Latest / 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories / The Southside Slayer

Transcript

The Southside Slayer · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

0:36
It was easy to get lost. In the nineteen eighties and nineteen nineties in
0:40
Los Angeles, the city was rife with turmoil, and entire neighborhoods sunk deep
0:45
into decrepit disrepair from the ongoing crack epidemic. Crime rates and hopelessness were high,
0:52
higher than residents had ever seen them before. For many, the future
0:56
looked bleak. It was a little surprised to find women as so haunted and
1:00
murdered, especially in neighborhoods that were known to harbor drug dealers and desperate,
1:04
oftentimes homeless sex workers. Case after case of murdered women piled up high on
1:11
top of detective's desks, usually only to be filed away and forgotten about when
1:17
the next one came in. But some of that changed in nineteen ninety eight
1:21
when forty one year old Paula Vance was killed. Unlike many of the women
1:26
who'd come before her, Paula's brutal assault and death by strangulation were all caught
1:32
on security camera. Unfortunately, her assailants remained a blurry, shadowy figure in
1:38
the footage. Detective Cliff Shepherd was put on the case, a case that
1:42
would make a lasting impression on him, but with only a little amount of
1:46
DNA evidence and unclear images to go on, he had very little to work
1:51
with. In two thousand and one, when he transferred to the LAPD's new
1:56
cold case unit, he carried with him the images of Paula's final mons moments
2:00
and his heart and mind right up to the lapse. Within the department.
2:05
It took a while for the case to gain some traction, but DNA evidence
2:08
collected from Paula's scene came back with the match for two other incidents. Mildred
2:14
Beasley had been a forty five year old homemaker on her way home to see
2:16
some friends in nineteen ninety six when she was assaulted and strangled. Her body
2:23
had been left behind in some bushes on the side of a freeway. The
2:27
other match, however, came back from a far more recent case. In
2:31
two thousand and two, forty seven year old Maria Martinez, who sold cigarettes
2:37
outside a homeless shelter, was approached by a man. He asked her for
2:40
a lighter for his crack pipe before dragging her to a deserted parking lot.
2:46
There, he assaulted her for over two hours. His victim managed to escape
2:51
once but was caught, but when she escaped again, she managed to break
2:55
away and get to the police. She led them right back to the homeless
3:00
shelter, where the police found her assailant hiding fully clothed inside the showers.
3:07
His name was Chester Turner. Chester had been born in Arkansas in nineteen sixty
3:12
six, but had moved to Los Angeles with his mother when he was five
3:16
after his parents' divorce. Like so many others around him, Chester Turner fell
3:22
through the cracks. He lived with his mother, going from her house her
3:25
father's house, in prison for petty crimes of theft and drug possession until his
3:30
mother left town for Utah. After that, Chester went from unreliable and unstable
3:36
homes back to prison and onto homeless shelters or skid row. He'd once managed
3:42
to find work at a Domino's pizza, but by two thousand and two he'd
3:46
mainly worked as a security guard for the homeless shelter he was currently hiding in.
3:50
When the police found him in the showers that day, he was a
3:53
burly six foot two man with scars across his face. He pled guilty to
3:59
the charge of rape, the first violent crime that would go on his already
4:02
lengthy record and would be followed by many many more. It was his DNA
4:09
that matched to the one found at Paula Vance's scene and told the investigators that
4:14
there could be more of Chester's victims hiding within their system. They tested everything
4:19
they could, dragging more results out of the already backlog labs of the LAPD
4:26
Still on the case, Detective Cliff Sheppard talked about the chilling year that followed
4:30
one that he later said seemed to get a new hit every month. Chester
4:35
was linked to the murders of ten women and an additional four that would come
4:40
up as testing continued. Many of these women were assaulted and strangled during the
4:45
initial weeks that Chester would be released from prison after serving his sentences for petty
4:49
crimes, usually after he'd been released early. His first set of victims came
4:56
from nineteen eighty seven and nineteen eighty nine. In nineteen eighty seven, motorists
5:00
along Harbor Freeway spotted the body of twenty one year old Diane Johnson on the
5:05
side of the road. She was partially nude, had been assaulted and then
5:10
strangled. After Diane was thirty three year old Alandra Joyce Bunn She'd been badly
5:16
beaten, suffered lacerations to her face and neck, and had bloody eyes.
5:20
She was found partially nude on top of a pile of trash. Next was
5:26
twenty six year old Annette Ernest. She was also found partially nude and strangled,
5:30
then dumped on a dirt shoulder of Grand Avenue. From there. There
5:35
were no matches to Chester Turner's DNA from nineteen eighty eight, but the killings
5:40
began again in nineteen eighty nine. In January of that year, the body
5:45
of thirty one year old Anita Fishman Bryer was discovered outside of a garage off
5:49
Figueroa Street. She'd struggled with drug addictions and homelessness, making her an easy
5:56
target for a man who by that point had become used to stalking the streets.
6:00
Later that year, the partially nude body of twenty seven year old Regina
6:04
Nadine Washington was discovered inside a garage of that very same Figaroa Street. Like
6:11
many of the others, she'd been assaulted and strangled, but Regina's case came
6:15
with some new chilling circumstances. Regina had been six months pregnant at the time
6:21
of her murder, her baby, later referred to as Baby Washington, had
6:27
died inside the womb, a direct result of the death of its mother.
6:30
The authorities believed that Regina's homicide was not one murder but two, and added
6:35
the death of Baby Washington to Chester Turner's growing list of charges. Only a
6:41
month later, twenty five year old Desiree Lame Jones was found in the backyard
6:46
of a vacant residence on Estrella Avenue. She'd also struggled with drug addictions,
6:51
but was described by those close to her as smart, outgoing, and funny.
6:57
She worked at a home for the elderly. Nineteen ninety five saw the
7:00
final spree of assaults and killings. Thirty one year old Natalie Jon Price had
7:05
briefly left her friend's house to look for a jacket she'd lost earlier that day.
7:11
She never returned, and was instead found near a vacant residence on Vermont
7:15
Knowles after she'd been strangled to death. The next year, forty five year
7:19
old Mildred Williams Beasley was killed after her husband dropped her off to visit friends.
7:25
She left behind a teenage son. In nineteen ninety seven, it was
7:29
thirty one year old Cynthia Johnson. She was found strangled to death in Green
7:33
Meadows, and her murder was followed a year later by the woman who,
7:36
in many ways was the key to untangling this long chain of assault and brutal
7:43
killings. In nineteen ninety eight, thirty eight year old Paula Donnell Vance was
7:47
found behind a local business. Almost unbelievably, a total of five security cameras
7:53
called portions of her final moments between them, but never a clear image of
7:58
the man who'd killed her. Camera that managed to capture a lot of the
8:01
assault in great detail would have clearly shown her killer's face, but cut away
8:05
only moments before he came in to frame. Paula was, in many ways
8:11
Chester's perfect victim. She'd suffered from mental illness and was homeless. She went
8:16
from place to place, sleeping wherever she could find a place to lay her
8:20
head, and didn't have anyone watching out for her until detective Cliff Shepherd saw
8:26
the footage of her murder. After that, Chester temporarily got away with one
8:31
more murder, the murder of thirty nine year old Brenda Bryce. She was
8:35
found strangled to death in a porta potty, only fifty yards away from the
8:39
hotel that Chester was living in at the time. DNA evidence named Chester as
8:45
the culprit, and he was taken to court for her murder. He was
8:48
serving eight years in the Sierra Conservation Center for the rape of Maria Martinez when
8:54
Chester Turner was charged with ten counts of murder. He pleaded not guilty and
9:00
was taken to court while four more charges of murder came in. Chester now
9:03
faced one trial of ten murders in an additional four, but he maintained his
9:09
innocence. His defense argued that Chester had known and had been in contact with
9:15
the victims because he sold them drugs, His DNA had been left on them
9:20
and at the scenes because many of these women had offered to pay for their
9:22
drugs with sexual favors instead of money. The courts disagreed and found Chester guilty
9:30
at his first trial. He was then sentenced to death for his crimes.
9:33
He was found guilty again at the second trial, taking his official charges up
9:37
to eleven counts of murder. He received another death sentence. A lengthy and
9:43
difficult journey of appeals began after that, coming all the way up to twenty
9:48
twenty, where the courts reviewed his sentences. His conviction for the murder of
9:52
baby Washington was overturned, but his sentence for the murder of his other fourteen
9:58
victims was upheld. He currently sits on death row in San Quentin State Prison
10:03
awaiting his execution. That's ten minute Murder for today brief and bingeable true crime.
10:18
I'm Joe. I'm the host, and thank you for taking the time
10:22
to listen to ten minute Murder. If you'd like to get in touch with
10:24
me, you can do that Joe at ten minute Murder dot com. You
10:28
can also go to the website there and find everything you need to know about
10:31
the show, places to listen, social media links. All that stuff is
10:35
at ten minute Murder dot com. And an email from one of you listening.
10:39
Hello Joe. My name is Roxanne, but I usually go by Rocks.
10:43
I'm wondering. You've done this podcast for a while now and I love
10:46
it, but other times when you're like I just don't have the energy for
10:50
this today, or struggle with self doubt. I know it's a strange question,
10:54
but I'm just curious. Rocks and Charlotte, thank you Rocks for the
10:58
email and the answer is, yeah, I'm a normal human being. There
11:01
are absolutely days when I don't want to do the podcast. That's mostly because
11:05
the topic is so heavy that I need a little mental vacation from time to
11:09
time, and the self doubt. Absolutely you're listening to a guy that can't
11:15
spell restaurants without the aid of spell check. I'm pretty self deprecating anyway,
11:20
So on those days when I'm struggling a bit mentally, I do wonder why
11:24
many of you choose to listen to this dummy talk about true crime, and
11:28
not that you ask, but let me give you a huge reason why I
11:31
actually do this podcast. I do it because, in my weird way,
11:37
this is how I can shine a spotlight on the mental health crisis that exists
11:41
not just here in America but all over the place. For so many years,
11:45
the stigma of being mentally unwell was kind of a taboo subject. If
11:50
it was bad enough, your family would PLoP you into a special home or
11:52
a hospital so that they didn't have to deal with you. They were embarrassed
11:56
by you. So if you were a person that tiptoes the line of being
12:00
mentally unwell, you kept that stuff inside. You kept it to yourself until
12:03
one day you might crack. What's going on with mental health crisis today.
12:09
It's not perfect, but I believe it's getting better. And if you're listening
12:13
to me right now and you know that you're struggling with your mental health and
12:16
it's unchecked, I hope that you will seek help. So, if you've
12:20
noticed an underlying theme to most of these episodes of ten Minute Murder, it's
12:24
mental illness or being raised by abusive or absent parents or guardians. And thanks
12:31
for coming to my Ted Talk. That's it. That's your episode for today.
12:35
If you're off to binge Moore, go right ahead, and thanks for
12:37
listening to ten Minute Murder