Witnessed: Fade to Black - The Doodler | 6. A Sketch for the Street Cops

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

In the Fall of 1975, a composite sketch of The Doodler is published in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Sentinel, and tips begin to roll in. Street cops are on high alert for anyone matching the description. Inspectors Rotea Gilford and Earl Sanders round up several suspects for interrogation. Kevin and Mike uncover more details about a psychiatrist and secretary who claim their patient is The Doodler. 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

In the heat of August, in a forest near Le Mans, the King of France snaps, murdering five of his own men in a frenzy delusion. Before long, this beloved ruler has collapsed into madness, believing he's made of glass. Step inside a kingdom on the brink of shattering. This is History Presents, the Glass King, available wherever you get your podcasts. 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. SFPD released a composite sketch near the end of October 1975, based on a description given by the

diplomat who was attacked in Fox Plaza earlier that year. Was this the same man behind the murder of Jay Stevens in Golden Gate Park? Harold Goldberg at Lans End? The multiple murders on Ocean Beach? Police thought so, but they couldn't prove it. Risks aside, publishing the sketch was pivotal. It was an opportunity to enlist the public in an effort to rid San Francisco of a serial murderer. My newspaper, The Chronicle, published the sketch in a short story in November 1975, and then again months later, at the bottom of a larger series about sadomasochist culture in the gay community. At the end of that series, the paper made mention of a killer known as the Doodler. The San Francisco Sentinel, the gay newspaper, published the sketch

too, about a week before The Chronicle. This was actually their second big break in the Doodler case. Only a year earlier, they were the first outlet to notice a pattern in the Ocean Beach murders. Along with the sketch, they printed a clear and direct message. There was a serial killer on the loose, and he was targeting gay men. Now there was new and desperately needed publicity on the case, and readers had a number to call if they had any information. With the sketch, the entire SFPD had a face to look for in the crowd, and queer people had a face to watch for in the bars. The doodler couldn't hide in the shadows anymore.

I'm Kevin Fagan. From the San Francisco Chronicle, Ugly Duckling Films, and Neon Hum Media, this is the untold story of The Doodler. I had a picture in my mind of the doodler. There was a flyer out with him. This is James Andre Bowles. I was an officer, blue suit, driving a black and white with my partner.

In November of 1975, Bowles was just off a short stint in homicide, but still on the force and still in touch. Well, San Francisco homicide, you know, we thought it was the best homicide unit on Earth. They were working on the doodler at that time. And so I talked to everybody. It was a very, very big topic of discussion. Five people had been killed, two more assaulted. And now that there was a composite sketch, it felt like only a matter of time until someone found this guy.

Like a lot of cops, James Bowles wanted that someone to be him. I knew what he looked like. And so I was working alone one of the first. night. And so I told my lieutenant, I said, I'm going to go look for this homicide suspect. And I don't remember calling the doodler, but I'm going to go look for this homicide suspect. I'm going to go down on foot and see if I can spot them. So I went to 18th in Castro and I spent the evening there. Bowles walked around in the Castro trying to envision the Doodler. A black man, about six feet tall, slight build, around 20 years old, and matching the

composite police sketch. Well, about 9.30, I saw this guy walking down the street, and he fit the description fairly well. He was about the right height, build, and he looked really hinky because his right arm was straight. It didn't bend. at the elbow, and he's wearing a long p-coat. Bowles jumped into action without another thought. This was his chance. So I stop him, and I say, get up against the wall, because I don't know what he had in that sleeve,

but it didn't look right. So I started patting him down. He's got something in his sleeve, and I lowered his arm and said, open your hand, and he did, and it was a sawed-off basis. baseball bat. Well, that was the first clue that this guy wasn't real right. So then I finished patting him down and he'd got something down in his pants. So I'd pull that out. It's a

scimitar. It's a curved sword. That's the first and last time I ever stopped at Crook and he was carrying a scimitar. Bowles is remembering this just a little hazily. It was actually a cookery, a curved knife that is similar to a cemeter, but not as long. He says he took this suspect back to the police station. Bowles booked him, and when he did, he found another piece of evidence. I'm not free to discuss specifically what it is publicly, but I found some evidence that made me think that this guy was good for at least.

these to one of these murders. Was it some sketches? No, it was something that was, it was an indication that this guy had been in possession of some stolen property. And I can't say for a fact it was stolen, but let's put it this way. There ain't no doubt in my mind that was stolen property. Was it from one of the Doodler victims? Yeah.

Bowles says he passed the evidence and the suspect off to homicide inspectors for Tay Gilford and Earl Sanders. Had he caught the doodler? I have some doubts in my mind, but no real strong doubts. Plus, he had some crimes in his history that would match this sort of guy. So he fit my profile about as tight as anything. A cookery is more like a machete than a stabbing knife. Police know a steak knife was used in the diplomats attack,

but no weapon was found at the scene of any of the other doodler incidents. So this cookery could actually be a viable doodler weapon. And Bowles says this suspect did have a history of arrests. There are certain guys you'd get that feeling from. You meet some guys that are just evil to the core. Seldom have I been wrong with that. In fact, I don't think I ever have. have you.

It's unclear what happened to the cook rewielder. That piece of evidence Bowles found on him was pretty incriminating. Dan Cunningham told me it was a pond slip. This guy had sold a wristwatch belonging to the doodler's fourth known victim, Fred Cappin. But detectives couldn't link it to the murder. The watch was apparently stolen from Cappin's apartment before he was murdered. A few months after Bowles made that arrest, Rotei Gopher told the San Francisco Sentinel that there were several suspects being

looked at. I was able to get Dan Cunningham to tell me that the original case files include 16 suspects. That sketch must have kickstart at the tip line. I don't have tabs on all of them, but the man James Bowles arrested is one of them. And the others? Some of them shared the doodlers' artistic streak. There's two, at least two at least have, we have those photos of sketches they had done. Cunningham says at least one man was apprehended for bringing a sketchbook into a gay bar. And there was another man offering to draw sketches of patrons in a tenderloin bar. He was carrying a butcher knife and a book of drawings. That sounds spot on. So the cops were getting more leads, and the case had a new sense of momentum. But casting with such a wide neck

gets complicated, right? The circumstances of some arrests can get a bit shaky. The composite sketch was detailed, but the suspect description was fairly broad. So any young black man carrying a sketchbook into a bar, or even just walking down the street, could be stopped. This was the 1970s. Racial and sexual prejudice was explicit in the SFPD, even in the prestigious homicide department. Only one year earlier, the SFPD had been stopping and profiling hundreds of black men during the zebra murder case, a move that the federal court called a civil rights violation. And remember, when Earl and Rotate,

first became inspectors they were held to a different standard by the old boy's atmosphere in the department. I didn't mention that since 1973, they'd been participating in a lawsuit alleging the SFPD was biased against hiring minorities. Earl wrote in his book The Zeber Murders that at one point, a crowd of something like 200 white officers gathered to protest their allegations in that lawsuit. As Earl and Rotea pushed through the crowd, one even through a racial slur as he called for a contract to be put out on their heads. To which Earl hotly replied, Why doesn't the asshole who said that come over here and try to make good on that contract himself? So, inspectors Gilford and Sanders were actively fighting the inequities within the SFPD. Earl's son, Marcus Sanders, told me his father's hunt for a suspect was purely focused on catching the bad guy.

But I don't know how they felt about sending that very police force out into the streets to hunt down a black suspect. If they were alive today, we could ask him. I did ask Rotea's widow, Jude, but she said he never discussed his work with her. You know that moment when you're researching something completely unrelated and you stumble 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,

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That's simplysafe.com slash crimes. There's no safe like Simplysafe. The sketch was getting police closer to, catching the doodler than they'd ever been. But for the regular bargoer, the sketch wasn't going to protect them from another knife attack. The queer community was entirely fed up with the lack of security in their neighborhoods. They had been for a while, whether it was marauding teenagers throwing bricks from a car window or a serial murderer on the prowl. Activist Ann Cronerberg said they took matters into their own hands. We had to come up with our own system of

of, you know, kind of like a neighborhood watch or something. It's like take care of ourselves. You know, we started, and this is a little later in the 70s, more like 73, 74, started the whole whistle movement. So everybody, men and women in the gay community, carried a whistle with them, you know, on your keychain, on wherever, so that if there was trouble, you could blow the whistle,

and a community member hopefully would come and help you, because, again, you could not trust the cops for being there. By 1976, this coalesced into an organized effort. We were called the Butterfly Brigade, and we were gay, and, you know, the examiner called us vigilantes. That's former Sentinel editor, Randy Alfred, again. He was one of the organizers of the Butterfly Brigade. We were armed with whistles, nothing else.

And basically, we were, what was later called a neighborhood watch. They wore robes and some carried walkie-talkies. They could only afford a few. The Butterfly Brigade was a group of volunteers who actually patrolled the streets in the Castro. Harvey Milk came out on one or two occasions with us. He didn't come out on a lot because he didn't want a grandstand.

He signed up for a shift like everybody else. He did the full hour and a half watch. And we did two watches a night, Friday night and Saturday night. It was a huge commitment. The shifts went past 2 a.m. some nights. Randy Alfred wrote a story about the patrols in the Sentinel, and he said when someone yelled slurs from their car, the butterflies would write down their license plate number

and send them a letter, just to let them know that records were being kept. And sometimes, to let a parent know their teenage son was driving around town, harassing people. The butterfly brigade was pretty small and limited to a few blocks in the Castro, but it did a lot of good. And even the cops seemed to agree.

The brigade used peaceful intimidation against violent homophobes. The doodler was probably too careful to get caught by the butterfly brigade. He made sure his victims were well away from anyone or anything that could protect them. In March 2017, police in Ketchikan, Alaska, got a worried call. And I haven't heard some of them. I'm getting rage. 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. Why just survive back to school when you can thrive by creating a space that does it all for you, no matter the size. Whether you're taking over your parents' basement or moving to campus,

IKEA has hundreds of design ideas and affordable options to complement any budget. After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. As I've said, the publication of the sketch meant a lot more tips were coming in. Many were bogus, but some were intriguing. Earl and Rotea were operating on a hunch. They suspected that the man who attacked the diplomat

was the same person killing folks on Ocean Beach. But they didn't have hard evidence to support that connection. All they had were rumors about a sketch artist and a consistent pattern of attack, until another lead fell into their lap. It was an anonymous call, and she gave a very specific name. A name. Dan Cunningham says the caller claimed that the name she gave was the man in the sketch

and that he killed the people down on Ocean Beach. Approximately 10 days later, if 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. This anonymous woman called twice. First, with a claim that she knows the man in the sketch, Second, with a license plate number to pressure the police into arresting him. Subsequently, did the department then determine who the woman was and talked to this person of interest? So the investigators at that time started working up an individual that she provided a name for.

But just because the police got a name doesn't mean they could go kick down that person's door. Like Cunningham says, inspectors Earl and Rotea had to figure out more about the person named in the anonymous tip before they could pursue him outright. So they put him under police surveillance. Then the phone rang again. Within a short period of time after, you got a third phone call from a secretary at a psychiatrist's office saying that the person that committed these beach murders had been seeing the situation. psychiatrist that she works for.

According to a later chronicle article, the secretary called less than a week after the anonymous woman. The article references a fourth call, too. The fourth was the actual couple of days later, the actual psychiatrist himself. The psychiatrist alleged that his patient confessed during therapy, the same person the anonymous woman and the secretary had called about. Over the past three or four months, this patient had been talking about how he committed the murders on Ocean Beach. Rotea quoted the psychiatrist in the article, saying his patient was the doodler, quote, beyond any question.

The doodler potentially had a name. Was he this therapy patient? Sitting on a couch week after week, month after month, confessing to these crimes? We have to know who that patient was. But to figure that out, we have to know first, who was the psychiatrist? This is a question Cunningham was looking at, too. He tells me Rotea and Earl's case file only has one line that hints at who the psychiatrist may have been.

It says, Dr. Priest, Highland Hospital. My experience in the past has been he spent an endless hours and then suddenly one thing is the key and it unlocks it. That name and that location where things our private investigator Mike Taylor could work with. Highland Hospital is still in operation today. You know, hope springs eternal.

So Mike called up the hospital to see what records we could get about a doctor priest who may have worked there in 1975, but nothing. They told him that everything before the 90s had been purged. I tried to get more information out of Cunningham, but he got the same response from Highland Hospital that we did, though he had a few small details that Mike and I could talk through. Dan was saying that yesterday when we were walking around, that psychiatrist had met with the doodler suspect or person of interest

at an actual clinic at Highland Hospital in Oakland back then. But there was something about meeting at Highland and they had these temporary shacks set up outside the hospital or something like that. Yeah, mobile units. So I was going to chase that out with somebody I interviewed. long ago who was at Highland at the time

and just see if the guy's still alive and see if he remembers anything. Mike and I have called up every Dr. Priest who could have been practicing back in 1975, at least the ones we could find.

But no luck so far. Why didn't Rotea and Earl write down the full name of this psychiatrist? Was Dr. Priest's shorthand for something else? Or is this another matter of missing files? A doctor that I talked to a week ago brought this up. When I was talking about the psychiatrist at Highland Hospital

who might have talked to the dougler, whoever that was was probably in his or her 40s. So you'd be looking for someone in his or her 90s now. Good luck, but I don't think they're going to be around. Yeah, really. And good luck having him be a or her be a, witness, you know, here I-D this person from 45 years ago, Mr. 92-year-old doctor. Right.

That could be tough. In Mike's conversation with the doctor, he also learned that the Highland Hospital files may not have been purged after all. They may be sitting in a storage unit somewhere, waiting to be reopened. We've put in a Public Records Act request for those files. Even more than the diplomat, this psychiatrist, Dr. Priest, could have information implicating the doodler back in the 70s. He had what every investigator wants, a confession.

Next time on the untold story of the doodler. Earl and Rotea interrogate the suspect. What kind of things did he say? You know, I've had other people, I've done this to you before, and I enjoy this. So your anguish and pain and everything else is something I enjoy type of thing. That's next time on the untold story. of the doodler.

In the heat of August, in a forest near Le Mans, the King of France snaps, murdering five of his own men in a frenzy delusion. Before long, this beloved ruler has collapsed into madness, believing he's made of glass. Step inside a kingdom. on the brink of shattering. This is History Presents,

The Glass King, available wherever you get your podcasts. The doodlers created by the San Francisco Chronicle and Ugly Duckling Films and produced an association with neon hummedia and Sony Music Entertainment. It's 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 Chloe Chobel and Ryan J. Brown. Our sound designer and composer is Hansdale Suit. 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 Duckling Films, and Jonathan Hirsch for Neon Hum Media.

Thank you.