The Southside Slayer

It was easy to get lost in the 1980’s and 1990’s in Los Angeles. The city was rife with turmoil and entire neighborhoods sunk deep into decrepit disrepair from the ongoing crack epidemic. Crime rates and homelessness were high, higher than residents had ever seen them before. 

For many, the future looked bleak.

It was little surprise to find women assaulted and murdered, especially in neighborhoods that were known to harbor drug dealers and desperate, oftentimes homeless, sex-workers. Case after case of murdered women piled up high on top of detectives’ desks, usually only to be filed away and forgotten about when the next one came in. 

But some of that changed in 1998, when forty-one-year-old Paula Vance was killed. 

Unlike many of the women who’d come before her, Paula’s brutal assault and death by strangulation were all caught on a security camera. Unfortunately, her assailant remained a blurry, shadowy figure in the footage.

Detective Cliff Shepard was put on the case, a case that would make a lasting impression on him. But with only a little DNA evidence and unclear images to go off of, he had very little to work with. In 2001, when he transferred to the LAPD’s new cold case unit, he carried with him the images of Paula’s final moments in his heart and mind and right up to the labs within the department.

It took a while for the case to gain some traction, but DNA evidence collected from Paula’s scene came back with a match for two other incidents. Mildred Beasley had been a forty-five-year-old homemaker on her way to see some friends in 1996 when she was assaulted and strangled. Her body had been left behind some bushes on the side of the freeway. 

The other match, however, came back from a far more recent case. In 2002, forty-seven-year-old Maria Martinez, who sold cigarettes outside a homeless shelter, was approached by a man. He asked her for a lighter for his crack pipe before dragging her to a deserted parking lot. There he assaulted her for over two hours. His victim managed to escape once but was caught, but when she escaped again, she managed to break away and get to the police. She led them right back to the homeless shelter, where the police found her assailant hiding fully clothed inside the showers.

His name was Chester Turner. Chester had been born in Arkansas in 1966, but he’d moved to Los Angeles with his mother when he was five after his parents’ divorce. Like many others around him, Chester Turner then fell through the cracks. He lived with his mother, going from her house, her father’s house and prison for petty crimes of theft and drug possession, until his mother left town for Utah. After that, Chester went from unreliable and unstable homes back to prison and onto homeless shelters or skid row. He’d once managed to find work at a Domino's Pizza, but by 2002, he mainly worked as a security guard for the homeless shelter he was currently hiding in.

When the police found him in the showers that day, he was now a burly, six-foot-two man with scars across his face. He pleaded guilty to the charges of rape, the first violent crime that would go on his already lengthy record and would be followed by many, many more.

It was his DNA that matched with the one found at Paula Vance’s scene and told the investigators that there could be more of Chester’s victims hiding within their system. They tested everything they could, dragging more results out of the already back-logged labs of the LAPD. Still on the case, Detective Cliff Shepard talked about the chilling year that followed, one that he later said seemed to get a new hit every month.

Chester was linked to the murders of ten women and an additional four that would come up as testing continued. Many of these women were assaulted and strangled during the initial weeks that Chester would be released from prison after serving his sentences for petty crimes, usually after he’d been released early.

His first set of victims came from 1987 and 1989. In 1987, motorists along Harbor Freeway spotted the body of twenty-one-year-old Diane Johnson on the side of the road. She was partially nude, had been assaulted and then strangled. After Diane was thirty-three-year-old Elandra Joyce Bunn. She’d been badly beaten, suffered lacerations to her face and neck and had bloody eyes. She was found partially nude on top of a pile of rubbish. Next was twenty-six-year-old Annette Ernest. She was also found partially nude and strangled, then dumped on the dirt shoulder of Grand Avenue. 

From there, there were no matches to Chester Turner’s DNA from 1988, but the killings began again in 1989. In January of that year, the body of thirty-one-year-old Anita Fishman Breier was discovered outside a garage off of Figueroa Street. She’d struggled with drug addictions and homelessness, making her an easy target for a man who by that point had become used to stalking the streets.

Later that year, the partially nude body of twenty-seven-year-old Regina Nadine Washington was discovered inside a garage of that very same Figueroa Street. Familiarly, she’d been assaulted and strangled, but Regina’s case came with some new chilling circumstances. 

Regina had been six months pregnant at the time of her murder. Her baby, later referred to as Baby Washington, had died in the womb, a direct result of the death of its mother. The authorities believed that Regina’s homicide was not one murder but two and added the death of Baby Washington to Chester Turner’s growing list of charges.

Another set of hits came back from 1992. Thirty-two-year-old Debra Williams was found strangled to death at the bottom of a stairwell to the boiler room of an elementary school in Vermont Vista. Shortly after that, forty-one-year-old Mary Edwards was found in a parking lot close to that very same school.

A few months later, again at Figueroa Street, the partially nude body of twenty-nine-year-old Andrea Tripplett was found outside her home, strangled to death. In another chilling twist of events, Andrea had been five and a half months pregnant at the time of her murder, but California law found her fetus to not be viable. The death of Andrea’s baby was not deemed a homicide or added to Chester’s charges.

Only a month later, twenty-five-year-old Desarae Ellemae Jones was found in the backyard of a vacant residence on Estrella Avenue. She’d also struggled with drug addictions, but was described by those close to her as “smart, outgoing and funny.” She’d worked at a home for the elderly.

1995 saw the final spree of assaults and killings. Thirty-one-year-old Natalie Joan Price had briefly left her friends’ house to look for a jacket she’d lost earlier that day. She never returned and was instead found near a vacant residence on Vermont Knolls after she’d been strangled to death.

The following year, forty-five-year-old Mildred Williams Beasley was killed after her husband dropped her off to visit friends. She left behind a teenage son.

In 1997 it was thirty-year-old Cynthia Annette Johnson was found strangled to death in Green Meadows and her murder was followed a year later by the woman who in many ways was the key to untangling this long chain of assault and brutal killings.

In 1998, thirty-eight-year-old Paula Donnell Vance was found behind a local business in Azusa. Almost unbelievably, a total of five security cameras caught portions of her final moments between them, but never a clear image of the man who’d killed her. One camera that managed to capture a lot of the assault in great detail would have clearly shown her killer’s face but cut away only moments before he came into frame.

Paula was in many ways Chester’s perfect victim. She suffered from mental illnesses and was homeless. She went from place to place, sleeping wherever she could find a place to lay her head and didn’t have anyone watching out for her.

Until Detective Cliff Shepard saw the footage of her murder.

After that, Chester temporarily got away with one more murder: the murder of thirty-nine-year-old Brenda Bries. She was found strangled to death in a portapotty only fifty yards away from the hotel that Chester was living in at the time. DNA evidence named Chester as the culprit, and he was taken to court for her murder.

He was still serving eight years in the Sierra Conservation Center for the rape of Maria Martinez when Chester Turner was charged with ten counts of murder. He pleaded not guilty and was taken to court while four more charges of murder came in. Chester now faced one trial of ten murders and an additional four, but he maintained his innocence.

His defense argued that Chester had known and been in contact with the victims because he sold them drugs. His DNA had been left on them and at the scenes because many of these women had offered to pay for their drugs with sexual favors instead of money.

The courts disagreed and found Chester guilty during his first trial. He was then sentenced to death for his crimes. He was found guilty again at the second trial, taking his official charges up to eleven counts of murder. He received another death sentence.

A lengthy and difficult journey of appeals began after that, coming all the way up to 2020, where the courts reviewed his sentences. His conviction for the murder of Baby Washington was overturned, but his sentence for the murder of his other fourteen victims was upheld. He currently sits on death row in San Quentin State Prison, awaiting his execution.