Vaughn Greenwood | The Skid Row Slasher
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Vaughn Orrin Greenwood
Born: 01-19-1944
The Skid Row Slasher
American Serial Killer
Crime Spree: 1964 / 1974 – 1975
Death: 12-18-2020
Vaughn Greenwood was nicknamed “The Skid Row Slasher.” He was a 31-year old black man who ritually killed 11, down-and-out alcoholic bums, in Los Angeles. All the victims died by having their throats cut open, salt sprinkled around the bodies, and their shoes removed and left pointing toward the body. Police wasted a lot of the investigation searching for a white man, but in 1975, captured Greenwood attempting to murder again. He was sentenced on 2 deaths to life imprisonment.
Vaughn Orrin Greenwood
The first of Southern California’s Skid Row” slayers (there were several) launched his one-man war in 1964, taking a decade off before he returned to terrorize Los Angeles with nine more murders.
Victims were ritually “posed” by the slasher in death, with salt sprinkled around their bodies and cups of blood standing nearby, their wounds surrounded by markings of unknown significance.
In their attempt to capture the killer, police recruited psychiatric “experts” to create a profile of the perpetrator, publishing assorted sketches of their suspect. However, the case was ultimately solved by accident, embarrassing authorities whose “profiles” of the murderer were sadly, and extremely, off the mark.
The First Victims of Vaughn Greenwood
Vaughn Greenwood’s first known victim was an aging transient named David Russell. He was found on the steps of a library. His throat had been slashed. The date was November 13, 1964.
The following day, 67-year-old Benjamin Hornberg was killed in the second-floor restroom of his seedy hotel. His throat too had been slashed from ear to ear.
Police saw a pattern of sorts, but with no leads, the cases would go cold.
10 Years Later
On December 1, 1974, Vaughn Greenwood murdered 46-year-old Charles Jackson, an alcoholic drifter, on the same library steps where David Russell had been slain a decade earlier.
Moses Yakanac, a 47-year-old Eskimo was knifed to death in a Skid Row alley on December 8, and 54-year-old Arthur Dahlstedt was slain outside an abandoned building just three days later.
On December 22, 42-year-old David Perez was found in some shrubbery adjacent to the Los Angeles public library. Casimir Strawinski, 58, was found murdered in his hotel room on January 9 and 46-year-old Robert Shannahan had been dead several days when another hotel maid discovered his body, a bayonet protruding from his chest, on January 17.
The Final Skid Row Victim of Vaughn Greenwood
The final Skid Row victim, 49-year-old Samuel Suarez, was also killed indoors, his body found in a sleazy fifth-floor hotel room.
Inexplicably, the killer switched his hunting ground to Hollywood on January 29, 1975, stabbing 45-year-old George Frias to death in his own apartment. Two days later, a cash register mechanic, 34-year-old Clyde Hays was found in his Hollywood home, marked by the Slasher’s characteristic mutilations.
By this time, L.A. detectives had formed a mental picture of their suspect. They described him as a white male in his late twenties or early thirties, six feet tall and 190 pounds, with shoulder-length, stringy blond hair.
A psychiatric profile, published on the morning of Clyde Hay’s murder, described the killer as a “sexually impotent coward, venting his own feeling of worthlessness on hapless derelicts and down-and-outers. He strongly identifies with the derelicts and drifters he kills, and we think he’s trying to resolve his own inner conflicts by turning his wrath and hatred outward.”
The Skid Row Slasher was further described as a friendless, poorly-educated loner, probably homosexual, with an unspecified physical deformity.
Vaughn Greenwood Identifies Himself
On February 2, a prowler invaded the Hollywood home of William Graham, assaulting him with a hatchet before houseguest Kenneth Richer intervened, and both men plunged through a plate-glass window. Vaughn fled on foot, striking next at the home of actor Burt Reynolds, carelessly dropping a letter, addressed to himself, in the driveway.
Police picked up Vaughn Greenwood, charging him with counts of burglary and assault, their search of his residence netting a pair of cufflinks stolen from victim George Frias. A year later, on January 23, 1976, Greenwood was indicted on eleven counts of murder in the Slasher crimes.
Unfortunately for police, the “suspect profile” was a stumbling block to their solution of the case. For openers, Vaughn Greenwood was a 32-year-old black man, lacking any obvious deformities and from the testimony of acquaintances, he was not impotent. He was a loner and a homosexual, who finished seventh grade before he fled his Pennsylvania foster home and thumbed a ride to California.
Vaughn Greenwood Life
Most of his adult life was spent drifting from Chicago to the West Coast and back again, riding the rails and earning his keep as a migrant farm worker. In Chicago, during 1966, he had demanded cash from 70-year-old Mance Porter, following a sexual encounter in the latter’s skid row apartment. When Porter refused, Greenwood slashed his throat and stabbed him repeatedly with two different knives, spending five and a half years in jail on conviction for aggravated battery.
The “Skid Row Slasher” victims all had their throats cut from ear to ear. There was evidence that the killer drank the blood of some of his victims. Greenwood left cups of blood and rings of salt around the corpses. The items left around the bodies have caused some to believe the murders might have been to be linked to Satanism.
While awaiting trial on murder charges, Greenwood was convicted of assaulting William Graham and Kenneth Richer, drawing a prison term of 32 years to life.
On December 30, 1976, the defendant was convicted on nine counts of first-degree murder, jurors failing to reach a verdict in the case of victims David Russell and Charles Jackson.
Greenwood was sentenced to life on January 19, 1977, the judge recommending that he never be released because “His presence in any community would constitute a menace.”
Source: murderpedia | hyaenagallery.tumblr.com | frankensaurus.com | en.wikipedia.org | dbpedia.org
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