Witnessed: Fade to Black - The Doodler | 3. The Zebra Diversion

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Kevin and Mike dig deeper into the lives of the first three Doodler victims, and a clear pattern begins to emerge around the method and location of these deaths: brutal stabbings in remote hookup spots. Did SFPD see that pattern in the ‘70s? Or was it lost amid the crime wave sweeping across the city at the time? They look into the infamous Zebra killings of 1973 and ‘74. 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, it's Jesse Tyler Ferguson. On my podcast, Dinner's on Me. I've taken guests like Sophia Vergara, Catherine Hahn, and Margaret Cho to some incredible restaurants around Los Angeles. And now you can check them out for yourself. I've put together an Apple Maps Guide featuring just some of the delicious spots. We've shared meals and stories on the show. Go explore and maybe even go grab a bite where we recorded.

Just search dinners on me on Apple Maps. and don't forget to listen on Apple 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. 4 a.m. on July 7, 1974. A little more than five months after the murder of Gerald Kavanaugh, only 10 days after the murder of Joseph J. Stevens.

The sun was still below the horizon and the waning moon was hanging over the Pacific where the sea meets the sand. 49-year-old Talba Weiss was walking on Ocean Beach with her German Shepherd Moondance before she went to work. And all of a sudden, I see the dog was smelling, running, running. I couldn't figure out I was walking running after the dog. She chased Moondance over some sand dunes,

and that's when she saw him, a man lying face down on the beach. She called the police. She gave her name, but she didn't wait around for them to show up. Taubo was a survivor of Auschwitz. She told me a body didn't shock her. One of the inspectors on the scene that morning wore a signature bow tie and brown leather shoulder holster. His name was David Toski,

a charismatic cop well known for his work on the Zodiac case. Standing on this beach, in front of this particular murder scene, it was too early to tell whether Toski was looking at the work of someone like the Zodiac, a serial killer. But there were signs. This killing was especially brutal. The victim's throat was slashed in three places, and he had been stabbed at least 15 times.

The cops were not immediately able to identify the body. He had no ID on him. Finger and dental records didn't bring back any names. The victim was wearing a tan leather jacket, blue jeans, and orange bikini briefs. Police found a makeup tube in his pocket and a gold wedding ring on his finger. But based on his clothes,

The makeup tube, and the fact that Ocean Beach was a known cruising spot, inspectors wrote that the victim had homosexual propensities. A pattern was emerging. This was the third man stabbed to death at a gay hookup spot within six months. The murders were especially brutal, rage killings, with no clear motive but to kill. A few weeks after Dave Toski saw that body on the beach, the city's crusading gay newspaper, the San Francisco Sentinel, published an article. Police investigating link in three recent stabbings. In the article,

the police listed the names of Gerald Kavanaugh and Joseph Stevens, two men they described with that language I mentioned before, homosexual propensities. And the cops wanted help from Sentinel readers, help identifying this third victim. Altogether, you might think the SFPD was hot on the Doolers Trail. That wasn't the case at all. This murder and the two before it were sideline in a big way. I'm Kevin Fagan, and from the San Francisco Chronicle, Ugly Duckling Films, and Neon Hum Media, this is the untold story of The Doodler. This summer, we're loading up the car, two boys, one dog, and more snacks than any family should need, and heading out on some long overdue camping trips. But before we even pack the

marshmallows, I made sure our house is protect. That's why we use SimpliSafe. When we're out in the woods with no cell service and a squirrel stealing our trail mix, I don't want to be worrying about what's happening back home. SimpliSafe's active guard outdoor protection is what gives me peace of mind. It's proactive security, AI-powered cameras plus live monitoring agents who can spot suspicious activity, speak to someone in real time, trigger spotlights, and call the police before anyone breaks in.

It's easy to install, no contracts, no hidden fees, and it was named Best Home Security System of 2025 by CNET. Honestly, I wish packing the tent was that simple. Visit simplysafe.com slash crimes to claim 50% off a new system with a professional monitoring plan and get your first month free. That's simplysafe.com slash crimes. There's no safe like SimplySafe. You know that moment when you're researching something completely unrelated and you're onto a fine that's just right?

That happened to me last week while procrastinating on the script rewrite, and I came across this 100% European linen utility shirt from Quince in a color called Driftwood, and now I can't stop thinking about it. It's got this effortless lived-in look, structured enough to wear to a meeting,

breathable enough for a weekend away, and just that timeless, no-notes kind of way. It's definitely sitting in my cart right now, just waiting for me to pull the trigger. Quince is where I've been finding a lot of my go-to pieces lately. They make elevated basics that actually last, like lightweight pants, breathable polos, and classic layers that don't fall apart after a few washes. And here's the thing.

Everything is about half the cost of similar brands. That's because Quince works directly with top artisans and cuts out the middleman, so you're getting quality without the crazy markup. Elevate your fall wardrobe essentials with Quince. Go to quince.com slash crimes for free shipping and 365-day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash crimes. Not long after that Sentinel article was published, SFPD had a name for the unidentified victim, Klaus Christman, 31 years old, a tourist from Germany.

When Inspector Dan Cunningham and I met at that cafe in Petaluma, I asked him about Klaus Christman's final night. He had been seen earlier in the evening on Polk Street, Upper Hope Street, in a bar. I know from my research that Cunningham is probably referring to the gay club called Bojangles. It was in the Tenderloin, one block away from Polk Street, but not your typical tourist destination. So how did Klaus Christman end up there? He had been working for an automotive company back in Germany.

He had come out here and was living with a man and his wife, somewhere in the area of Church Street, I believe, or by the Castro. That man was Booker T. Williams and his wife, Nancy. I suspect that Booker Williams was the one who told police he saw Crispin leaving Bojangles for another gay club called The Shed. It was around midnight. We don't know if Chrisman ever made it there. About 16 days later, Williams was the person to identify Christman's body. And that's more or less where the timeline of what we know ends. Yo.

Hey, it's me. Our private eye, Mike Taylor, was able to find a Booker T. Williams and a Nancy Mabin in a San Francisco directory from 1975. If Williams was the last person to see Christman alive, he'd be worth talking to. I found Booker T. Williams at 4521 Fifth, 25th Street. And then it said administration, Hastings School of Law. 47 years later, that address is pretty much useless. But that detail about the Hastings School of Law could be helpful

in finding Williams. A bit more digging, and Mike found an article about Booker. I found an obituary from Detroit on Mr. Williams. He died in November of 2001. But importantly to this case, he was in the military police of the U.S. Army stationed in Germany. That military connection is likely how Klaus and Booker knew each other. But the obit means that Booker is no longer with us.

After some more reporting, we learned that Booker and Nancy divorced in 19, 77. And records say Nancy died in 2018. But we haven't hit a dead end. There's another clue worth investigating. When I was at the cafe with Cunningham, I asked about that wedding band SFPD found on Klaus Christman's hand. He was married and had two kids back in Germany and had been living for a significant amount of time in San Francisco before this happened. Chrisman was not only a husband, but a father. He had two children, so he was born in 43, died in 74. So whoever is around is probably in their 50s, maybe, late 40s or 50s.

Maybe those kids are still alive today. By summer of 1974, a Sentinel article showed that the police were beginning to connect these murders. They hadn't yet linked the Kavanaugh-Stevens and now Chrisman killings to one perpetrator, but still, they saw a patter. So why wasn't SFPD going full bore on these cases? Well, another string of murders was overwhelming the city. Well, I was working the night when five people were shot. That's former SWAT sergeant Bob Del Tori.

He saw a lot of violent crime in his 19 years on the SWAT team. But there are a few murders that stand out more than the Zebra murders of 1973. in 1974. We know now that the zebra murders were committed by a group of extremists who called themselves the death angels. It was a murder cult that targeted white people. But at that time, the killings seemed chaotic, random, and without motive. Sergeant Deltori was first on the scene of two of those murders on January 29, 1974,

two days after Gerald Kavanaugh was killed. I was the first car on the scene, and then we got a description of the car, a white valiant and a black Cadillac. I think that was it. And then Roxanne Macmillan got shot up in the Excelsior district about five minutes later. And she was a fifth one that night.

Del Tori was in shock, his adrenaline pumping. He was trying his best to keep the victims alive while the zebra killers were driving around town shooting people. I'm going to tell you something. When we went back to the station, I don't know how to explain it.

Guys, they weren't. crying, but they were pretty upset. It was a very, very somber mood at the station that night. We felt like, oh, my God, five people got shot and we couldn't catch it. By April, 21 people had been shot while they walked the streets. There was a point early in 1974 when people just stopped going out in San Francisco. They were too afraid of being gunned down on the street. Two Salvation Army cadets were shot point-blank on their way to a market for a late-night snack.

Two teenagers were shot on Easter Sunday while waiting for a bus. In total, the zebra murderers took the lives of 15 people and wounded at least eight others. The crime spree stretched from October of 1973 to April of 1974. During the widespread panic, the police created a special task force for finding these guys. And they exclusively used Radio Channel Z to talk during the investigation. All that chanter on Channel Z is what inspired the name Zebra. Bob Del Tori says the SFPD was putting a lot of resources into the case. There was a lot of inspectors working.

I don't know how many. I don't know how many. There's probably at least six or eight. There was a lot. It was a lot. The SFPD was at a loss. Around April of 1974, the task force started to put things together, though. Survivors told police that the attackers were young black men.

On April 18th, the city ordered police to profile and stop any black man who fit the description. It was a move that a federal court quickly struck down as a civil rights violation. The police also put out crude police sketches and a $300,000 reward. It was an irresistible amount of money. An accomplice to the zebra murders confessed everything to earn the reward, and ultimately four men were convicted for the murders. A killer like the one on Ocean Beach didn't inspire the same kind of widespread fear. He wasn't attacking whoever he saw on the street.

He was specifically killing gay men. There's no question this thing did not get the kind of attention, for example, that I got because of who the victims were. That's Art Agnos. He was a social worker around that time, and he was actually target in one of the zebra shootings. He went on to become mayor some years later. I think it was a reflection of the discriminatory attitudes that general society had toward gay people in 74. I mean, those times were Neanderthal times.

The status of the victim is extremely important in terms of mobilizing both law enforcement and the media. That's criminologist Mike Rustigan. He teaches law enforcement how to investigate serial murders. If it's a Johnny Versace or women at an upper middle class university, white women, oh my God, oh, the homicide is geared up and mobilized. If it's homeless, if it's prostitutes or like in San Francisco with gays, I mean, the cops weren't all that mobilized to vigorously pursue offenders back in the 70s.

There were at least 130 homicides in San Francisco that year, more than twice what the city sees today. By the end of the year, dozens were still unsolved. That includes Christman, Stevens, and Kavanaugh. Frank Falzone was an SFPD homicide inspector at the time. When you were on call, we were going seven days a week, 24-7, so we were getting called out four or five times, sometimes in a day. Falzone says, even though there were a lot of murder cases happening, officers really weren't communicating.

This was the old days, the old ways. You could have a case, and the guy sitting right across from you could have a related case, and you wouldn't know it. Right. There was nobody, I shouldn't say nobody, but a lot of times the connections weren't being made. All of their work was on paper in folders and filing cabinets. They didn't have a computer database of crimes like today. and DNA evidence wasn't yet in their toolkit. If cops wanted to find connections between different cases,

they'd have to ask another inspector. Did we look to see that maybe McCoy, Erlatz, or Carreras might have a gay that was stabbed? We weren't doing that. At least 10 gay men were killed in San Francisco in 1974. Some of those were stabbing, too. And our modern-day brains immediately think serial killer, But most people didn't make those assumptions in 74.

Here's criminologist Mike Rustigan again. If you go back historically with homicide, if you were worried about being murdered, you had to worry about people that you knew. What happens in the late 60s into the 70s is that there's like a new pitch in America. Suddenly, you have killers, gunmen, stabbers, whatever, are targeting victims. for no apparent motivation. I mean, in other words, total strangers. Killers like Zodiac caught SFPD flat-footed.

That was like the embryonic precursor of what was to become. I mean, Zodiac gave us a glimpse of the nature of serial killers and became extremely interesting to see how much he wanted notoriety, publicity, that he wanted fame and taunting the police. and catch me if you can, that kind of mindset. It wasn't until the end of the 70s that the FBI would start giving local police departments guidance on how to identify and investigate serial murder cases. But that was too little, too late for the doodler victims.

The SFPD was in uncharted waters and a serious doodler investigation had yet to begin. 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. Hey, it's Jesse Tyler Ferguson. And on my podcast, Dinner's on Me, I've taken guests like Sophia Vigara, Catherine Hahn, and Margaret Cho to some incredible restaurants around Los Angeles.

And now you can check them out for yourself. I've put together an Apple Maps guide featuring just some of the delicious spots we've shared meals and stories on the show. Go explore and maybe even go grab a bite where we recorded. Just search dinners on me on Apple Maps and don't forget to listen on Apple Podcasts.

Mike Taylor's been looking into the doodler's third known victim, the German tourist Klaus Christman. It had been a couple of weeks since we talked, so I gave him a call. Hey, it's Kevin. We're recording. We're recording? Yeah, we are. Okay. Mike's not a big fan of being recorded. Let me just pull up my notes here for a sec.

But actually, there's an intriguing development that I sort of developed in the last 12-hour year or so dealing with Klaus Christman. My big hope is that we can find some of Christman's relatives in Germany. They might have been sent a police report back in the 70s or heard other details that investigator Dan Cunningham has kept to himself. There's a guy in Germany who, when I run Chrisman's name or his widow's name, and somehow this guy's name came up. This guy didn't have the surname Chrisman, but he had some strange connections to the murder case.

So I went to his Facebook page, and I messaged him. I've got an answer back, but I found some other entries that link him to an aerial photograph of the beach area where the bodies were found and a map where the bodies were found. What? And a Public Records Act requests to the San Francisco Police Department from the spring of 2018. Someone was poking around to get information about Christman. I can't detect any reason why he would be interested in the case. If his last name was Crispin, that would be a other thing.

It's possible this guy was just a true crime fan who came across the Doodler murders on the Internet. But putting in a public records request means this person was motivated. Three days later, Mike found a phone number connected to this guy, and he gave him a call. It turns out the man who put in the request is married to Klaus Christman's daughter.

They live in a small town in southern Germany. He didn't want to be recorded, but Chrisman's daughter was fine with it, as long as we agreed to leave her name out of our podcast. So I'm going to call her Helen Christman. So, hear you hear me? Lizzie Roberts is helping us talk with Helen Chrisman. Okay, toll.

Now I have she on speakerphone. She's a reporter in Germany, and she's fluent in English and German. Lizzie called Helen on a Monday morning. She translated the conversation for us. For Helen and her mother, Claus is a distant, and that Helen and her mother, Klaus is a distant and painful memory. And that makes this all the more challenging.

We want to ask about things Helen might not want to discuss. Who was Klaus Khrisman? Why did he come to San Francisco? And is there any reason other than the obvious, why he was spending time at gay bars. Helen was just a baby when her father was murdered in San Francisco. But her mother told her about her dad when she got older. You know what this for a local was, in a bar or in restaurant, cafe, or a bar?

A bar. Okay. She says Klaus worked at a bar in the city of Kaiser Slautern. The first time her mother came to the bar, she was shocked to see men kissing each other. The bar openly catered to start. and gay clientele, which was unusual in the 1960s. But Klaus's day job was at a Michelin factory, she said. The Klaus was yearning for something more.

Helen says that many Germans thought anything was possible in America. He wanted to give his children a better life than he had. In the 60s, the United States still had a post-war presence in Germany. Booker T. Williams was an American soldier stationed there. One night he came into Klaus' bar in Kaiser Slautern, and they became close friends. Years later, Klaus decided to visit Booker in San Francisco and try to put some roots down in America, and soon his family could follow him. Klaus stayed in close contact with his wife.

Helen says her mom and dad often talked on the phone and sent letters to each other. But her family's American dream would soon be shattered. A telegram from Booker T. Williams arrived for Klaus's wife in late July of 1974. It was unusual that Booker would send her a message. They barely knew each other. The telegram was very matter of fact. It simply said, Sorry to tell you, Klaus has died.

That's how Klaus's widow found out, through a seven-word telegram from a practical stranger 6,000 miles away. There's no easy way to ask a person if their dead father was secretly gay. But Klaus was found at a known hookup spot, killed by someone who targeted gay men. We had to broach the subject. The police had said, that demented on homosexual propensities,

I don't know what this word is, of Dutch. Helen tells Lizzie she stopped asking about her father when she was little. She could see how painful it was for her mother. But Helen has grappled with this question over the years. What would it mean for her if her father was gay? Should that really matter? Moreover, simply because you're tolerant, because you hang out at bars with gay people, it doesn't mean you're gay yourself. But there was something especially vicious in the way Klaus was murdered. It had the telltale signs of an act of passion and rage. Klaus's sexuality ultimately doesn't matter.

He was targeted nonetheless, and we can presume the killer thought Klaus was gay. So why was this killer drawn to gay men? Was he conflicted about his own sexuality? Was that fueling his hate-filled murders? If you ask me, I think the dula might be gay himself, maybe even a hustler who turned tricks on the tenderloin. No matter what, he was clearly charming enough

to lure these men. into the dark. Next time on the doodler. The SFPD finally assigns two investigators to the case, Rotea Guilford and Earl Sanders. Both those guys were snappy. Even if they show up in three in the morning, they'd be all decked out.

They always were in a suit, and there was a presence. Like, oh, here they are, man. Homicides here. Rumors about a new killer in town began to spread in the bars on Polk Street. Rotea Guilford was a kind of. a guy that could make people talk.

That's next time on the untold story of The Doodler. 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 Rann 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 Bowsager for Ugly Deckling Films

and Jonathan Hirsch for Neon Hum Media.