At first light on May 12, 1947, an oil-company patrolman named Bert Winfield was driving toward his post when he noticed something lying in the dirt beside an access road. The location was not especially remote. It sat within the oil fields north of central Long Beach, barely a block from the traffic of Long Beach Boulevard and within sight of a city already spreading around the forest of wooden derricks.
What Winfield found was the body of a woman dressed in a black three-quarter-length coat. She lay with a strip of flowered cotton knotted tightly around her neck. Her clothing had been disturbed, her face bore the marks of violence and one white open-toed shoe remained on her foot. Her body was still warm, suggesting that whoever had left her there had departed only recently.
The missing shoe immediately acquired an importance out of proportion to its size. Detectives believed it might have been lost wherever the woman was attacked and could lead them to the room, automobile or patch of ground where the murder had actually occurred. Tire impressions and marks in the dirt indicated that the oil field was probably a dumping place rather than the primary crime scene.
Los Angeles newspapers were already prepared to give the killing a more sinister meaning. Less than four months had passed since Elizabeth Short’s bisected body was discovered in a vacant lot. Several other women had since been beaten, strangled or stabbed, and the press had begun presenting their deaths as chapters in a continuing cycle of “horror murders.” Before detectives knew where the woman in the oil field had spent her final hours, headlines were already asking whether the so-called Werewolf had killed again.
The dead woman was soon identified as 37-year-old Laura Trelstad, a married mother of three who lived only a short distance away. To find her killer, police would have to reconstruct a Mother’s Day night that had begun with a domestic disagreement, passed through the bars and buses of Long Beach and ended somewhere between her family home and the dirt road where one of her shoes disappeared.
