The San Francisco Police Department announced Thursday that they were pledging $200,000 for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of a serial killer who targeted gay men in the 1970s.
Police also added a sixth man to the list of suspected victims of ‘The Doodler’ as they doubled the reward from $100,000 in the 48e anniversary of the killer’s first known murder.
Police believe the Doodler was behind five brutal murders of gay white men on or near Ocean Beach between January 1974 and June 1975. press release.
Police now believe they have identified a sixth victim – Warren Andrews, who was found unconscious in Land’s End in April 1975. Andrews never regained consciousness and died weeks later, police said.
Authorities suspect the killer was also behind two separate non-fatal assaults on gay men in the Fox Plaza Apartments in July 1975. cartoonist.
The attacker allegedly told his victim that he was an art student and scribbled animals on a napkin while they were in the restaurant, leading to the name ‘Doodler’. A composite drawing was based on his attacker’s victim’s description, police said.
Several people later tipped off the police about a suspect, whom they interrogated in 1976.
“The same person who was questioned by police in 1976 will still be the focus of our investigation in 2022,” the PD said in a statement. “We believe there are other individuals who may have survived attacks by the same suspect or have information about this suspect and these attacks.”
The cold case has been reinvigorated in recent years following a San Francisco Chronicle series on last year’s unsolved murders. The newspaper and investigators had linked Andrews to the serial killer, even though he had been beaten with a rock and tree branch and not stabbed to death like the other five known victims.
Police have since found new evidence and are testing DNA evidence from the Andrews crime scene, the… Chronicle reported:.
“There are some cold cases where investigators think they can take some real steps in the investigation with a little help from the public, and this is one of them,” police spokesman Robert Rueca told the Chronicle of Thursday’s announcement.
