hit her on the side of the head with a mop handle, and tied her hands and feet with stockings. Then, Livas supposedly said, ‘I took her clothes off. I fucked her for a little while and pulled my dick out and ate her pussy a little bit and then fucked her some more. When I got through fucking her, I hit her some more with the stick.’
According to Livas’s confession, he decided to attack Ferne Jackson after seeing her get out of a car being driven by someone else and go inside her house. The police, of course, knew she had been dropped at her home by her friend Lucy Mangham. The rest of Livas’s account was a close match with other known facts:
I waited down the street on the corner until I didn’t see no lights on at the house. I went to the house and went up on the porch where some glass doors were. I had a screwdriver with me. I stuck the screwdriver in the right side of the door and forced the lock. I went in the door and looked around the house and found an old woman asleep in the bed in the bedroom. She had on some type of gown. I put my hand over her mouth and she tried to move. I hit her pretty hard in the eye with my fist. I raised her gown up. I started fucking her in the pussy and then I ate her pussy. She was crying while I was fucking her. I was buck fucking her with her legs pulled up toward her head. I looked around in some drawers and found a stocking. I wrapped the stocking around her neck and pulled it tight and tied it in a knot.
Livas said he stole his victim’s car and left it on a dirt road off Lawyers Lane in south Columbus, exactly where Mrs Jackson’s vehicle had been found. His confession to murdering and raping Jean Dimenstein was equally vivid and, seemingly, accurate. Having tried to open a window, he said, he went round to the port where her car, a blue Chevrolet, was parked:
I took the hinges off the door. I threw them out in the backyard. I took the door off and set it to the side … I found an old woman in the bedroom asleep. I put my hand over her mouth and she was trying to wake up. I hit her with my fist. I don’t remember where I hit her. She had on some kind of housecoat. She had on a pair of panties. I took her panties off and threw them down. Then I pushed her legs back and buck fucked her. Then I ate her pussy a little bit. I got a stocking from a chair and wrapped it round her neck and choked her … I went out the same door I came in and got in [her] car and left. I put the radio station on WOKS because I always listen to it. I took the car pretty close to where I left the last car but left it on a paved street this time.
Dimenstein’s car radio – as the police, but not the press, knew – had indeed been tuned to WOKS when it was found on a paved road in Carver Heights.
Three days later, on 6 October, the police showed Gertrude Miller, the woman who had apparently survived the strangler’s attack, an array of photographs. She picked out Livas. His picture, she said, was the one that looked most like the man who raped her, and had ‘all the right features’. It looked as if the case was nailed. On 14 October, the Deputy Police Chief C.B. Falson, the robbery-homicide squad director Ronnie Jones, and his deputy, Herman Boone, called a press conference. Jerome Livas, they announced, was officially a suspect for the stranglings. If convicted, he could expect to be sentenced to death.
Even then, there were some members of the CPD who had their doubts. Carl Cannon, a young reporter with the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, spoke to an anonymous police source who told him Livas was a ‘twenty-four-carat idiot with the intelligence level of a five-year-old’. Another said Livas had not understood the contents of his own confession, let alone the implications of signing it without having seen a lawyer: ‘Explaining that to him is like explaining Einstein’s quantum theory of physics [sic] to a three-year-old.’ Livas’s employer, William Renfro, told Cannon he was ‘slow, illiterate and stupid’, and would ‘say anything’. But Chief McClung was confident the police had got their man. The special patrols in Wynnton were stood down.
Florence Scheible was a widow of eighty-nine, almost blind, and walked only with the aid of a Zimmer frame. Originally from Iowa, she moved to Columbus because she liked its warm weather. On the morning of 21 October, while Livas remained in custody, her neighbours saw her outside at about 11 a.m., shuffling in the garden in front of her two-storey house on Dimon Street, a few blocks from the murders. Three-and-a-half hours later, her son Paul, a colonel in the military, called the police, saying he had come to visit and found her dead.
Ed Gibson, a CPD patrolman, went inside, into the tidy living room. Antique furniture and a rug stood on a polished hardwood floor; there was a television in the corner. Mrs Scheible was lying on her bed in the bedroom next door, next to her walker. Her dress had been pulled above her waist, exposing her pubic area, which was covered in blood. She was wearing one nylon stocking. The other had been wrapped around her neck.
In the wake of Florence Scheible’s murder, Columbus was seized by dread. The special patrols reappeared, joined by soldiers from Fort Benning and volunteers from other jurisdictions. Like many women who lived alone, Martha Thurmond, a retired teacher aged sixty-nine, decided not to risk relying on these measures. The day after the discovery of Mrs Scheible’s body, she had deadbolt locks fitted to the doors, and burglar bars fixed to the windows of her house on Marion Street, a small, wood-framed dwelling just off Wynnton Road. Her son Bill, who lived in Tucker, a suburb of Atlanta, came down with his wife and son to stay for the weekend, wanting to be certain that she would be safe. They left for home at about 3.30 p.m. on Monday, 24 October.
At 12.30 p.m. next day, a neighbour noticed that Mrs Thurmond’s front door was open. The new lock had not been properly fitted, and working in silence, the killer had forced it during the night. She was inside, on her bed, wearing a pink pyjama top; taped to the wall above her was a large sheet of paper with a phone number written in large characters: 322–7711 – the number for the Columbus Police Department. Like Florence Scheible, she had been hit with enormous force, by a blow that fractured the base of her skull. The stocking ligature had been tightened so fiercely against her skin that it had caused a friction burn, a brownish red, blistered trough against her windpipe. In and around her vagina were copious quantities of seminal fluid.
Driven to desperation, Mayor Mickle tried to reduce the chances of another murder by cancelling Halloween. Parents, he told reporters, should ensure their children were home by 6 p.m. on 31 October. Trick or treating was forbidden.
With the police investigation and the reputation of his department in disarray, Chief McClung continued to claim that Jerome Livas might still have killed the first two victims. ‘The evidence against him still exists,’ he told reporters. I met the Ledger’s former crime correspondent Carl Cannon in a cellar bar in Washington DC, where his career has prospered as the White House correspondent for the National Journal. Warm and approachable, he vividly recalled the events of his reporting youth twenty-five years earlier. His father had been a big-time Washington reporter before him, and unlike most Columbus journalists, he always knew he was only passing through, and could afford to make enemies.
‘They were still using that hoary old line – Livas had said things that only the killer could have known – and when Mrs Scheible was killed, they added another: that there had to be a copy-cat killer. I’d already had some experience with the Columbus cops and their tendency to rush to judgement. But I had a source in the department who used to call me at home. He told me it was bullshit: the murders were the work of the same guy. He said Livas had this urge to please. He’d confess to anything.’
Cannon managed to enlist the help of a judge to get him access to Livas in jail. Left alone with Cannon, Livas signed another statement within a couple of hours. This time, he not only confessed again to the first two Columbus stranglings, but admitted that it had been he who had assassinated two Presidents, John F. Kennedy and William McKinley; that he had been with Charles Manson the night his followers murdered the actress Sharon Tate; that he had known when Charles Lindbergh’s baby was going to be kidnapped in the 1930s; and that he knew Elizabeth Short, the victim of the notorious ‘black dahlia’ murder in Cannon’s home state of California the following decade. Cannon asked him if knew what the
