Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom - Hardcover

In the spring of 1962, the greater Phoenix area had not yet sprawled haphazardly across the high desert floor. To the northeast, where luxury resorts would later rise in Scottsdale, open reaches of barren sandy land rolled on for miles and miles. Yet the Scottsdale desert had its inhabitants, at least at night, when young people from all over Maricopa County would arrive to party, drink and build bonfires—or park in isolated lovers’ lanes. There might have been one thousand teenagers in the vicinity on any night. Sometimes one party would be romping just two hundred feet away from another. Little trails crisscrossed the desert, created by cars driving off-road, which they did for good reason. If you circled your cars and started drinking right on the edge of the desert, twenty-five feet from Scottsdale Road, the cops would catch you. So everyone drove deeper in, at least two hundred feet. Despite that act of caution, most of the kids would then go ahead and build a bonfire, only to wonder later how the cops managed to find them. By dawn, everyone would be gone, the desert abandoned to the heat of the day.

Out there, where the pavement gave way to sand, a school bus full of students drove by at 7:30 a.m. on May 24, 1962, a Thursday. The students, from the small town of Cave Creek, were on their way to Paradise Valley High, two miles north of Phoenix. They were laughing and talking until, looking east out at the desert, they saw a car parked some three hundred feet off Scottsdale Road, just north of Bell Road. Near the car, they saw two people—bodies?—lying on their backs. The students rushed to tell the bus driver, who at a stop sign called out to a state highway crew foreman, Joe Armos, asking him to notify the sheriff’s department. Armos instead flagged down two deputies on their way to target practice at the sheriff’s range. It had been their day off, but now Joe Duwel and Don Spezzano turned and drove into the desert. They reached the car—a 1959 Chevy Impala, white with a red stripe—at 7:54 a.m. It sat under a palo verde tree, some thirty-eight feet up one of the many desert trails. Beside it lay the body of a young man, his head facing the car, and, six feet south, the body of a young woman, on her back with her legs pointed toward his. Both were fully and neatly dressed, he in Levi’s and a short-sleeved striped shirt, she in yellow capri pants and a checked yellow blouse. Both still had their wallets, money and jewelry, with her purse untouched in the car, a man’s class ring on her left index finger. Both also had holes in their heads—her right temple, his left. They had each been shot twice. Deputy Duwel called his supervisor. Within twenty minutes, Sergeants Jerry Hill and Lester Jones arrived at the scene, summoned from their breakfast at Helsing’s Coffee Shop.

It did not take the sheriff’s detectives long to identify the victims. Tim McKillop and Joyce Sterrenberg, both twenty—he six foot four, 180 pounds, blond hair and blue eyes, she five foot nine, 125 pounds, brown hair, blue eyes—had been employed by Mountain States Telephone. They’d been engaged, with plans to marry. They had left Joyce’s home near 8:00 p.m. the previous evening, after celebrating her dad’s birthday over ice cream and cake, saying they were going to look at model homes in a new development. Their parents had wakened in the early morning to find Tim and Joyce’s beds made up and empty—they’d never come home. Tim’s father, Jim McKillop, had called the Sterrenberg home at 5:30 a.m. Cliff Sterrenberg had filed a missing person report and cruised the neighborhood. Back home, near 9:30 a.m., both he and McKillop heard the same news report on their kitchen radios: two bodies, a young couple, found shot to death in the desert north of Scottsdale. McKillop just knew it was Tim and Joyce. Sterrenberg braced himself and called the sheriff’s department.

At the murder scene, Sergeants Hill and Jones took notes, shot photos and collected evidence. They found four spent .45 reloaded gun casings (new bullets in old cartridges), one live shell, one mutilated slug, tire tracks, Joyce’s purse, Tim’s wallet, a handkerchief and a thatch of hair—the last recovered some sixty feet from the car. They noted that the front passenger door was locked, suggesting that both victims had gotten out on the driver’s side. Tire marks told them that another car had backed up and sped out to Scottsdale Road, the tires digging into the desert floor as a car does when it accelerates rapidly from a dead stop. According to Hill and Jones’s initial report, they marked, tagged and placed all items of evidence in envelopes labeled maricopa county sheriff’s office property.

Yet it can’t be said that the deputies ran a sophisticated operation. They didn’t identify the type of blood at the murder scene. They didn’t make casts of the tire tracks. They didn’t secure the site—on the morning of May 24, journalists and TV crews joined investigators in tromping around the area. Stranger still, the deputies didn’t lift fingerprints off the car out in the desert. Instead, they had the Chevy Impala towed to a sheriff’s department lot in downtown Phoenix, without monitoring the route taken or the departure and arrival times. Once there, the car sat in an open, unsecured area before being moved into a garage.

Shortly after noon, a sheriff’s fingerprint technician, Sergeant Jerry Jacka, arrived at the garage to start his process of photographing, dusting and lifting latent prints off the Impala. In all, he came up with fifteen latents, but most were either the victims’ or unintelligible. Two weeks later, he sent just one latent lift to the FBI’s fingerprint section; he’d taken it from the bottom of the left front door handle, thinking it the best possible for a match. When that yielded nothing, Jacka sent the FBI three more lifts, apparently the remaining intelligible ones, noting that “these latent impressions are the only physical evidence that we have at this time.” Again, nothing.

***

By then, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office was in a frenzy. The pressure had been on from the first day, when news of the murders claimed front-page banner headlines (“Authorities Sift Slender Clues in Savage Slaying of Young Pair”), supplanting news that astronaut Scott Carpenter had landed after three orbits of the earth in the Mercury-Atlas 7 rocket. On the second day, a renowned Arizona State University psychologist told reporters that the killer either knew and had been rejected by Joyce or was a sadist who would strike again. In an interview at his home, Jim McKillop sobbed and pounded his thigh with a fist. “What is there to say,” he asked, “when you learn your only son and the girl he was going to marry have been shot to death by a madman? Why oh why? Is there anyone in the world who had anything against either one of those kids? They were good kids who wanted to get married. Neither had ever hurt anyone.” McKillop seemed to be in a state of semishock as he rose to show the reporter bowling trophies he and Tim had won together in a church league. “My pal, my hunting and fishing partner, that fine boy gave me a lot of proud moments, the little fella I watched grow into a real man. We fished, we camped, we’d go everywhere together. It made me glad when I learned my boy had met a girl he wanted to marry. He had planned a big wedding for next April.”

Cliff Sterrenberg also spoke to a reporter: “You read about these things in the newspapers. You think it can’t happen to you. . . . They’d been going steady since they were introduced last October. They were buying things as they planned their wedding.” He recalled the last time he’d seen his daughter: She at the door, leaving to get gas in her car, saying, “We won’t be long.”

Sheriff L. C. Boies soon had seventeen investigators assigned full-time to the Scottsdale lovers’ lane murders, working twelve-hour days in five separate teams, helped by 110 other deputies ordered to funnel information to a coordinating captain. Officers spread through the Phoenix area, canvassing citizens and gun dealers, collecting and test-firing many dozens of .45-caliber pistols, focusing on people known to use hand-reloaded .45 shells. They questioned informers, visited pawnshops, talked with parolees and crackpots—anyone with an idea or a theory. Hundreds of telephone tips began flooding the department, the numbers rising along with the growing total of reward money contributed by businesses and community groups—$1,000 became $5,000, then $7,000, finally $10,000.

Theories abounded. The investigators variously thought the murders the work of a jealous suitor, a robber, a madman or an enraged driver. Some in the sheriff’s office believed the killer had certainly known his victims. But Sergeant Lester Jones suspected a gang of roving thrill seekers. “This was a spur of the moment slaying,” he told reporters. “It is the type committed by a bunch of punks driving around looking for trouble.” Sergeant Jones said he had a number of reasons to believe there was more than one person in the killer’s car, “but I’m not ready to release this evidence for publication. It could hurt our case.” Also: “There’s a possibility there are two or three teen-agers that witnessed the crime and are now reluctant to come forward with their accounts because they fear the gunman who fired the fatal shots.”

What “number of reasons” did Sergeant Jones have? What evidence that he was “not ready to release?” The Macumber file never yielded answers to these questions. Not a single sheriff’s report—at least not a single surviving report—addressed or documented this possibility. Whatever the deputies’ theories, the investigators appeared to still have no solid clues or leads when Joyce and Tim went to their graves together at a double funeral held on Monday afternoon, May 28, in the Memory Chapel of A. L. Moore and Sons Mortuary. Two gray caskets rested end to end in a dimly lit room, draped in flowers, with more than three hundred mourners attending—including a team of plainclothes detectives, watching for a possible killer among them.

“To those who love God all things can work together for good,” the Reverend Philip A. Gangsei reminded the mourners. “Blessings can come, and usually do, from trouble and difficulty.” He knew everyone was asking why this young couple had been so brutally murdered. The young pastor could only say, “We live in a world where men’s minds sometimes become twisted.”

In the ensuing weeks, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office continued to search frantically but vainly for clues and leads. Sheriff Cal Boies issued a public appeal for assistance, as did Cliff Sterrenberg. “We’ll continue to check out every lead including crank calls,” Captain Ralph Edmunson vowed. “We can’t pass up one because you never know when the right tip will come in. . . . Neither I nor all the men who have been working this have been able to get it off our minds. None of us will rest until it’s over. Someday we’ll get the guy.”

In time, though, every tip started feeling like a crank call. A local attorney thought a former client he’d represented years before in Montana on a grand theft charge might be the killer. A man reported that he’d been getting annoying phone calls from a stranger in the middle of the night, someone talking about “the deal out on Scottsdale and Bell Road.” A priest reported a boy who was “acting abnormal” and rambling on about the double slaying. Women at bars tried to turn in ex-lovers, ex-husbands and anyone who’d done them wrong. Others thought their next-door neighbors had been acting oddly. An alcoholic ex-con fingered his brother, with whom he’d been arguing all night. A woman jailed on a drunk driving charge loudly accused her husband, who when contacted by investigators said, “She sure must be mad at me.” Another wife, deep into a custody dispute with her estranged husband, insisted that he’d killed the couple in the lovers’ lane. A disturbed young man tried to confess so he could be committed to the Arizona State Hospital and get help. Jim McKillop even had some suspicions about Cliff Sterrenberg.

In issuing his fiscal year report at the end of June 1962, some five weeks after the Scottsdale murders, Sheriff Boies could claim a generally high crime-solution rate—they’d solved 59 percent of all felony cases, more than twice the national average. During that year, they’d arrested fifteen persons in connection with ten homicides. They’d solved nine of those murder cases—all but one: the double slaying of Timothy McKillop and Joyce Sterrenberg on May 24.

Then, amid all the crank calls and false leads, came another tip. On August 25, three months after the Scottsdale killings, an informant advised sheriff’s investigators that a seventeen-year-old girl confined at the Maricopa County Detention Ward had told a matron a story that seemed to place her at the scene of the murders.

The tip went to the chief investigators, Sergeants Jerry Hill and Lester Jones. They tried to interview the girl, Linda Primrose, who was temporarily in the detention center over a stolen car charge, her usual domicile being the Good Shepherd Home for Girls, where she’d been placed by her mother. But Primrose wouldn’t cooperate with Hill and Jones. Despite what she’d told the matron, she now resolutely denied any knowledge of the homicides.

Hill decided to try again with another deputy sheriff, Sergeant Tom Hakes. On September 9, Hakes visited Primrose at the Good Shepherd Home and found her much more cooperative. She told him her story: On the night of May 23, she’d been picked up near her home by a man named “Ernie Salazar,” a girl known as “Terry” or “Theresa,” and two other men. They were all drinking and smoking pot, and she was skin-popping, too. While driving north on Scottsdale Road, they spotted the Sterrenberg Impala at a gas station. They followed the Impala up Scottsdale, being on their way to pick up a “stash” out in the desert. About a half mile north of Bell Road, the Impala turned onto a dirt road. Ernie drove his car past the dirt road for a tenth of a mile, then made a U-turn and came back. He pulled his car almost parallel with the Impala and stopped. He got out of his car and walked over to the Impala, where he started talking to the couple inside. Primrose heard Ernie shout some profanities, then saw him return to his car and get something from under the driver’s seat. Everyone was outside of their cars by now. Primrose heard a shot, turned, and saw the young man lying on the ground. She saw Ernie shoot the young woman—once, then again while she was lying on the ground. The girl named Terry or Theresa began to scream and yank at her own hair in a fit of sorts. Primrose pushed Terry back into Ernie’s car, and they quickly drove off.

Six days later, Sergeant Hakes met Primrose again, along with two other deputies. During a two-hour interrogation, Primrose once more told of being at the scene of the murders and seeing “Ernie” kill Tim and Joyce. This time, the deputies took shorthand notes and transcribed her statement. Primrose offered a revised version: Now they’d initially come across the Impala in the desert, while looking for their “stash,” rather than at a gas station. Otherwise the details remained much the same, though Primrose at moments appeared somewhat confused. The interrogators kept asking this teenage addict to be precise, and she kept telling them she couldn’t remember and didn’t care: I didn’t notice. . . . Like I said, I was high. No, I can’t think of her name because I don’t give a damn about her name.

Yet she did remember the victims’ car: a white Impala with a stripe. And she remembered the murders: We couldn’t pick up our stash because those people we...