Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods

Helen Golay and Olga Rutterschmidt: Black Widows

Hit and Run

LOS ANGELES, Calif. (Crime Library) On June 22, 2005, a car crept through an alley off Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles. The time was shortly after midnight on a Wednesday. Not a lot of people would be out.

Kenneth McDavid
Kenneth McDavid

The driver slowed to a stop. Then someone got out and pulled an inebriated Kenneth McDavid, 50, from the car and laid him in the alley. With a blood alcohol count of .08 percent combined with the influence of a few prescription painkillers and sleeping pills, McDavid wasn't in any condition to be walking.

The car backed up, and then the driver slowly ran over McDavid, as if to inflict the greatest possible injury. In fact, the car was going so slow that the McDavid's glasses remained on his head, splattered with grease. An autopsy report would later reveal that he had a "flattened chest" with three broken ribs, a fractured spine, and abrasions consistent with being dragged several feet. A tire imprint was left on his jeans.

Los Angeles Police Department badge
Los Angeles Police Department badge

McDavid was listed on the coroner's report as "transient." No witnesses were located, so the case became just another tragic hit and run. The investigating officer from Los Angeles Police Department's Traffic Division had little to go on and the case languished for about seven months. Until, one morning, he was in the squad room and mentioned to another officer how unusual it was to have two women ask for the police report on a transient hit-and-run who weren't even related to the victim.

Another investigator overheard the conversation and interjected, "I had a case like that six years ago."

 

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