CRIMINAL COLD CASES-FUGITIVES FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE-17-CHESTER TURNER

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CHESTER DEWAYNE TURNER:
ANGEL OF DEATH
FOR SUCH A LARGE AND CRIME-RIDDEN CITY, LOS ANGELES HAS NOT PERHAPS SEEN QUITE AS MANY SERIAL KILLERS AS OTHER AMERICAN CITIES. FOR YEARS ITS MOST PROLIFIC SERIAL KILLERS WERE MICHAEL PLAYER, THE 'SKID ROW SLAYER', CONVICTED OF KILLING TEN TRANSIENTS IN THE DOWNTOWN AREA IN 1986, AND DOUGLAS CLARK, THE 'SUNSET STRIP KILLER', FOUND GUILTY OF HALF A DOZEN MURDERS IN 1980.
During the 1980s' crime wave, annual homicide figures sometimes topped a thousand a year. Perhaps this stark statistic acted as a smokescreen, which hindered police from apprehending, or even suspecting, that from 1987 onwards there was a killer at work who would eventually become one of the most prolific serial killers in the history of the city. All this changed when in 2001 the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Cold Case Unit began looking at a single unsolved homicide, thanks in no small part to the use of a DNA record system and testing. In fact, the technology not only led officers to a prime suspect, it also freed an innocent man.

The Figueroa Street Strangler
Chester Dewayne Turner was not a native Californian, having been born in Warren, Arkansas, in 1968. When he was five his parents separated and his mother moved out west to live with her own father, taking her son with her. She worked hard to provide for him, holding down two jobs for much of his childhood. Turner was a pupil at 97th Street Elementary School and Gompers Middle School before dropping out of Locke High in his mid-teens. By this point he had grown to six foot two, and had a naturally heavy-set physique. His appearance was, by all accounts, intimidating and very noticeable.

Turner's mother worked hard to provide for her son, and he appeared to start off well in life. However, he then turned to crime, and never looked back

After school, Turner went on to work for Domino's Pizza, where he began to carve out a promising career for himself, first as a delivery boy, then as a cook, and finally as a trainee manager. He then appears to have turned, quite suddenly, to a life of crime. From that point on, he spent the rest of his life in and out of jail, for a series of offences ranging from drug possession to theft. As time went on, Turner's life became more and more chaotic, as his drug use spiralled and his law-breaking became more frequent. He flitted from place to place, but always staying within the same small area, living in homeless shelters, at the apartments of women friends and at his mother's house. When Turner's mother moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1991, he went to live with her there on several occasions despite the fact that by this stage he was spending an increasing amount of time in prison.


After his first felony conviction for car theft in 1995, Turner returned to prison seven times, and these periods always coincided with a lull in murders taking place in and around the area where he lived. When he got out, they would start up again within a few weeks but at the time, however, nobody noticed.

In 2002, Turner was convicted of rape, the first violent crime on his record, and sentenced to eight years. After that, the killings stopped entirely. Again, nobody noticed, but it was this conviction that required him to give a DNA sample, and so began his journey on the long road to justice.

The killing years
Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of murders occurred in the same small area where Turner lived, within a couple of blocks either side of Figueroa Street, between Gage Avenue and 108th Street, a stretch itself of no more than a few dozen blocks. The thirteen murders began in 1987 and ended in 1998, most of them involving women who were involved in prostitution or were homeless, although some were just passers-by with the terrible luck to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The roll call of the dead is a long one.

In March 1987, the body of a twenty-one-year-old woman named Diane Johnson was spotted on the road by passing motorists. She was found strangled, and partially nude. In October that same year, Annette Ernest, twenty-six, met the same fate. Two years later, police received a call about a dead body in an alleyway. It turned out to be Anita Fishman, aged thirty-one. Again, she was found strangled and partially nude. In September the same year, the body of 27-year-old Regina Washington was discovered in the garage of an empty house. She was six months pregnant at the time. She had been asphyxiated.

In 1992 there were three murders in the area: Debra Williams, Mary Edwards, and Tammie Christmas, were found in September, November and December respectively. In early April the following year, the body of Andrea Tripplett, twenty-nine, was found by a builder. Only a month later, Desarae Jones, also twenty-nine, was killed. In 1995, there was Natalie Price, thirty-one; in 1996, Mildred Beasley, forty-five; and in 1997, Brenda Bries, thirty-seven. All were found strangled and in a state of undress.

The final victim was Paula Vance, forty-one, who was murdered in February 1998. It was this killing that put police on Turner's trail. It was recorded by no less than five different security cameras, each capturing various stages of the crime, but in each case, the camera panned away before the killer could be fully revealed; frustratingly, another second and the man's face would have come into view. As it was, all the police had to go on was a bulky silhouette.

CODIS and the Cold Case Unit
In 2001 LAPD detective Cliff Shephard became a member of the city's Cold Case Unit. He had over nine thousand unsolved homicides to choose from, but a specific brief to focus on those which were sexually motivated, and it was perhaps that tantalising silhouette that attracted him to the Vance murder. He had worked that part of town earlier in his career, and had always believed there were several serial killers in the area, although his hunch had never developed into a full-scale investigation.

Shephard's first step was to have the semen recovered from Vance's body sent to the laboratory for testing. The Serology Section of the LAPD's Scientific Investigation Division performed the extractions and made sure the resulting profiles were uploaded to the FBI-administered Combined DNA Identification System (CODIS) that is being compiled across the country. Then Shephard and his partner walked the streets again, as he had done before, as a beat cop, looking for registered sex offenders in the neighbourhood and handing out flyers. He spread the news that the Vance investigation was open again, in public and throughout the department, and made sure to consult other parts of the LAPD that might help him, like the Robbery-Homicide Division's special rape section. He even took the security camera footage to Paramount Studios where they enlarged it on a massive screen.

However, all this got him nowhere, at least initially. In deep frustration, he had almost decided to move on to another case when a call came back from the lab. The DNA from Vance matched that of a man already serving an eight-year sentence in California State Prison: Chester Dewayne Turner. As the suspect was already off the streets he posed no further immediate threat to the public, so Shephard was able to take the time to investigate the matter thoroughly. More samples from countless other homicides were fed into the computer, and CODIS crunched the numbers. Soon, another match came back (this one for Mildred Beasley); and then another; and then another.

'The number kept on growing,' Shephard said. 'We hit five, and thought, “Where are we going to end?”' All in all, this further testing took almost another year, as the detectives looked on in amazement. Eventually it peaked at thirteen. In October 2004, the police pressed charges against Turner.

Another victim?
Cliff Shephard had been with the LAPD for thirty years by the time he was investigating Turner. Unofficially, some colleagues might say this made him a bit set in his ways. Certainly, there were not many officers who would have checked Turner's DNA not just against unsolved murders but also against solved ones. Yet had he not, Dave Allen Jones would never have been exonerated of the murders of Debra Williams, Mary Edwards and Tammie Christmas.

Jones was a retarded part-time janitor with low IQ and a mental age of eight, who had incriminated himself while being interviewed (people like Jones frequently incriminate themselves under police questioning; the University of Chicago Law Review found that ninety-eight per cent of people with a low IQ or some form of mental disability believed they would be penalized in some way if they did not talk). His low IQ was further confirmed by the fact that when Jones signed his first letter for appeal, which was written for him by a fellow inmate, he misspelt his own first name.

However, thanks to DNA testing, it became clear that Jones was wrongly convicted of the murders. 'What's unusual here,' said Jones' lawyer, 'is that after he had his man and after he had found crimes that Mr Jones could not have done, he took that extra step. He suspended his own disbelief that such a mistake could happen and pursued it. And for that, Mr Jones and I have nothing but gratitude for him,' Gordon said.

Chester Dewayne Turner's conviction for the series of murders made him the most prolific serial killer ever to walk the streets of Los Angeles. He pleaded not guilty to the killings and his defence lawyers focused on the possibility that the DNA samples might have been tampered with or carelessly maintained over the years. However, in all but three of the murders the DNA evidence was felt to be incontrovertible and in April 2007 Turner was convicted of ten counts of first-degree murder and one count of second-degree murder, for killing the unborn foetus of Regina Washington. The death penalty was recommended.