By March 1947, Los Angeles had begun to resemble a city haunted by its own vacant spaces. The war had ended, but the population boom continued, pushing streets into unfinished neighborhoods and filling downtown with transient hotels, cocktail bars, railroad workers, discharged servicemen and women searching for whatever remained of the futures they had imagined. Beyond the bright marquees and department-store windows were freight yards, drainage channels, oil fields and empty tracts where a body could lie within sight of civilization and still seem abandoned beyond its reach.
The newspapers had already shown the city what might be waiting there. Less than two months earlier, the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short had been discovered beside a sidewalk in Leimert Park. Her murder became a national spectacle, generating false confessions, taunting correspondence and increasingly feverish speculation about a sexual sadist stalking Los Angeles. Then, on February 10, Jeanne French was found beaten and trampled to death in a vacant lot near Santa Monica Airport, a message scrawled across her body in lipstick.
The sequence was not yet a proven pattern, but it felt like one. Women who drank in bars, moved between temporary rooms or accepted the company of unfamiliar men were recast as potential victims in an unfolding urban horror story. Reporters wrote of “werewolves” roaming the city. Detectives compared bodies, injuries and disposal sites. Each new killing was examined for the signature of the same invisible predator.
Evelyn Winters did not fit the popular image of a Hollywood hopeful. She was 42, once regarded as intelligent and professionally capable, and had spent years working as a legal secretary within the movie industry. By 1947, however, alcohol had taken almost everything from her. She had lost her position, her home and the stable routines that once made her absence noticeable. Much of her life was now conducted in downtown beer parlors, residential hotels and public rooms where people could know her face without knowing where she slept.
During the evening of March 10, Winters was reportedly drinking in a room at the Albany Hotel on West Sixth Street with a younger man she had known for approximately two years. He later claimed that she walked out alone sometime between 7:30 and 8 p.m.
Just over four hours later, a railroad worker found a nearly nude woman lying beside a line of freight cars near downtown Los Angeles. There was lipstick on the workers mouth when the police arrived. He told detectives that he had kissed her before realizing she was dead…
