Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - The Doodler | 5. An Actor and a Diplomat Walk into a Bar

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

At the end of 1975, The Doodler murders Harald Gullberg, the fifth and final suspected fatality that investigators have tied to this case. The Doodler’s sixth victim actually survives a brutal knife attack. Investigating today, Kevin is desperate to talk to an eyewitness, but investigator Dan Cunningham says the man wants to put the events of 1975 behind him. Private investigator Mike Taylor looks into rumors that this surviving victim may have been a Swedish diplomat, and some new leads emerge. This is a re-released series from The Binge archives. Binge all episodes of The Doodler, ad-free today by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge Crimes on Apple Podcasts and hit ‘subscribe’ or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access. From serial killer nurses to psychic scammers – The Binge is your home for true crime stories that pull you in and never let go. The Binge – feed your true crime obsession. A Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit ⁠⁠podcastchoices.com/adchoices⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey there, I'm Mel Gidroich, host of Where There's a Will is Awake, the comedy podcast that sees your favourite celebs meet their maker. That's right, they've died and they're telling me all about what's happening at their funeral. And listen up, we have a cracker of an episode for you. I got to meet one of my all-time heroes, ruddy Monty Python's Eric Idle. I've been watching, listening and consuming his groundbreaking comedy since I was a kid. We talked dipping, ding-dongs and having a reefer with a beetle. Honestly, it was a bucket list moment for me and you can hear it right now wherever you get your podcasts.

The Binge You're listening to The Doodler, a re-release series from The Binge Archives. If you're a subscriber to The Binge, you can listen to all episodes ad-free right now. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge.com to browse all the great shows on the channel. The Binge, feed your true crime obsession. This series contains depictions of violent assault and murder. Listener discretion is advised.

Listen to this series carefully and let us know if anything you hear in this show jogs a memory of yours. And if you've got a tip, you can call us at 415-570-9299. We're about, I don't know, maybe three quarters, 75 or 80 percent done with the reporting. You know, I mean, short of actually standing there and watching someone kill someone else. We're relying on history. Mike Taylor and I are talking out the difficulties of reporting a case with more questions than answers. You know it's it's it's putting together little threads and you can't have the threads together if you don't have the you know the semblance of a cloth. Right, exactly. Until the summer of 1975 the

Doodler had managed to kill at least four people, mostly undetected, leaving little evidence and no witnesses, as though he'd planned out everything perfectly. But of course, nobody is perfect. We really want to find a key witness in this case, an unnamed young man who we think was attacked by the Doodler in July of 1975 in his apartment at the Fox Plaza apartment building in San Francisco.

Around this time, the Doodler started to make mistakes. Some of the many attacked may have gotten away with memories of exactly what happened. Are any of them still alive? If so, we want to find them. But before the end of 1975, the doodler would claim one more life. I'm Kevin Fagan from the San Francisco Chronicle, Ugly Duckling Films, and Neon Hum Media. This is the untold story of the doodler. So I'm not sure what hole this is but it's by the 16th hole of Lincoln. And

evidently down a road that's got this divider to it. Investigator Dan Cunningham and I are right by Lincoln Golf Course at Land's End. It's just a skip north of the previous Doodler kill sites, Ocean Beach and Spreckels Lake. The fifth and final presumed victim was found near the course's 16th hole. Hey, do you know where the 16th hole is at?

16th one is the one that goes down the hill right here on that side. Cunningham is using crime scene photos to pinpoint the exact spot. So I think we're close, right? I guess so. It's probably about where the sign is up there, that next one, somewhere around that area? I think so. If the 16th, there's the, well there's the flag right up there. Several months into this investigation, I think Cunningham is starting to think that my work could benefit him too.

Maybe that's why he's starting to be a little less reticent. Oh, look at that down there. Exactly, it could be it. We settle on a spot that looks pretty close. There's a gap in the brush in front of us, to a cliff that drops down to the ocean. It's pretty safe to say this is the same kind of sound you'd be hearing 45 years ago. Right, right. It was probably as nice that day as it is today. I mean it was in June.

Uh-huh. June of 1975. June 4th, 1975, around 6 p.m. That was when a hiker stumbled upon the body of Harold Goldberg. His body was found probably between 10 to 14 days after he was killed. So he was probably killed in the middle of May. I'm guessing it was probably a nice day that day. And beautiful view. Birds. You got the best view of the world right here. It's like a panoramic postcard. Yeah. Of the bridge, the ocean.

Golden Gate Bridge is straight over there. You got Baker's Beach, the beach. Yep. And beautiful. It's ironic that a horrific act like that would have taken place in such a lovely location as this. Harold Gulberg was a 66-year-old merchant seaman, a Swedish immigrant, naturalized as a U.S. citizen 20 years before he died.

Inspector Frank Falzone was the first responder that morning, along with his partner, Dave Toskey. I remember the coroner telling us the body had been there for a while because of the size of the lava that was left by flies that the body had began to decay. Goldberg's throat had been slashed, his pants unzipped. Falzone and Toskey worked the Goldberg crime scene, but they wouldn't be the ones to take the case.

So the lieutenant at the time, and I believe it was Charlie Ellis, took the case away from Tosky, also away from myself, and gave it to Rotea Guilford and Earl Sanders. The Doodler investigators. Former Mayor Willie Brown says they were the guys for the job. And they did a considerable amount of police work together and they became really well known as the two cop cops. They were well wired into the street and that included gay bars where people might know what was going on.

But Earl and Rotea quickly learned that Goldberg would be a hard nut to crack. Harold Goldberg in Sweden, I'm getting zero, zero of anything, anyone close to him. Partially it's because of his age. He was 66 when he died 45 years ago, so any contemporary would be 110 years old or at least 100. So that's sort of a problem. We do know that Goldberg was a merchant seaman for most of his life.

I'm in touch with the Sailors Union of the Pacific, which is the big seafaring union in California. And I gave them the name, date of birth, date of death, and all that to see if they have anything. Turns out the union had no records on Goldberg and could tell us nothing. But with some help from Mike's PI pal, Tamara Thompson, we learned Goldberg traveled to ports in Shanghai, Fiji, New York, Liverpool, and of course, San Francisco, among many others. He didn't stay in one place for very long, but from what we've gathered, San Francisco seems to have been his home base. It was the friendliest port a gay man like Goldberg could find.

That's about all we know about Goldberg. He's the last known and confirmed Doodler fatality. And on paper, his being an enigma reminds me of the Doodler's first victim, Gerald Kavanaugh. Both older loners. I began this journey wanting to find out more about the victims so I could understand more about the Doodler. And while I've got a better handle on the Doodler's potential motive and his inner turmoil, I don't have much else. But according to rumor, there were other doodler victims.

Ones who survived. Men that I believe Rotea and Earl spoke to. And at least one of them might still be alive. This is a true story. It happened right here in my town. One night, 17 kids woke up, got out of bed, walked into the dark, and they never came back. I'm the director of Barbarian. A lot of people died in a lot of weird ways.

You're not gonna find it in the news because the police covered everything all up. On August 8th. This is where the story really starts. Because the police cover everything well up. On August 8th. This is where the story really starts. Weapons. Hey there, I'm Mel Gadroich, host of Where There's a Will is Awake, the comedy podcast that sees your favourite celebs meet their maker. That's right, they've died and they're telling me all about what's happening at their funeral. And listen up, we have a

cracker of an episode for you. I got to meet one of my all-time heroes, Ruddy Monty Python's Eric Idle. I've been watching, listening and consuming his groundbreaking comedy since I was a kid. We talked dipping, ding-dongs and having a reefer with a beetle. Honestly, it was a bucket list moment for me and you can hear it right now wherever you get your podcasts. Newspaper clippings from the 70s make passing reference to potential survivors of the doodler. Mike and I have been trying to find them. Back then, investigators protected their identities. But Mike and I have gleaned a little info. So, who were these witnesses? According to talk at the time,

there was an actor who hung around gay bars. Rotaya mentioned to the press that he was an actor famous enough to be nationally known. He was deep in the closet for the sake of his career, but there were places in San Francisco for famous gay men to indulge their desires in private. Rock and Cary Grant were two that were, you know, everybody talked about, oh my god, Rock Hudson came into that club.

And these were upscale clubs, you know what I mean? These are Jack and Ty clubs. That's Ron Huberman again. He's the investigator you heard last episode. He says Hudson and Grant were the kind of nationally known actors whose sexuality was the subject of rumors. It later came out that Hudson was gay, but Grant was only speculated about. Yet they both went to clubs where famous gay men were known to flock. The actor in question likely did too. Gossip about these men must have passed from bartender to bartender until they

trickled down into the dive bars. Wayne was so gregarious. I mean, he was a perfect bartender. He talked to everybody. Wayne Friday tended bar at a gay spot called the Newbell Saloon. He was a friend of Jay Stevens. He heard a lot and he saw a lot. He had to be very careful.

He didn't out people, but he would hint. It's a good bet that Earl and Rotea talked to Wayne. The rumor they heard went something like this. A well-known actor went home with a man to have sex, and as they were about to go to bed, a knife fell from his coat. I wonder how long the knife sat on the floor between them before the actor bolted out of the room.

He must've been quick. There was no attack. No blood. It was barely a story, really, until it caught Earl and Rotea's attention. They thought it might be related to the Duthler case. Reports suggest the investigators tracked down the actor in question, and after talking with him, they seemed convinced that it was connected. Rotea was later quoted saying, it would be terrible if his name got out. So a lot of people throughout the years have thought it's a lot of different people. And I don't want to say anybody's name specifically, but whoever that person was, they never made

a police report. Dan Cunningham at SFPD has access to Earl and Rotea's files, and he says even he doesn't know for sure who the actor is. At that time, it wasn't a popular thing if you were a celebrity to come out and to be acknowledged as a gay man. So that report was never made because there would have to be a name with that. Even though it was an attempt, we don't have that information. Cunningham has looked into several different names, and so have we. Mike and I have called agents of the few living actors from that time who were speculated about. We traced any actor

who may have been in town performing, promoting something or just hanging out. And we called relatives and acquaintances of the deceased stars too. The ones who responded didn't want anything to do with this project. The details around the actors run in with the doodler are admittedly murky, but we learned that there's potentially

a second surviving witness. And he has a much more harrowing tale. So there was a diplomat. There was a diplomat, one that Dan Cunningham says had a run-in with the doulaure at a late-night restaurant. It was called the truck stop. It was by Market and Church. And the victim was in this bar at 2 o'clock in the morning, whatever, 2.15, and I guess they started putting

all the chairs and tables together to make room, and everybody just kind of sat together because a lot of people wanted to eat, getting out of the bars. And there was an individual that was there, and he was drawing on a napkin with some expertise. He was drawing animal figures. And an individual that was there started chatting with him, ended up bringing him back to his place at the Fox Plaza. The diplomat

took this man and the restaurant back to his place in a high-rise apartment complex just south of the Tenderloin. It's called Fox Plaza. The building, which is still there, had offices and a bar on the lower floors and apartments with fabulous views all the way up to the 29th floor. When they got there, the artist locked himself in the bathroom for a while. The guy went in to check on him at some point, and he said he was okay.

The victim went back and sat down with his back to the door of the bathroom. Not long after that, the man emerged. This guy came out some point and put a steak knife and just started attacking him. He was trying to get his front and his back, stabbing him. It was consistent with the other injuries that he had done to the other victims.

The attacker stabbed the diplomat six times, piercing his lung. The blade broke off, he survived. The guy ran. In fact, Dan told me that as soon as the blade broke, the he survived. The guy ran. In fact, Dan told me that as soon as the blade broke, the diplomat grabbed his attacker and threw him against the wall. The attacker, now unarmed, ran from the scene. The diplomat was gravely wounded, bleeding from six places in his chest and his back. But he was alive. Miraculously, he walked himself to a hospital clinic down the street, where he stayed for

several weeks. He didn't go to the cops at first. If he did, he'd have to tell them exactly what happened, why this man was in his apartment in the first place. At best, he would have to out himself to the police. At worst, he would be outed to the public, his colleagues, for which a gay man in 1975 would mean public humiliation and potential criminal liability.

But a few weeks later, the diplomat filed a police report on the incident. I don't know what changed his mind. Inspectors Rottay Guilford and Earl Sanders took the report into their file. The attack on the diplomat was an outlier. It marked a complete change in pattern from the five murders we've talked about. Those killings happened in remote locations, all within walking distance of each other,

starting at the beach and curving up the coast to the Wooded Lands Inn, places where victims were unlikely to receive help. The diplomat had neighbors in Fox Plaza. His screams could be heard through the walls. If this was a doodler attack, why would he change things up? Why would he take such a huge risk? Does Dan have the police reports of those attacks from July 75th? He does, yeah.

I mean, did the cops go back to the building and start interviewing people up and down the hall? Why, curiously, he did not fill me in on all those intricate details. I see. I would like to, I would assume they would, don't you think? I mean, that's, that kind of makes sense. You'd go bang on some doors. If they did it, yeah.

You know, a lot of times investigators will go back to the crime scene and bang on a door, leave a card. It doesn't mean people are home. The next time I met Cunningham, he confirmed that the diplomat is very much alive. You talked to the diplomat, right? I've talked to that victim, yes. Does he want to come forward? I don't want to comment on that.

From the sound of Dan's voice, it feels like something is still going on with this witness. Is he still scared of being outeded or is that still an issue at this time? I don't know. I don't the issue with him is not about being outed at all. What kind of redis? He's got some other issues throughout the years because of that attack. Yeah did he sustain injuries that stuck through these years? Yes. C. Okay. Cunningham says this diplomat doesn't want to talk.

Nearly half a century later, he appears to still live in fear that he'll be attacked again. We don't want to out the diplomat by name or to put him in danger. But if we talked, he could confirm what the doodler looked like, acted like, or maybe he could even give us a name. I feel like we can convince him to trust us if we can only figure out who he is. There's not much for us to go on other than his title, diplomat. In 1975, San Francisco was home to consulates from all over the world. France, Sweden, Japan, India, the Philippines, the list goes on. Narrowing that list down without any guidance

would be time consuming, if not impossible. But I do wonder, if rumors about the actor spread through the bar scene, maybe there were rumors about a diplomat too. (*phone ringing*) Yep. Randy Alfred was a journalist at the San Francisco Sentinel, a gay newspaper back when these

attacks happened. He covered anti-gay violence, and he worked closely with the guy who covered the doodler. Which was Chuck Morris's beat. Chuck Morris passed away in 1986, but Randy remembers hearing one detail about the diplomat, a rumor that came from the SFPD. I'm pretty sure that they thought it was a Swedish diplomat, a rumor that came from the SFPD. I'm pretty sure that they thought it was a Swedish diplomat. And I think that may have been information that wasn't publicly released because it would have identified him.

He's right. It wouldn't be hard to get information on a diplomat in a single consulate in San Francisco. And that narrows it down from all of the countries, you know, 40 or 50 or even 60 countries had consulates here because it's a port city, unless it was one of those other Nordic countries like Denmark or Norway, but I remember it as Swedish. I asked investigator Ron Huberman if he ever heard anything similar about a Swedish diplomat from Wayne Friday or any other bartenders at the time? I think the diplomat, I can't remember his name now, but the diplomat used to go into the Nubel, which is where the piano player was and where Wayne held, attended bar.

Huberman makes it sound like this diplomat was a regular. Everybody would just call him the diplomat. I don't think he used his name, which is very common in some of his positions. Do you know what country he might have come from? I don't think he used his name which is very common in some of his position. Do you know what country he might have come from? I don't know. I don't I just can't remember but it wouldn't be strange for diplomats from I would say You know northern Europe another words from France or Germany or you know, Switzerland or the to be assigned in San Francisco and be gay Seemed like I was on to something. So I pressed Dan again the next time I saw him.

That conversation was off Mike, but I updated Mike Taylor on the phone. I said, okay, diplomat, is he Swedish, Scandinavian? The quote was, you're good, but I'm not going to tell you any of that. I'm pursuing some other lines on the diplomat just to see if they pan out. There's actually a very strong Swedish or Swedish-American community in the Bay Area, so I'm starting to find some names in there to go after. Mike wants to cross-reference those names with the names that are listed in a 1975 San Francisco City Directory. The directory lists the names of almost all

of the residents in Fox Plaza, the diplomats' apartment complex. Mike has been culling a list of over 300 names. If we knew what floor he lived on, we could narrow it down. Mike also wants to compare the names to Swedish consular records. If the laws were the same in Sweden as they are here and you could file a Freedom of Information Act request and say you know cough up any

papers you have on problems in the Swedish consulate in San Francisco in the mid 70s. The only catch is that the Swedish government is barred by law from sharing archival materials with non-citizens. So Mike called up a researcher in Stockholm. It's 8.30 a.m. in California. I'm with Nina, how do you pronounce it, Sylvan Toinan? Perfectly. Nina Sylvan Toinan is going to look through the archives in Sweden for us. I remember there was one email that I got from the Riks Arkabit in Sweden.

And the man said, look in box, shelf this, box number, et cetera, et cetera. Did you get that? You got that? Yeah. I actually had contact with her, the woman from there, and I ordered the file, the dossiers that she mentioned.

But she also said that be aware that the lists are not complete. But of course, I mean, I will pick them out for you. And I have a big box waiting for me when I get there tomorrow. I'll update you if those records from Sweden get us anywhere. The actor and the diplomat were linchpins to Earl and Rotea's investigation. Their combined memories told a story of a knife wielding man, a man intent to kill the man he went home with. If Rotea and Earl were right, this was the doodler. But there's still more we need to know to be sure.

What I'm about to go into is a combination of details from my own research and new details from Cunningham. In July of 1975, the diplomat was laid up in a hospital bed recovering from severe stab wounds and a pierced lung. He had just agreed to file a police report. What he revealed to Earl and Rotea was, to them, the first description of the doodler to ever hit a policeman's ear. They wrote down the description in their report.

Dan Cunningham laid it out for me. So this person was, at the time, late teens, 19, 20 years old. Slender, six feet, 5'11", Slender Bill, African American. The diplomat's attacker was a young black man, not unlike the Zebra Killers, and he too had a motive. I read in some of the clippings that in one of the attacks, the perpetrator said something about,

you gay guys are all the same or something like that. Is this that series of attacks? Yes, there's consistent comments made to both victims that survived This attacker seemed to harbor some kind of hatred toward the actor and the diplomat for their sexuality Same as the killer on Ocean Beach We already know the doodler had it out for gay men, so this language fits the doodler's pattern. You gay guys are all the same. Rotea and Earl had to be pretty damn sure this was their guy. After gathering as much as they could from the diplomat and the actor, Earl and Rotea had enough information to start piecing together an image of this suspect. The doodler was about to be doodled.

The doodler was about to be doodled. One of the witnesses generated the sketch. Cunningham eventually said the diplomat was the one who described the attacker in the greatest detail. The sketch looks like a shaded pencil drawing. The man it depicts is young with a long chin, serious eyes, and a medium dark complexion. He's wearing a navy-type watch cap. The drawing is almost photorealistic.

It's not a character like some other police sketches. Drawn with precision, a lot of time and effort went into this sketch. It was released to the public in November of 1975. Both the Sentinel and the Chronicle published it, along with a phone number for tipsters to call. Earl and Rotea were confident that the diplomat's attacker and the doodler were one and the same. They needed any additional leads they could get to confirm that.

The Sentinel warned readers, under no circumstances should the suspect be approached. It was a huge development for the case, and investigators were putting a lot of faith into this composite sketch. Would that be a problem? The word I would probably use with respect to police sketches or composite sketches is dangerous. Karen Newworth is an attorney for the Exoneration Project. She's also an expert on eyewitness identification. We know as a matter of scientific fact based on laboratory research that composite sketches are unreliable.

That the ability to describe a person is not well correlated to the ability to identify them. Those are two separate functions in your brain. Newworth says that when we look at a face, we see it as a whole, not as individual parts. Making a composite sketch, the way it's done requires an individual to describe a person by their features, right? Individual features. We make the eyes, we make the nose, we make the mouth. And absent something really distinctive, that's asking people to do an entirely separate

cognitive task describing about something that we don't actually process. If you show 26 people or 2,600 people the same photograph, you're going to get that many different composites. And the reliability of a composite sketch is even shakier when the victim and the perpetrator are different races. It's worth noting that the suspect described in the Doodler sketch was a man of color, and all the known Doodler victims were white.

These were cross-racial in nature, and cross-racial identifications are known to be more unreliable than same-race identifications. And part of that problem is the lack of vocabulary, and particularly from white to black in the United States, to describe features of other race persons or to, you or to appreciate distinctions in other race features. This all means that building an accurate compasa sketch is a long shot at best.

Jennifer Dysart is a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an expert on eyewitness identification. Research has also shown that by using a sketch artist or some of these older techniques where you kind of, let's say, build a face, that those processes can actually influence your recollection and your memory for the face of the perpetrator.

And using an inaccurate sketch in your investigation can compound the problem. The sketch is done. The witness says it's as good as it's going to get, or it's very close, or it looks just like him, whatever they say. And then the sketch is distributed. And the hope is what?

That someone will see the sketch and go, oh, my gosh, that's my neighbor. And so you call the police. you say it's probably nothing. Let's say then the police, maybe they see the sketch, maybe they don't, but they go to the neighbor's house and the person opens the door and they think, oh, he looks just like the sketch, right? Like what are the chances? The chances are very high actually, because the person was calling

because they already believed. There's already been a match. In a way, the sketch gives the police exactly what they want, a suspect. Now, anything the neighbor does will be seen through a lens of suspicion. What the person doesn't realize, the neighbor who's now the suspect, is that

the witness's memory of the perpetrator has been influenced by the sketch and their memory for the perpetrator is going to look very similar to the sketch. And if the suspect has been selected because they look like the sketch, why should anyone be surprised when that guy gets selected from a photo array or a live lineup or an in-court identification procedure? No one should be surprised. Professor Dysart says there is no scientific way to evaluate the accuracy of a police sketch.

The only way to know if it's right or wrong is to identify the perpetrator by other means, like DNA testing or video evidence, things that SFPD didn't have then. DNA wasn't a tool for police until many years later. Whether the police knew it or not, the doodler sketch was a shot in the dark. Who knows how much false suspicion it would raise around the streets of San Francisco. At the time, Rotay and Earl were two of the only black investigators at the SFPD. It's hard to know if any of this was front of mind for them.

After all, just a year earlier, a composite sketch had helped them solve the Zebra Case. So this was a tool they likely had some faith in. And as it would turn out, the Doodler sketch got results. Next time on The Doodler. Once the sketch, the composite was put out there, then the phone call came from the anonymous woman. And it was that woman's phone call that started it. Police get a fateful phone call. And she gave a very specific name.

Yeah. And approximately 10 days later, she called up again, a little upset, apparently agitated, because she didn't think anything was getting done, and provided a license plate of the suspect. That's next time on the untold story of the doodler is created by the San Francisco Chronicle and Ugly Duckling Films and produced in association with Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment. It is reported by me, the host, Kevin Fagan, and Mike Taylor, produced and written by Tanner Robbins.

Natalie Rand is our co-producer, and Odelia Rubin, our supervising producer. Associate producers are Bennett Purser, Chloe Chobel, and Ryan J. Brown. Our sound designer and composer is Hansdale Sue. Our editor is Nick White, and our executive editor is Catherine St. Louis. Editorial support from King Kaufman and Tim O'Rourke for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Executive producers are Sophia Gibber and Lena Bausegger for Ugly Duckling Films, and Jonathan Hirsch for Neon Hum Media.