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TwitThisThe Heinous Crime
When the cold case unit was formed in Los Angeles, detectives faced a daunting backlog of 9,000 unsolved murder cases dating back four decades. But killings don't get any colder than the 1957 murder of two young cops during a routine traffic stop. Investigators had all but given up on the case -- one of the oldest unsolved homicides in the country -- when modern technology finally caught up with justice.The story begins 48 years ago, on July 21, in a desolate area of an oil field in Hawthorne, California. With its view of the ocean and glittering city lights, the spot made a perfect lovers' lane, which is where, around midnight, two teenage couples in a 1949 Ford were parked. They weren't alone for long. Out of the darkness, a man in his 20s, with a pompadour hairstyle, approached the car and, in a distinct Southern drawl the teenagers would never forget, said all he wanted to do was rob them. He pointed his .22, told the frightened youths to hand over their watches and cash, then made himself out to be a liar.
Snapping off pieces of both duct and surgical tape to strap over their eyes and mouths, he forced three of them, two boys and a girl, into the backseat, while he raped the other girl in the front. Terrified, the youths figured they'd be killed so there would be no witnesses. Instead, the intruder ordered the teenagers to take off everything but their underwear, and left them, nearly naked, in the middle of nowhere as he sped away in their Ford.
Two miles to the west, in the city of El Segundo, officers Richard Phillips, 29, and Milton Curtis, 25, were patrolling the streets when they saw a man in a Ford run a red light. It was 1:30 a.m. They pulled the car over and noticed clothes -- a yellow sundress, a slip and a man's sport shirt -- strewn across the backseat. The officers ordered the driver out of the car, and as Curtis used his radio to call headquarters, the man pulled out his .22 and shot Phillips three times in the back. Then he pointed the gun inside the patrol car where Curtis was sitting and fired three more times, striking him in the chest.
Phillips managed to discharge his service revolver three times in the direction of the man -- who by then was climbing back behind the wheel of the Ford -- before he fell to the ground. With both officers down, the driver took off. Four blocks away, he abandoned the car and fled on foot.
Back in the oil field, the teenagers eventually stumbled upon a security guard and asked for help. Still dazed when the police showed up, the youths struggled to recall physical details of the perpetrator in hopes a composite sketch would lead to his arrest.
The young rape victim was examined, but in the 1950s, says Darren Levine, the deputy DA assigned to the case in 2002, "the way they handled a rape case was much different from today. They gave back the girl's semen-stained underpants and slip, so we never had that forensic evidence to work with later on."
Keith Curtis, now 53, was only five, and his sister two, when he heard a knock on the door at four in the morning. "I was awakened by voices and my mother's crying," he recalls. His mother was so rattled she couldn't get the front door unlocked. "What's wrong?" she called to the El Segundo police chief. "Is my husband hurt?"
"No, it's worse than that," said the chief, who, at a house a mile away, had just delivered the same devastating news to the widow of Officer Phillips and his three young children.
"I was confused for a while," Curtis says. "My mother kept saying my father had just gone away on a trip. Finally, she told me he'd gone to heaven and couldn't come home."
The killing of the policemen made headlines in Southern California for months. In the abandoned Ford, detectives found three bullet holes from the shots Phillips fired -- two in the rear window and one in the trunk -- but located only two projectiles. Where was the third? The answer would eventually stun them. Also in the Ford, torn clothing and pieces of tape were found, along with three partial fingerprints on the steering wheel and a car panel. But with no computer databases against which to check the prints, police simply sealed and stored them.
Over the next few years, as detectives worked the case, bits of evidence surfaced. A month after the murders, a woman gardening in her backyard near where the Ford was abandoned found a man's watch but made no connection to the crimes. Two years later, her husband was clearing brush in the yard when he discovered a piece of a .22-caliber handgun but, like his wife, didn't think much about it and put it on a shelf in the garage.
In 1960, the couple's son was working outside when he found the revolver's rusty cylinder. The boy's father, having seen news stories about the officers' deaths, put two and two together. He reasoned that, with his house located close to the crime scene, the suspect had tossed the incriminating evidence in the backyard as he fled. The man phoned police.
When a ballistics check confirmed that markings from rounds fired by the gun were consistent with bullets removed from Curtis's and Phillips's bodies, elated police finally had their first break. Investigators were able to trace the murder weapon to a Shreveport, Louisiana, Sears store, where records indicated it had been purchased three days prior to the killings. But because identification wasn't necessary for the purchase, the customer had simply signed the receipt, "G. D. Wilson," in wide-spaced lettering.
Investigators located the clerk who handled the transaction and, amazingly, he recalled that the purchaser was a man with a pompadour who seemed in a hurry to get out of town. But the trail went dead when those leads led nowhere, sending the case into cold storage for another 42 years.
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