The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (28 page)

For all that, Fish was careless with his crimes, frequently losing jobs “because things about these children came out.” Arrested eight times over the years, he served Albert Fish on trial (Wide World API)

77

“FRANKFORD Slasher”

“FRANKFORD Slasher”

Philadelphia’s Frankford district is the hard-scrabble neighborhood chosen by Sylvester Stallone as the setting for his first Rocky film. Rocky Balboa had gone on to bigger, better things by the late 1980s, however, when Frankford earned a new and unwelcome celebrity, this time for the presence of a vicious serial killer who slaughtered at least seven women.

The mystery began on August 28, 1985, when two transit workers reported to their job at a Frankford Avenue maintenance yard, around 8:30 A.M Within moments, they found a woman’s lifeless body sprawled between two heaps of railroad ties. She was nude from the waist down, legs splayed, her blouse pushed up to show her breasts. An autopsy report enumerated 19

stab wounds, with a gaping slash along her abdomen nearly disemboweling her. She was identified as Helen Patent, 52, well known in many of the bars on Frank-Pelvic X-ray of Albert Fish reveals needles he inserted in ford Avenue.

his groin. (Wide World API)

Just over four months later, on January 3, 1986, a second mutilated corpse was found on Ritner Street in South Philadelphia, 10 miles from the first murder scene.

Neighbors were surprised to see the door of 68-year-old homicides, including children killed in 1919, 1927, and Anna Carroll’s apartment standing open, and they 1934.

found her dead inside, on the floor of her bedroom. Like Authorities disagreed on his ultimate body count, Helen Patent, this victim was also nude below the waist, detectives listing at least three more victims in New her blouse pulled up. She had been stabbed six times, York City. Arrested for questioning in one case, Fish her abdomen sliced open from breastbone to pubis.

had been released because “he looked so innocent.” On No more was heard from the slasher for nearly a another occasion, a trolley conductor identified Fish as year—until Christmas night, in fact—when victim num-the man he saw with a small, sobbing boy on the day of ber three was found on Richmond Street in the Brides-the child’s disappearance. A court psychiatrist suspected burg neighborhood, three miles from where Helen Albert of at least five murders, with New York detec-Patent was killed. Once again, it was worried neighbors tives adding three more, and a justice of the New York who found the corpse, investigating an open apartment Supreme Court was “reliably informed” of the killer’s door to find 74-year-old Susan Olzef dead in her flat, involvement in 15 homicides.

stabbed six times in the back. Like Helen Patent, Olzef At trial, the state was desperate to win a death was a familiar figure on Frankford Avenue, police spec-penalty, overriding Fish’s INSANITY DEFENSE with laugh-ulating that her killer may have known her from the able psychiatric testimony. Speaking for the state, a bat-neighborhood.

tery of doctors declared, straight-faced, that Thus far, Philadelphia’s finest had little to go on, and coprophagia “is a common sort of thing. We don’t call they resisted the notion of a serial killer at large in their people who do that mentally sick. A man who does that town. As Lieutenant Joe Washlick later told reporters in is socially perfectly all right. As far as his social status is an effort to explain the oversight, “The first three slay-concerned, he is supposed to be normal, because the ings happened in different parts of the city. We could State of New York Mental Hygiene Department also almost give you a different suspect for each job.”

approves of that.”

Almost . . . but not quite. In fact, there were no leads With Fish’s rambling, obscene confessions in hand, and had been no arrests by January 8, 1987, when two the jury found him sane and guilty of premeditated Frankford Avenue fruit vendors found a woman’s murder in Grace Budd’s case. Sentenced to die, Fish was corpse stuffed underneath their stand, around 7:30 A.M.

electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison on January 16, 1936.

The latest victim, 28-year-old Jeanne Durkin, lay face-According to one witness present, it took two jolts down and she was nude below the waist, legs spread.

before the chair completed its work, thus spawning a She had been stabbed no less than 74 times.

legend that the apparatus was short-circuited by all the With four corpses and no end in sight, authorities needles Fish had planted in his body.

officially linked the Patent and Durkin murders, later
78

“FRANKFORD Slasher”

connecting all four and creating a special task force to his shoes, reporting them “similar, but not identical” to hunt the man Philadelphia journalists were already the killer’s.

calling the “Frankford Slasher.” For nearly two years, Another 15 months elapsed before the killer struck the task force spun its wheels, making no apparent again. Patrolman Dan Johnson was cruising his beat in progress until November 11, 1988. That morning, 66-the predawn hours of April 28, 1990, when he found a year-old Marge Vaughn was found dead on Penn

woman’s nude, eviscerated corpse in the alley behind a Avenue, stabbed 29 times in the vestibule of an apart-Frankford Avenue fish market. The latest victim had ment building from which she was evicted the previous been stabbed 36 times, slashed open from her navel to day. She died less than three blocks from the Durkin vagina, and otherwise mutilated. A purse, found murder site, a half-mile from the spot where Helen nearby, identified the woman as 45-year-old Carol Patent was found . . . and this time, there was a witness Dowd, and a preliminary canvass of the neighborhood of sorts.

turned up a witness who had seen her walking along A Frankford Avenue barmaid recalled seeing Vaughn Frankford Avenue with a middle-aged white man sev-around 6:00 P.M. the previous day. Vaughn had been eral hours before she was found.

drinking with a round-faced, middle-aged Caucasian man It looked like another dead end, until detectives got who wore glasses and walked with a limp. Several around to questioning employees of the fish market, sketches of the unknown subject were prepared and pub-several days later. One of them, 39-year-old Leonard lished, but despite predictable false leads and fingerpoint-Christopher, had already spoken to reporters, describing by uneasy or malicious neighbors, the police appeared ing the alley behind his workplace as “a hooker’s par-no closer to their man than they had been in 1985.

adise” and frequent scene of drug deals. Questioned by Two months later, on January 19, 1989, 30-year-old authorities about his movements on the night Carol Theresa Sciortino left a Frankford Avenue saloon at six Dowd was murdered, Christopher replied that he had o’clock in the evening. She was last seen alive moments spent the evening with his girlfriend. The lady in ques-later, walking down the street with an unidentified tion, however, denied it, insisting that she spent the middle-aged man. Around 6:45 P.M., Sciortino’s neigh-night at home, alone. Suspicious now, investigators bors heard sounds of an apparent struggle inside her took a closer look at Leonard Christopher. They found apartment, followed shortly by footsteps creeping a local mailman who reported seeing Christopher and down the stairs, but they failed to call police, and it Dowd together in a bar, the night she died. Another was 9:00 P.M. before they spoke to the apartment man-witness—this one a convicted prostitute—allegedly ager. He, in turn, waited past midnight to check on his saw Christopher and Dowd walking together down the tenant, then found Sciortino sprawled on the floor of street. A second hooker told police she saw Christo-her kitchen, nude but for socks, stabbed 25 times. A pher emerge from the Frankford Avenue alley around bloody footprint at the scene provided homicide detec-1:00 A.M. on April 28. According to her report, tives with their best lead yet, and while they initially Christopher had been “sweating profusely, had his focused on Sciortino’s boyfriend, calling him “a good shirt over his arm, and a ‘Rambo knife’ was tucked suspect,” he was finally cleared when police checked into his belt.”

On the strength of those statements, Christopher—a black man who bore no resemblance to the “Frankford Slasher” sketches or the middle-aged Caucasian seen with Carol Dowd the night she died—was arrested for murder and held without bond, his trial date set for December. A search of his apartment failed to turn up any useful evidence: one pair of slacks had a tiny bloodstain on one leg, but it was too small to be typed or subjected to any tests involving DNA.

While Christopher sat in jail, the Frankford

Slasher—or a skillful copycat—struck again in early September. It was 1:00 A.M. on September 8 when tenants of an Arrott Street apartment house complained of rancid odors emanating from the flat occupied by 30-year-old Michelle Martin. The manager used his pass-key and found Martin dead on the floor, nude from the Police sketches of “Frankford Slasher” suspect (Author’s waist down, her blouse pushed up to bare her breasts.

collection)

Stabbed 23 times, she had been dead for roughly two
79

FRANKLIN, Joseph Paul

days, last seen alive on the night of September 6, drink-local Ku Klux Klan. Franklin began insulting interracial ing with a middle-aged white man in a bar on Frank-couples in public, and on Labor Day 1976, he trailed ford Avenue.

one such couple to a dead-end street in Atlanta, spray-Ignoring their apparent dilemma, prosecutors went ing them with chemical Mace.

ahead with Leonard Christopher’s trial on schedule, in About this time, Franklin legally changed his name, December 1990. Their case was admittedly weak—no shedding the last links with his “normal” life. Prosecu-motive or weapon, no witness to the crime itself, no evi-tors allege—and jurors have agreed—that he spent the dence of any kind connecting the defendant to the mur-years from 1977 to 1980 wandering across the South der scene—but jurors were persuaded by the testimony and Midwest, employing 18 pseudonyms, changing cars describing Christopher’s “strange” behavior and lies to and weapons frequently, dyeing his hair so often that it police. On December 12, he was convicted of murder, came close to falling out. Along the way, he killed more later sentenced to life imprisonment. From his cell, than a dozen persons in a frenzied one-man war against Christopher still maintains, “I was railroaded.”

minorities.

And what of the Frankford Slasher, described for According to the FBI, Franklin launched his cam-years as a middle-aged white man? What of the near-paign in the summer of 1977, bombing a Chattanooga identical murder committed while Christopher sat in synagogue on July 29. Nine days later, investigators say jail? Lieutenant Washlick seemed to shrug the problem he shot and killed an interracial couple, Alphonse Man-off, telling reporters, “Surprisingly, we still get phone ning and Toni Schwenn, both 23, in Madison, Wiscon-calls. Leonard Christopher is a suspect in some of the sin. On October 8, Gerald Gordon was killed by sniper killings, and we have additional suspects as well. Last fire as he left a bar mitzvah in the St. Louis suburb of year, we had 481 homicides in the city, and we solved Richmond Heights.

eighty-two percent of them.”

Harold McIver, the black manager of a fast-food But not the Frankford Slasher case. The perpetrator restaurant in Doraville, Georgia, was working the night of those crimes is still at large.

shift when a sniper took his life on July 22, 1979. On August 8, another black man, 28-year-old Raymond Taylor, was shot and killed through the window of a
FRANKLIN, Joseph Paul