Don't Bite the Hand That Feeds You But the most telling bit of evidence, the one to convince me that the problem was more than merely local, came a few days after I'd arrived in New York. One afternoon at lunchtime, I headed to the nearest diner I knew—a greasy spoon called Nanny's—for a quick bite. I sat down, ordered a hamburger, and began looking through the week's paper as I waited for it to arrive. As I flipped the pages, I spotted a headline that stopped me cold. BODY FOUND IN GREENWICH VILLAGE. I took a long look at the photo of a naked corpse, its body covered with wounds and gore. There was no blood—the corpse had been drained of its blood and organs. And, to make matters worse, someone had carved a pentagram on his chest. The murderer had made a point of draining the body of its blood, but why? To heighten the fear? To hide the true extent of the killer's rage? Whatever the reason, it had worked. The scene had been horrifying, and it had worked. The article went on to mention the name of the murderer: Leland Stanford White. With a jolt, I realized that it was Charles's father, Leland Stanford White, who had been my client in Los Angeles. And the body was Charles's. I began my investigation, digging up the story of Leland Stanford White and his connection to Charles Gittings. It didn't take long for the story to start coming out: Charles and Leland Stanford White had been very close. Leland Stanford had doted on the boy, encouraging him in his artistic interests, and had even written a song for him to be performed at school assemblies. But in March of 1929, things had changed. Stanford White—whose name was soon to be synonymous with that of the man to whom he'd introduced Charles—found himself staring at a corpse. The body was in his study, covered in blood. The police were called, and shortly thereafter, Charles Gittings and his father were named as suspects. Within months, Gittings had been arrested and tried. The story goes that the night before the murder, he had come to Stanford White in a drunken rage, wanting to kill him. But Stanford White begged him not to. He begged for his life. It wasn't until Gittings had been arrested that he had the opportunity to strike. But why didn't he just leave? The police never found a motive, but the answer may have been right there, in the pentagram on his chest. The pentagram was a symbol of the occult, a talisman, a symbol of evil, a sign of death. Maybe he thought by covering his victim in symbols of death he could turn it into a force for good. There were a few problems with this scenario. The main one was the fact that Charles didn't kill his father. This was not what I was being told in New York, and, if it wasn't what had happened, I was left wondering why the newspapers would lead me to believe that it had. Another problem was the identity of the victim: Charles's father. To understand the nature of the problem, you have to understand what I was told about the trial. As I studied the story of the trial, I started to get a more complete picture of the events. Charles had been working as an illustrator for William Randolph Hearst. He was twenty years old and not well off. His father, Leland Stanford White, was a wealthy man, and he was determined to give his son every advantage in life. After the murder, the police had suspected Charles and Leland Stanford White, but Leland White, a professor of architecture at Cornell University, was able to provide a suitable alibi for Charles. On that basis, the police let them go. They didn't really believe it was Charles. The murder wasn't the sort of thing that happened in New York. A year went by before Leland White was found dead, and the circumstances were eerily similar to those of Charles's first murder. An artist, Carl Wagner, was also involved. It was discovered that he had gone into Leland White's study with a knife and slit his throat. Carl Wagner was tried for the crime, but the details of the murder weren't enough to convict him, and he went free. What happened next is still a matter of dispute, but I'm convinced of this: Carl Wagner confessed to killing Leland Stanford White on the condition that the police not look any further into the deaths of Charles Gittings or Lulu Kine. After reading the article, I felt I had reached my breaking point. I had become obsessed. I had believed I was an orphan of two crimes, not four, and for many weeks after reading that article, I suffered, living in New York like a condemned man. I couldn't help but wonder if I would be next. Each day was like waiting for the other shoe to drop. If the other shoe hadn't dropped, then maybe the murderer had given up, or maybe he had decided to move to another city, or maybe he was lying in wait for the next unsuspecting victim. And the truth was that I didn't know enough to understand what was happening. I was caught in a labyrinth of my own making, an endless cycle of fear and ignorance and suspicion. Every time the phone rang, I held my breath, praying it was the doctor, to let me know if everything was all right. I felt I had no choice but to leave New York, go back to Los Angeles and find out the truth, and then come back and finish my life in New York, safe in the knowledge that I had done everything I could to protect myself from the forces that had tried to take me. But would that be enough? Or would the forces of evil find me even there? So what was I to do? A man had died, and I was convinced that it wasn't an accident. I couldn't prove it, and I couldn't prove it in New York. So instead, I did the only thing that seemed possible. I put in an order with the _New York Times_ , the _Los Angeles Times_ , the _Daily News_ , the _Daily Mirror_ , and the _Los Angeles Examiner_ , through an agency in the business of newspaper subscriptions. In the end, the agency ran out of time. The newspapers wouldn't be delivered for another four months. But I knew in my gut that the problem wasn't going away, and it was something I had to do. So I decided that I would go back to California and find out the truth of the matter. And that meant finding the man I had been forced to leave behind. It was a dangerous move, and one that could easily end up with me getting killed. But I had no choice. I had to do it. I flew back from New York to Los Angeles, but there was no sign of trouble. As soon as I arrived, I got in touch with an old friend who had a job on the police force. We agreed that he would keep an eye on my house, and I would get a job with an advertising agency so I could stay there while the investigation was going on. Then I went straight to see Charles's father. I let him know that I had come to Los Angeles to investigate the circumstances of his son's death and that I wanted to be the one to tell him what happened. I also warned him that I wouldn't be going back to New York after that and that I would need the use of his house for a while. He thought that was fine, as long as he knew why. So, after I paid him off, I moved into his house. Then I began to collect evidence. It was impossible for me to keep any one task for long. I went through Charles's things, but I had no idea what I was looking for. It was just a hunch, nothing more than a guess. So I started by following the trail that Lulu Kine had left behind. She was one of the reasons I had wanted to get close to Charles. He had told me that Lulu had come to him in the first place for help with her problem, but that he had no idea what she was talking about. If he didn't know, maybe no one else did either. So I contacted the police, and they gave me a lot of information about her life. She was single, and she was twenty years old. She had been living with the son of a hotel owner, and it was unclear why they split up. But Lulu was a prostitute, and most of the time she did it in Los Angeles, but once in a while she went to San Francisco. I suspected that Lulu could have been killed either by a customer or by someone who was paid to do it. Her body was found a month after I had come to Los Angeles. She had been shot in the head. The man who found her had been drinking, and he stumbled across her body lying in a ditch on the side of the road. By this time, I'd made up my mind that it must have been Charles who killed Lulu. If he'd wanted to, he could have done the deed in New York or somewhere else before going to Los Angeles. But there was no doubt that he had taken her on a trip up north. I had no idea what happened between them. I assumed he was helping her, but I still couldn't get my head around the idea of them having sex. I thought maybe that's why he had