He knows how to find people.Īnd Cunningham knows how to make sense of threads long since gone cold. Mike and I teamed up to cover the Unabomber and Polly Klaas killings.
So I called Mike Taylor, who retired as a reporter from The Chronicle in 2009. This was going to be a heavy lift, and I would need some help. Because the Doodler case is so confounding - and because it deserves the kind of deep look it didn’t get in its own time - I wondered if a journalist could figure out what happened in ways that might not occur to a detective. Usually reporters document the hunt for a killer from the sidelines, but this time it’s different. “It needed to be looked into.”Įver since that call, I’ve been on a deep dive into the mystery of a killer long forgotten. “It just struck me,” said Cunningham, a man of succinct words. So many gay men killed, so long ago, at such a tumultuous time for LGBTQ people seeking justice and freedom.
One of the first cases he looked into was the Doodler. He’d retired not long before, but missed the hunt. Always in spots known for clandestine gay hookups.ĭespite the efforts of two famous San Francisco homicide detectives, he was never caught.īut then, two years ago, Cunningham joined the cold case unit after a career as an active-case homicide inspector. Savagely knifed and slashed, over and over. Next day, the victim turns up dead on a beach or in a park. Show him the “doodle” - flatter him, suggest they peel away for sex. The Doodler snared his victims with his sketches.īy all accounts a good-looking young man with real artistic skills, he’d stroll into one of the scores of gay bars in Polk Gulch, the Tenderloin and the Castro. There have been serial killers before and since.
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