Witnessed: Fade to Black - The Doodler | 2. Murder, Mistrust, and the SFPD

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

The Doodler’s second known victim is an up-and-coming San Francisco drag queen named Jae Stevens. In the present, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Kevin Fagan recruits private investigator and former Chronicle colleague Mike Taylor to help him track down some of Stevens’ friends and family. Through Jae’s story, we learn how the contentious relationship between police and the gay community complicates the original investigation. 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

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The Binge. Feed your true crime obsession. This series contains depictions of violent assault and murder. Listener discretion is advised. We're at 34th and Fultz and Ruffington. right now. And sure enough, that's the lake right there. It is, isn't it? Golden Gate Park is over 1,000 acres sprawling from the middle of the peninsula all the way to Ocean Beach. Detective Dan Cunningham and I are at Spreckles Lake on the park's northern edge. It was a rare sunny day.

See that opening there? That would probably be up here. That's a little trail. So it's probably one of these. Next to the lake, there's a little path between the trees. This might be the spot right around here. Holy cow, right under a big tree. On the morning of June 25th, 1974, five months after the body of Gerald Kavanaugh was found,

a second body was found right here. The victim was male. Mid to late 20s, his pockets were empty, and there was blood in his mouth and his nose. He had several stab wounds in his torso, five, according to reports in the San Francisco Examiner. This was San Francisco's 70th murder victim of the year. Was this a pickup spot too back then?

I don't know about this specific spot. I don't know if people had favorite spots they went to. But like I said, I know of the fact that people would meet at the bathrooms. They'd meet down by the beach. They'd meet out and go and get park, different areas. But I think a lot of times of men were out here late at night, and they weren't walking a dog, there was usually a reason why they were out here. Cunningham is alluding to the cruising scene.

Police in the 70s suspected the victim came here with someone to have sex. Maybe he came up here or maybe he had been here before he knew the spot and the spot he liked. And, you know, this guy turned out to be a killer. The police eventually identified the young man as Joseph Stevens. But he was better known throughout the city as Jay. that's J.A.E. And by all accounts, he was a beautiful drag queen and a rising star. Jay was from the Bay Area. He had family here. At least he did in the 70s. They've all apparently moved away since then, but I want to find them. If they can tell me more about Jay and who he hung out with, maybe I can figure out how he and his murderer were connected. Hello. Hey there, it's Kevin.

So I call my old pal from The Chronicle. Okay, so we're on the machine now? Oh, yeah. Mike Taylor was a reporter at The Chronicle back in the early 70s, before I got there. I met him when we were both covering a fatal train crash in Central California. A red-brown liquid had splattered all over the scattered train cars, and everyone assumed it was blood. Mike and I weren't sure. We were the only two journalists to taste it.

It was Hershey's chocolate. Since then, he and I have covered huge stories together, the Unabomber, the Columbine High Massacre, and an endless string of disasters and murders all around the U.S. Mike retired about a decade ago, and now he's a licensed private investigator. I think I told you this stuff about the Williams. Mm-hmm, looking for Jay's dad, yeah.

I thought Mike could take the lead on finding Jay's family. He was having early luck finding people who might be related to Jay, But a lot of the records are in Texas. Apparently, his father and brother lived there. These genealogical databases go back a long, long ways. You know, and you can build a fairly cogent tree, which is what we're doing on these people. All right, well, let's start scraping away again and see what we can find.

While he looked for family, I was on the hunt for Jay's friends. And I would start in San Francisco's gay scene in the 70s. That's where news of Jay Steve's, in his death spread like a shockwave, where bars were shelters from gay bashings and dirty cops, and were drag queens were the center of attention. I doubt it got a deep enough look from investigators back in 1974. And I think I can snuffle up some new leads there. I'm Kevin Fagan. From the San Francisco Chronicle, Ugly Duckling Films, and Neon Hum Media, this is the untold story of the doodler.

Hello boys, hello girls, hello girls, hello boys, hello boys, hello boy girls, hello girl boys, I guess that covers everyone here. This is not Jay Stevens, it's another drag queen, Charles Pierce. Jay and Charles were friends. They often shared the same stage. I am a little older than most of you people out in the audience, but I always bridged the generation gap. I tried smoking pot, but the handle got caught in my throat. So I got high on a wearing blender.

For six years, Charles Pierce was the headliner at a bar called The Gilded Cage and the Tenderloin. He since passed away, but I talked to his longtime assistant, Kirk Frederick. Charles was well known in gay circles and starting to sort of cross over and then straight audiences and celebrities and all kinds of people would start coming to see this extraordinarily gifted man. Kirk remembers a lot from this time in San Francisco, sometime around 1969. We had met Charles at a little club off an alley on Mason Street, downtown San Francisco, called The Fantasy. He was performing with this young, beautiful boy named Jay Stevens. With makeup and hair and costumes and, you know, the fake corsets and all that, he was an strikingly beautiful woman.

In a review of Jay's show, columnist Don McLean wrote for the Bay Area reporter that Jay Stevens had a face that launched a thousand sailors. He had high cheekbones, long wavy hair, the color of straw, and eyes like a dough. It's a testament to Jay's talents that 50 years later, Kirk Frederick still remembers seeing him that night. was this bright young, I would guess, in his early 20s, pretty boy who would lip-sink Julie Andrews songs from My Fair Lady and Thoroughly Modern Millie and that sort of thing,

which is what most of eight queens do really well. The real clever ones, the ones that can do stand-up comedy as well, are the ones that survive, and that's what Jay was. A really good stand-up comic in a dress. We met him backstage afterwards, and I remember liking him instantly, a very likable guy. He was very quiet, very modest. You know, you would give him a compliment

and he would almost turn away an embarrassment. Jay had his own show at the PS lounge on Polk Street, right there on the edge of the gritty tenderloin in central San Francisco. He performed there for several years. It did very well. They basically had our own showroom. A couple other acts would play there, but primarily it was the Jay Stevens show.

The neighborhood was taking off, too. This whole tenderloin area was just buzzing. That's Colette LeGrand. Before COVID-19 shut most things down, I met Colette when I went to see her rollicking drag show at a bar called Aunt Charlie's. Back in the early 1970s, she was working as a hooker. I was a hooker back in those days.

I don't deny it, why would I? And then did you turn your tricks outside or go inside a room? Either way. Yeah? I was famous for Alley's. Ah, yes. The tenderloin was known for its illicit activities. It was also a low-income neighborhood with affordable housing,

so it was one of very few options for queer folks with just a few bucks. Eventually, it became the gay neighborhood. All along Polk Street, gay bars and bathhouses began popping up, too. 14-15 bars here, 14-15 bars in Polk Street. There was the cockpit, the frolic room, Bojangles Club, which was the rare gay club of those days that catered to African Americans, and the PS lounge with its top drawer drag axe, the gilded cage, and so many more.

The tenderloin and Polk Street were the place to be. When I moved to San Francisco, Polk Street is where I hung. That's Anne Cronenberg, the gay rights activist. You heard her last episode. Polk Street was the heart of the gay community in the late 60s, early 70s. And there were many different bars where, you know, gay men who dressed in drag would perform and sing. And it was a raucous time in San Francisco. The bars were places where a queer person could be surrounded by other queer people, some for the first time in their lives.

Gay life was very much integrated with the bar scenes at that point because that was one of the only places that you could feel comfortable and safe. Jay Stevens became a part of that scene, performing nightly in several bars. But according to Kurt Frederick, Jay liked to keep his wits. Jay didn't drink. I don't remember Jay ever drinking. There was danger outside the bars. Gangs of men, sometimes even teenagers, would drive through the tenderloin, shouting slurs, and attacking anyone who was walking alone. Being drunk or high made you even more vulnerable.

Yeah, there were a lot of, a lot of, of attacks. You just had to be on your toes. You know what I mean? You had to watch where you were going, who you were surrounding yourself with, you know. Jay Stevens was six foot two. He was big and strong. He didn't have a lot of fear about gay bashings, even though he was as much at risk as anyone. And police were well aware of all the crime going on. The tenderline was probably the most police neighborhood in all of San Francisco. But protect and serve wasn't applied equally to everyone. You know that moment when you're researching something completely unrelated and you stumble

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of queer people being harassed by police. It's evolved to a much better place today with LGBTQ diversity in the officer ranks, but between the 1940s and the 1980s in particular, it was a constant tension. The police were to be avoided at all cost. I mean, if you knew of a policeman that might be sympathetic or friendly, that I think in that period would have been an anomaly. Jim Van Buskirk is the co-author of Gay by the Bay. It's a history of queer culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. He says that since the 1940s, when gay people first began populating San Francisco, police were one of their greatest

threats. The pervasive element, I think, would be feared, just fear that you might say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time and really be in a lot of trouble. Homosexuality was illegal in all ways but by name. If you were caught in a gay bar, you could be charged with any of a number of crimes. Lude and lascivious behavior, there's antisodomies. There were laws on the books where people had to wear at least three articles of gender-appropriate clothing. You couldn't be cross-dressed and try to pass as the opposite gender.

A gay couple could be charged with lewd and lascivious behavior for holding hands. A woman could be charged with cross-dressing for sporting a crew cut and wearing jeans and a leather jacket. The police could raid the home of a known homosexual and arrest them for sodomy. The risks involved in being arrested were devastating. A publication of one's name, address, workplace. You could lose your job. You could lose your relationship with your family. You could lose your living space.

So it was pretty serious. It was a pervasive, hateful. campaign against queerness under the guise of law and order. Here's Anne Kronenberg. You could not trust that the police were going to stand up for you if you were having an issue in the street and you were a gay person. Back then, if a gay man went to the cops to report an assault, the police may well have arrested the victim instead of the attacker.

It happened a lot in places like the tenderloin. Gay men are getting busted after they've been at a bar for the night and pulled into jail because what they did was illegal, in quotes. Street cops seemed more concerned with enforcing the laws on cross-dressing and lewd behavior than chasing cars full of marauding teenagers. But individual harassment was just the tip of the iceberg. Up until the early 70s, any business that was known to cater to queer people was targeted by police, almost as if they were a criminal enterprise.

It was about intimidation and sometimes even extortion. The San Francisco Police Department and the alcohol beverage control officers were caught taking bribes from gay bar owners in exchange for not rating their bars. It was a well-known practice called Gaiola. This went on all through the 50s and 60s until the Tavern Guild finally shamed the SFPD out of the practice. But even into the 1970s, the memories were still fresh. Simply parking a patrol car in front of a bar was enough to. to deter people from entering in 1974. Jay Stevens was murdered at a time when police didn't trust queer people,

and gay folks didn't trust the cops either. Queer identities had been criminalized for decades. An entire community of people felt like they had to fend for themselves. It was a perfect storm of circumstances that allowed the doodler to kill people, undetected. Hearing all this from Anne and Jim and Collette, I couldn't help but feel like the mainstream news, including my newspaper, harbored some responsibility for the way gay people were treated in the past. We as journalists are supposed to really reflect the communities we cover, and we didn't back then. Certainly, the Chronicle has evolved

to being much more diversified and reflective today, but maybe if we'd all done better all those years ago, we'd have more to go on now. In March 2017, police in Ketchikan, Alaska, got a worried call. And I haven't heard some of them, so I'm getting worried. It was about a beloved surgeon, one of just two in town, named Eric Garcia. When police officers arrived to check on the doctor, they found him dead on a couch. Is it a suicide? Is it a murder?

What is it? From ABC Audio and 2020, Cold-blooded mystery in Alaska is out now. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. The new BMO ViPorter MasterCard is your ticket to more, more perks, more points, more flights, more of all the things you want in a travel rewards card, and then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO ViPorter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bemo.com slash V-I-Porter to learn more.

Sometime in early 1974, Jay began performing at a club called Finocchio's. Jay, by then, had become such a sort of icon in the, certainly in the gay circles, and then crossed over to please the state audiences as well. Finocchio's was an internationally known tourist destination in San Francisco. It was so famous for its female impersonators that the likes of Marilyn Monroe would actually go there to see herself impersonated. Jay Stevens knew it was a big opportunity, and Jay had dreams of becoming more than just a drag performer.

He wanted to be a star, like the women he impersonated. Finocchio's was in North Beach, a hopping neighborhood, famous for beat culture, at the tip of San Francisco's Bayside. Compared to the tenderloin, it was more straight-laced, a step in the direction. direction Jay wanted to go. But the Finocchio's gig wound up being his last. Talking to Jay's friends, I get the sense that most of them

knew him from his performances. It seems there are few people alive today who truly knew Jay. But Mike Taylor was making good progress on Jay's family. People think investigative reporting is so glamorous, but it's really a lot of drudge, isn't it?

It's not glamorous. It's not clamorant. Mike and I often rant about the struggles of investigative reporting, especially in cold cases. It's a weird thing, journalism. It's a lot of just paper chasing. Yeah, and then when you find the real people, you're kind of invading their lives. Very few people say it, but once in a while I get somebody says, so how did you get my name, or how did you get this number?

And you feel a little embarrassed, yeah. A lot of this is a paper chase because people were chasing their dead. Mike spent weeks dredging social media accounts and genealogy websites, calling anyone with the last name Stevens. It took that kind of shot in the dark reporting to find one relative, a distant niece of Jays. She was interested in this story, but she didn't know much about J.O. or his murder.

So she reached out to the rest of the family for us. And that's when Mike gets an email. A very short, uh, frank email saying, My brother was brutally murdered in San Francisco. The cops haven't done anything to find his killer. I'd be willing to answer any questions you have. The name on the email is Melissa Stevens-Hanrat, Jay Stevens' younger sister. So we email her saying, well, please call us.

Here's my number. Here's Kevin's number. Call us any time. But after two days, we hadn't heard back. But she works at a hospital just an hour north of where we live. So I can drive up and knock on her door. And then, as Mike and I are talking, I just got an email that I saw on the lower right corner of my screen from Melissa saying,

hi, we'd love to talk to you. Tell her, yes, I'll go visit her, Thursday. Tell her I can come in person. I drove about an hour north to meet Melissa in Sebastopol. It's a small town with only about 8,000 residents. I was trying to get my microphone ready when she came out of the house to greet me. Welcome. Oh, well, thank you.

It's a... What a lovely house. Oh, thank you. So say a little word? A little word. Yeah, one more time. One more time. There we go.

Okay, good. She set us up on her back patio surrounded by succulents and palm plants. Melissa looks a lot like Jay. They have the same high cheekbones. She's got a twinkle in her eye and an incandescent smile. I passed her a mic so we could keep our distance. He was as beautiful as any woman could be except for that he was six foot two. I mean, he would do a Julie Andrews that was just remarkable.

She told me how Jay, or Joe, as she called him, was always. a performer. That was what we did. We put on shows all the time, you know. They let us have the run of the garage. And we had an old piano out there, and we put up stage curtains, and we had neighborhood shows

and charged admission. Even at a young age, Jay was dressing up as a girl. He would call himself Carolyn when he played with Melissa. Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, we'd fix each other's hair. And, you know, just we'd play like two girls would. And that's when I was beginning to realize something about Jay

that I never heard from anyone else. You think it was really transgender? Oh, absolutely. I do know that cross-dressers like to cross-dress, but Joe really wanted to be a woman. He was more fun when we were putting on our shows in the garage. That's when Joe would be alive. Otherwise, he felt pretty suppressed.

Melissa says Jay knew he was a girl from his... young as six years old. He didn't exactly hide it from his family, but being transgender wasn't understood by most people back in the 60s. And by the way, I continue to say he rather than she, because that's what Jay used when he was alive. Melissa uses he, and it's difficult to know what Jay would have wanted for sure. That being said, Melissa and Jay came from a big family. There were five of us at home, but she had six children. Jim, Joe, me, William, John, and then are the baby, Teresa. When a Vietnam draft letter came in the mail in the mid-60s, Jay came out to the recruiter.

He didn't want to go to war. Joe was denied, you know, because he was gay. And my father kicked him out of the house. Jay didn't have a home and conquered anymore. And so, of course, he went to San Francisco. In a way, Jay was able to spread his wings and fly. He began his drag career almost immediately after he moved in 1966. And even Jay's mother came out to see him perform.

She was amazed at how beautiful Jay and all the drag queens were. They were more feminine than we were. You know, it was envious. Their movements were so grace. I mean, they just had it down. Jay was a talent. Melissa told me he could dance. He could sing.

He could act. On stage, he was a force to be reckoned with. By 1973, he was accepting an award for his drag work. The ceremony was held at the Kabuki Theater, not very far from the tenderloin and Polk. And Joe went in, you know, he crossed dress. He went as a woman, and my father bought him a corsage. and pinned it on him.

Jay's father finally gave him some acceptance, though he never came to any drag shows. Melissa, on the other hand, was hooked. When she was old enough, she followed her brother to San Francisco. She got work at a high-end restaurant called Petars. On June 25, 1974, Melissa was waiting tables at her new job. I'm working, and Petar himself calls me over the phone,

and he goes, this is the San Francisco Police Department on the phone. They want to talk to you. Melissa had no idea what this could be about, but she got on the line with the SFPD. And they told me that there had been a murder and that it could possibly be Joe Stevens and could I please come and identify this body. Melissa drove home to pick up her brother, William.

She didn't want to go alone. They drove down to the police station all the way they were hoping this was some kind of misunderstanding. I'm going, it's not Joe, it's not Joe, it's not Joe. And we went to the police station somewhere there. In the police station, you know, a lot of the details I've definitely blocked out, except for like seeing him. There was no doubt about it. It was definitely Joe.

How much of him did they show you? Everything but his groin. And he wasn't just stabbed. He was brutally beaten. The attack on Jay Stevens was what police would call a rage killing. Like I noted earlier, it was the same pattern of stabbing

used on Gerald Kavanaugh. Though this was the first I ever heard that Jay was beaten. When William and I drove up to the house to go say yes indeed, that really is Joe, you know, we could hear our sister wailing, and I knew

something was cracking then. The owners of Pinocchio's held a memorial for Jay and the place was packed with people. Jay's friends and family and performers from all over the city came to mourn his loss.

If Jay hadn't been murdered, his name might have been written in lights on a marquee somewhere in New York or L.A. He was never able to fully realize his own gender identity. We don't know if Joseph Stevens would have preferred to be Jay Stevens or Carolyn Stevens or with his true talent,

maybe one of those one-name stars like Cher. Joseph J. Stevens is frozen in time at 27 years old. Kirk Frederick and Charles Pierce went to the memorial. I mean, everyone loved Jay. How dare he's murdered. We hated it. We were saddened by it. We had benefits for him. We did everything we could to memorialize him and honor him. He was taken too early.

So many queer people were taken too early. And there was a killer still on the loose. Those that lived had to find a way to make it through the tragedy. Charles Pierce, I remember, we opened the next night at Gold Street and engagement. And we were backstage, and Charles was saying, I can't go on. And, you know, we all said, but you have to, the show must go on. And that was ultimately the attitude, you know, as sad as it was. and as difficult as it was to get through, we had to go on.

We had to preserve here. The police investigation around Jay's death was short. I presume they didn't have many good leads. Some people saw Jay leaving the cabaret club earlier that night, but we're not sure with whom. According to Cunningham, Jay's car had been parked near Golden Gate Park. Frustratingly, Cunningham still won't let me see case files. But he told me one of the theories back then was that Jay drove there himself.

and that maybe the killer rode with him. The morning after Jay's death, his car was stolen. It was involved in a high-speed chase which ended with a blonde-haired thief escaping police. Records show they later caught him and determined he had nothing to do with the murder. They called a couple times, and they investigated, and I won't even remember his name now,

but Joe's boyfriend at the time, you know, they investigated him. I haven't been able to identify who Jay's boy. friend was. The people who met him only remember his blonde hair. But other than that, police hardly ever called us back. Melissa was still young, and her parents were so shocked by Jay's death that they didn't know what to do. We didn't demand knowing more. We didn't demand that they investigate. We didn't do Gay Lives Matter, you know. We just kind of went, okay, I guess it's just going to be an unsolved murder. Like, that was okay. Melissa Stevens doesn't remember any police officers following up on the investigation with her parents.

I think it was just pushed aside, you know, another gay, unworthy person murdered. You know, just maybe because there were so many other things going on, or maybe just because it had to do the gay population. For 43 years, Melissa didn't even know that Jay was murdered by a serial killer. The police never told her about him. She didn't see it in the papers. It wasn't until an old friend sent her an article about the doodler in 2017 that she saw her brother's name next to all the other victims.

That was the first time she read about the doodler's alleged talent for drawing his victims. Can I see Joe being smitten about someone wanting to sketch him? Yes, I can see that. Because he did think of himself as being beautiful. Can I see him leaving someplace with, I don't know. You know, I don't know. And then Melissa asked me, question I wish I had more answers to.

And what's with this guy? Is he around? Is he alive? This dutler guy? That's what we're trying to find out. Next time on the untold story of the doodler. In our search for people

connected to this killer's victims, Mike Taylor finds a guy who's been doing his own doodler research. I went to his Facebook page, and I found some other entries that link him to an aerial photograph of the beach area where the bodies were found. What? And a public records act requests to the San Francisco Police Department from the spring of 2018.

And that trail leads to someone with new information about another dougler victim in Germany. That's next time on the untold story of the dupler. Impact site located, entering spacecraft. Contact, but identified life form. We were safer in space. FX's Alien Earth, an original series streaming August 12th on Disney Plus. Sign up today. Require, TNCs apply.

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 Wren 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 Bousager for Ugly Deckling Films

and Jonathan Hirsch for Neon Hum Media.