The chopper flies low. The walking cops wear hip boots. The horses buck knee-high water. A storm hits at 3:00 P.M. The search is called off.
The storms continued. Big rain on Sunday and Monday. The search was postponed indefinitely. They had to let the water recede.
Koury and Meyers called it a snatch, rape, and kill. They leaned on registered sex offenders. They logged in zero suspects.
They door-to-doored by Durfee Drugs and Vons Market. They tapped out. Nobody saw anything. They interviewed the probable victim’s father, mother, stepfather, stepmother, and brother. The father and mother ragged the husband:
He’s a lowlife. He’s a tyrant. He’s a cold son of a bitch. Bud Bedford says it flat out: He killed Betty Jean.
Wednesday, 2/7/73:
Bill Scales is summoned to the Sheriff’s Crime Lab. Sergeant Ben Lubon administers a polygraph test. Koury, Meyers, and an El Monte PD man observe.
Lubon calls the result conclusive. The subject has no guilty knowledge of his wife’s disappearance and possible death.
The Scales job stalled out. No body and no workable crime scene. Koury and Meyers caught fresh murders. The new jobs demanded full-time work. The rain came and went. The pits were full of stagnant water.
3:30 P.M. Sunday, 2/25/73:
A perimeter road near a big pit mined by Conrock-Durbin. A five-gallon can on the side of the road.
A security guard stops his car and picks up the can. His dog jumps out of the car and runs into the pit. The guard whistles. The dog barks and ignores the command. The guard walks to the edge of the pit and looks down.
She was nude. She was faceup at the bottom of the pit. The staplebat was fifty-seven inches from her left hand.
She was badly decomposed. Immersion had intensified the decomp. Maggots had eaten her eyes and most of her membranous tissue.
Her skull was caved in. Her hair fell out as she decomped. Maggots swarmed inside the cranial vault.
Matted hair on the business end of the staple-bat.
A dozen cops hit the crime scene. They grid-searched the pit. A chopper flew over. A photo deputy shot some wide-angles.
The grid search tapped out. Zero: dirt, rocks, mud, and gravel. A deputy coroner requisitioned the body,
He performed a postmortem. His stated cause of death: bluntforce trauma and resultant skull fractures. His semen smear turned up inconclusive. The vaginal membranes were waterlogged and badly decomposed.
Everyone knew who she was. They tagged her Jane Doe #10 anyway. They needed a formal ID.
They ID’d her off dental charts:
BettyJean Bedford Scales. Born 3/6/49. Probable date of death: 1/29/73.
Koury and Meyers worked the case part-time. They checked recent sex assaults with suspects at large. Their geographic focus: El Monte/Baldwin Park/Irwindale. 12/16/72:
2:00 A.M. The Baldwin Park Post Office. 220 PC–Assault with Intent to Commit Rape.
A white youth accosts a 44-year-old white female. He shoves her into her car at knifepoint. He rips off her bra, pulls down her pants, and fondles her buttocks. The victim screams. The suspect flees on foot.
12/17/72:
3:45 A.M. The all-night laundromat at 4428 Peck, El Monte. 220 PC–Assault with Intent to Commit Rape.
A male Latin accosts a 56-year-old white female. She works at the laundry and another laundry four blocks away.
The suspect tries to push her into a storeroom. He states, “I want pussy! I want pussy! I don’t want to rob you!” The victim pulls a safety pin off her coat. She stabs the suspect. The suspect screams and runs out the door. The victim calls the El Monte PD. A patrol team responds. She tells them: “I saw the same man at two o’clock this morning. He cruised by my other laundry and looked in the window.”
1/4/73:
1:00 A.M. The all-night laundromat at 4851 Peck, El Monte. 207 PC–Kidnapping, 261 PC–Rape, 245 PC–Assault with a Deadly Weapon, 10851 CVC–Grand Theft/Auto.
A male Latin accosts a 26-year-old white female. He saps the victim. He forces her into her car and takes the wheel. He drives out the 605 Freeway, the 210 Freeway, and Highway 71. He stops on a side street and orders the victim out. He marches her into a brush field. He rapes her and forces her to orally copulate him. He marches her to her car and drives her back to El Monte. He forces her out of the car at Cherrylee and Buffington. He tells her he’ll leave the car at Cherrylee and Peck.