“That was a few years later,” Black said. “Up in Washington, they had Bundy killing college coeds, and down in California they had Ed Kemper doing the same thing. Monsters, both of them, but they were men. We’d never seen anything like this.”
I nodded. As every true-crime lover knows, the seventies were a banquet of particularly brutal serial killers. If you read enough true crime, you started to think that being a young woman back then was a pretty dangerous business. And it was amazing that anyone survived hitchhiking at all. “So what happened?” I asked.
“We gave the note to the press,” Black said. “We had to take the chance. It hadn’t worked with the Zodiac—they printed everything he told them to, but he kept killing anyway. But our hands were tied. There was a lot of arguing behind the scenes. Half the cops thought the note was a red herring and we were dealing with a man. The other half thought that the killer was probably a mistress of Armstrong’s, though we couldn’t find evidence of one. No one thought it was actually what it was.”
“Which was?”
“A true, bona fide female serial killer.” Black put his glass of water on the counter and stared at it, unseeing. “It’s difficult to explain how hard that was to process for us in 1977. It’s still hard now. We had no context, no idea what we were dealing with, no idea what to expect. None of us had the slightest bit of training or education in serial murder, let alone female serial murder. It was so unusual that we haven’t had another case like the Lady Killer in forty years. A woman driving around shooting people for fun. We live in a very different society than we did in 1977, but that part hasn’t changed.”
“And then Paul Veerhoever was killed,” I said.
Black nodded, seeming to remember I was there. “Veerhoever had two kids,” he said. “He’d served six years in the military before an honorable discharge. His wife had had three miscarriages, and he’d been by her side for all of them. The first bullet didn’t kill him—only hit him in the jaw. He was in unimaginable agony until the Lady Killer put a second bullet in his temple and left him by the side of the road.”
My mouth was dry. This was what they thought Beth had done. It was this murder that a witness had said he’d seen Beth drive away from.
Detective Black walked to the only chair, on the other side of the coffee table, and sat down. Outside, I could hear birds calling over the ocean. The boat rocked gently, and I felt like I was a little drunk. I couldn’t see how anyone could live here—too many ways for someone to break in, too many strangers walking by, no alarm system that I could see—but I had to assume he liked it. Cops, even former cops, could live in places I couldn’t and not worry about it.
“The first time I met Beth was at our first interview,” he said, though I hadn’t asked a question. “The day after Veerhoever was killed. We had a witness identification by then. I knew who Beth Greer was, though I’d never met her. I knew who her parents were. I knew she lived in Arlen Heights. It seemed unlikely that she was a killer, but, like I say, we had no idea what we were looking for. We didn’t know what a female Zodiac was supposed to look like. And Beth wasn’t like any woman any of us had met.”
“She was young and sexy and smart,” I said. “Rich. So that made her a murderer?”
Detective Black leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees. “Aside from the witness identification, think about this,” he said. “This killer, whoever they are, can get away scot-free. There’s no connection to the victim, no fingerprints, no hair or fiber evidence, no blood or DNA. No witnesses. This person has just literally gotten away with murder. And she decides to leave a note with her handwriting on it. Paper that could be traced, handwriting that could be analyzed, possibly even fingerprints. Who would do that? Someone with an ego. Someone who thinks she’s smarter than the cops. Someone who thinks she’ll never be caught.”
“Someone who wants to be caught,” I countered. “Deep down, even if she can’t admit it. She wants to be stopped.”