He will portray Polete as a remorseless predator with good predatory years left and the will to perpetuate his rage. He will state his opinion that Polete should be kept in prison for the rest of his life. He will tell the Story of women savaged in anger and self-pity, He will pray for a receptive parole board. He will draw strength from his dead going in. Tracy Stewart. Karen Reilly. Bunny Krauch.
Killed by men known and unknown.
Add Betty Jean Scales and Geneva Hilliker Ellroy. Add me as Stoner’s chronicler. Add my insurmountable debt and his professional commitment. Add the need to know and serve that drives us both. Factor in the core of sex that drives us toward these women.
Bill Stoner will continue. I will continue to tell his story. Our collective dead demand it.
March, April 1998
MY MOTHER’S KILLER
I thought the pictures would wound me.
I thought they would grant my old nightmare form.
I thought I could touch the literal horror and somehow commute my life sentence.
I was mistaken. The woman refused to grant me a reprieve. Her grounds were simple: My death gave you a voice, and I need you to recognize me past your exploitation of it.
Her headstone reads GENEVA HILLIKER ELLROY, 19 15–1958. A cross denotes her Calvinist youth in a Wisconsin hick town. The file is marked “JEAN (HILLIKER) ELLROY, i87PC (UNSOLVED), DOD 6/22/58.”
I begged out of the funeral. I was io years old and sensed that I could manipulate adults to my advantage. I told no one that my tears were at best cosmetic and at worst an expression of hysterical relief. I told no one that I hated my mother at the time of her murder.
She died at 43. I’m 46 now. I flew out to Los Angeles to view the file because I resemble her more every day.
The L.A. County Sheriff handled the case. I set up file logistics with Sergeant Bill Stoner and Sergeant Bill McComas of the Unsolved Unit. Their divisional mandate is to periodically review open files with an eye toward solving the crimes outright or assessing the original investigating officers’ failure to do so.
Both men were gracious. Both stressed that unsolved homicides tend to remain unsolved–thirty-six-year-old riddles deepen with the passage of time and blurring of consciousness. I told them I had no expectations of discovering a solution. I only wanted to touch the accumulated details and see where they took me.
Stoner said the photographs were grisly. I told him I could handle it.
The flight out was a blur. I ignored the meal service and the book I had brought to kill time with. Reminiscence consumed five hours–a whirl of memory and extrapolatable data.
My mother said she saw the Feds gun down John Dillinger. She was 19 and a nursing-school student fresh off the farm. My father said he had an affair with Rita Hayworth.
They loved to tell stories. They rarely let the truth impinge on a good anecdote. Their one child grew up to write horrible crime tales.
They met in ’39 and divorced in ’54. Their “irreconcilable differences” amounted to a love of the flesh. She majored in booze and minored in men. He guzzled Alka-Seltzer for his ulcer and chased women with an equal lack of discernment.
I found my mother in bed with strange men. My father hid his liaisons from me. I loved him more from the gate.
She had red hair. She drank Early Times bourbon and got mawkish or hellaciously pissed off. She sent me to church and stayed home to nurse Saturday-night hangovers.
The divorce settlement stipulated split custody: weekdays with my mother, three weekends a month with my father. He rented a cheap pad close to my weekday home. Sometimes he’d stand across the street and hold down surveillance.
At night, I’d douse the living-room lights and look out the window. That red glowing cigarette tip? Proof that he loved me.
In 1956, my mother moved us from West Hollywood to Santa Monica. I enrolled in a cut-rate private school called Children’s paradise. The place was a dump site for disturbed kids of divorce. My confinement stretched from 7:30 A.M. to 5 P.M. A giant dirt playground and a swimming pool faced Wilshire Boulevard. Every kid was guaranteed passing grades and a poolside tan. A flurry of single moms hit the gate at 5:10. I developed a yen for women in their late thirties.