My Dark Places - James Ellroy [1]
It was a female Caucasian. She was fair-skinned and redheaded. She was approximately 40 years of age. She was lying flat on her back—in an ivy patch a few inches from the King’s Row curb line.
Her right arm was bent upward. Her right hand was resting a few inches above her head. Her left arm was bent at the elbow and draped across her midriff. Her left hand was clenched. Her legs were outstretched.
She was wearing a scoop-front, sleeveless, light and dark blue dress. A dark blue overcoat with a matching lining was spread over her lower body.
Her feet and ankles were visible. Her right foot was bare. A nylon stocking was bunched up around her left ankle.
Her dress was disheveled. Insect bites covered her arms. Her face was bruised and her tongue was protruding. Her brassiere was unfastened and hiked above her breasts. A nylon stocking and a cotton cord were lashed around her neck. Both ligatures were tightly knotted.
Dave Wire radioed the El Monte PD dispatcher. Vic Cavallero called the Temple office. The body-dump alert went out:
Get the L.A. County Coroner. Get the Sheriff’s Crime Lab and the photo car. Call the Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau and tell them to send a team out.
Cavallero stood by the body. Dave Wire ran over to the dairy and commandeered a length of rope. Cavallero helped him string up a crime scene perimeter.
They discussed the odd position of the body. It looked haphazard and fastidious.
Spectators drifted by. Cavallero pushed them back to the Tyler Avenue sidewalk. Wire noticed some pearls on the road and circled each and every one in chalk.
Official cars pulled up to the cordon. Uniformed cops and plainclothesmen ducked under the rope.
From El Monte PD: Chief Orval Davis, Captain Jim Bruton, Sergeant Virg Ervin. Captain Dick Brooks, Lieutenant Don Mead and Sergeant Don Clapp from Temple Sheriff’s. Temple deputies called out to contain the civilians and plain curious on- and off-duty cops.
Dave Wire measured the exact position of the body: 63 feet west of the first locked gate on the school grounds/2 feet south of the King’s Row curb. The photo deputy arrived and snapped perspective shots of King’s Row and the Arroyo High playing field.
It was noon—and closing in on 90 degrees.
The photo deputy shot the body from straight-down and sideways angles. ’Vic Cavallero assured him that the guys who found it did not touch it. Sergeants Ward Hallinen and Jack Lawton arrived and went straight to Chief Davis.
Davis told them to take charge—per the contract mandating all El Monte city murders to the L.A. Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau.
Hallinen walked over to the body. Lawton diagrammed the area in his notebook.
Tyler Avenue ran north-south. King’s Row intersected it at the southern edge of the school property. King’s Row ran east about 175 yards. It terminated at Cedar Avenue—the eastern edge of the school property. It was nothing more than a paved access road.
A gate closed off the Cedar Avenue end. An inner gate sealed some bungalows near the main Arroyo High buildings. The only way to enter King’s Row was via Tyler Avenue.
King’s Row was 15 feet wide. The sports field ran along the northern edge. A shrub-covered chain-link fence ran behind the southern curb line and a 3-foot-wide ivy thicket. The body was positioned 75 yards east of the Tyler-King’s Row intersection.
The victim’s left foot was two inches from the curb. Her weight had pressed down the ivy all around her.
Lawton and Hallinen stared at the body. Rigor mortis was setting in—the victim’s clenched hand had gone rigid.
Hallinen noted a fake-pearl ring on the third finger. Lawton said it might help them ID her.
Her face had gone slightly purple. She looked like a classic late-night body dump.
Vic Cavallero told the coaches and baseball kids to go home. Dave Wire and Virg Ervin mingled with the civilians. Sergeant Harry Andre showed up—an off-duty Sheriff’s Homicide man hot to lend a hand.
The press showed up. Some Temple deputies cruised by to check out the scene. Half the 26-man El Monte PD cruised by—dead white women were some