I nodded. “I’m a blogger. Not as my day job. As my hobby.” I stopped talking, realizing that for once I was with someone who didn’t need an explanation about why I liked true crime. If anyone would understand, it was Detective Joshua Black.
Black turned around, the glass in his hand. “I recognized your name when you made the first request,” he said frankly, “but I make it a policy never to talk about that case with anyone. This time, though, I got a personal request from Beth to meet with you, and I was too curious to turn it down.”
This part had me completely baffled. “You have a relationship with Beth,” I said, and it didn’t come out as a question.
Detective Black leaned against his tiny kitchen counter. “We live in the same town,” he said. “We’ve both lived here all our lives. Claire Lake isn’t a very big place.”
“So even though you investigated her and testified at her murder trial, the two of you are friends.”
He laughed, though the sound had little humor in it. Instead I heard layers of complexity I didn’t understand. “We aren’t friends.” He gestured at the view out the kitchen window. “Did you know that these houseboats were originally put here by Claire Lake’s homeless people?”
I blinked. “Pardon?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” He smiled. “In the early 1960s, the city wanted to put up single-family houses by the lake. They were going to tear down public housing in order to do it, and evict everyone in the neighborhood. No one stopped them, so the city evicted over two hundred people, all of whom had to find somewhere else to live. Some wise soul realized that he could buy a boat that was headed for the junkyard for much cheaper than a house, and also that the city’s zoning laws technically allowed for residential boats off the piers. So a lot of the evicted people, who were now homeless, bought up old boats, anchored them, and lived in them instead.”
“I’ll bet the city was pleased,” I said.
Black smiled again. “The city was livid, but there was nothing they could do. The zoning laws were on the books. Since then, this area has gentrified so much that only artsy types and retirees like me live here. But the first boats were owned by the poor rabble, the people who had nowhere else to go.” He shook his head. “I guess you’re not interested in my Claire Lake history lesson.”
“It’s interesting,” I said, which was true. I pulled out my phone. “Is it okay if I record this conversation?”
Detective Black looked amused. “So I’m on the other side of the recording this time. Okay, I give my permission.”
I put the phone down, hoping it would pick up the conversation with Black, standing a few feet away. I didn’t want to ask him to sit down in his own house, and I didn’t want to stand up and crowd him. But Black had been a cop for thirty-five years, and I realized his position was deliberate.
The thought made me salty, so I said, “I’d love access to the original Lady Killer interview tapes, if you’re feeling generous.”
“The transcripts were leaked online.”
Nice try. “Only sections were leaked. Not the entire tapes.”
“True, but the leaked sections were pretty relevant.”
“According to you,” I countered. “The entire tapes would give a better idea of your interview technique.”
“You mean mine and Detective Washington’s.”
I nodded. “It’s too bad I’m too late to interview him, too.”
He gave me a wry look. “You’d have to time-travel to early 1980 to do that.” His tone said that he hadn’t liked Washington very much.
“Tell me how you two started working together,” I said.
Black’s eyebrows rose. “You’re warming me up,” he stated. “Getting me talking before asking what you really want to know. It’s a time-honored technique. You forget you’re dealing with someone who has done this a lot.”
For God’s sake, was every single person involved in this case going to be difficult? “I can sit here all day,” I said.
That caught me a ghost of a smile. “Now I can see why Beth likes you. Okay. I met Washington for the first time the day after Thomas Armstrong got two bullets to the face. I was one of the only detectives on the Claire Lake force, and I’d never worked a homicide before. We didn’t have many murders. Mostly I worked assaults, robberies, and rapes. I was only thirty-one.”
“So the Claire Lake PD brought in the state police,” I said.
Black nodded. “Washington was a state detective. He’d never seen anything quite like the Armstrong case, either, even though he had more experience than me. The murder seemed random, but random murders had been done before. It was the note that threw us.”
I nodded. Am I bitter or am I sweet? Ladies can be either. Publish this or there will be more. Everyone who was obsessed with this case knew that note by heart. “What did you and Washington think the note meant?”
Black’s eyes were looking at something far away now, and the words came easily as he remembered. “Well, the Zodiac had done his business down in San Francisco,” he said, “killing people at random and mailing notes to the newspapers. So we’d seen a similar MO before. But the Lady Killer note was in a woman’s hand, a rounded cursive with flourishes that the handwriting experts said a man wouldn’t make. The Armstrong murder was heartless and cruel, particularly brutal. Whoever had killed him had looked him in the eye as they shot him in the face. That isn’t a woman’s method.”
“Are you going to tell me that poison is a woman’s weapon?” I asked, stating the cliché. “Diane Downs shot her three kids point-blank, then drove slowly to the hospital, hoping they’d bleed out.”
“That was a few years later,” Black said. “Up in Washington, they had Bundy killing college coeds, and down in California they had Ed Kemper doing the same thing. Monsters, both of them, but they were men. We’d never seen anything like this.”
I nodded. As every true-crime lover knows, the seventies were a banquet of particularly brutal serial killers. If you read enough true crime, you started to think that being a young woman back then was a pretty dangerous business. And it was amazing that anyone survived hitchhiking at all. “So what happened?” I asked.
“We gave the note to the press,” Black said. “We had to take the chance. It hadn’t worked with the Zodiac—they printed everything he told them to, but he kept killing anyway. But our hands were tied. There was a lot of arguing behind the scenes. Half the cops thought the note was a red herring and we were dealing with a man. The other half thought that the killer was probably a mistress of Armstrong’s, though we couldn’t find evidence of one. No one thought it was actually what it was.”
“Which was?”
“A true, bona fide female serial killer.” Black put his glass of water on the counter and stared at it, unseeing. “It’s difficult to explain how hard that was to process for us in 1977. It’s still hard now. We had no context, no idea what we were dealing with, no idea what to expect. None of us had the slightest bit of training or education in serial murder, let alone female serial murder. It was so unusual that we haven’t had another case like the Lady Killer in forty years. A woman driving around shooting people for fun. We live in a very different society than we did in 1977, but that part hasn’t changed.”
“And then Paul Veerhoever was killed,” I said.
Black nodded, seeming to remember I was there. “Veerhoever had two kids,” he said. “He’d served six years in the military before an honorable discharge. His wife had had three miscarriages, and he’d been by her side for all of them. The first bullet didn’t kill him—only hit him in the jaw. He was in unimaginable agony until the Lady Killer put a second bullet in his temple and left him by the side of the road.”