"Howard"

My parents told me many moons ago that I should never, ever pick up a hitchhiker. Hitchhikers were dangerous people who had only one reason for their lonely activity, and that was to find and attack young women drivers who were silly enough to stop and give them a ride. I never argued this point with my parents and unless I recognized the person by the side of the road that was thumbing for a ride, I never stopped to pick him up. Well, almost never. But I had my driver’s license the day I turned sixteen, and I had my own car before I ever turned sixteen, so the rule to never pick up a hitchhiker was broken on occasion in spite of my parental warnings.

I was given the keys to a 1962 bright red Corvair convertible. My Dad bought it for me when I was about fifteen and a half and the neighbor boy had to drive me to school in it until I turned old enough to drive it myself. Was I spoiled? Yup. But I also believe it was just one of my Dad’s fantasies; to have a red convertible. Being a family man and an executive it wasn’t likely he would have one for himself. Besides, my mother was never the red convertible type.

The red Corvair was the perfect vehicle for stuffing friends and surfboards in the back and heading to the coast. Gas was cheap back then; there were still Gas Wars and it could often be had for twenty cents a gallon and the roads were uncrowded. It was the perfect summertime escape and surfing was one of the best ways to spend a day. Sometimes, however, we left the surfboards at home and headed a bit further south than our usual haunts down to San Diego.

My parents never knew this. They would not have cared about my trekking to San Diego itself, they were pretty lenient with me in that aspect, but if they had known we drove to San Diego for the express purpose of meeting sailors or other male types– well - that might have been another story. It was not acceptable behavior for a sixteen-year-old girl to stop and pick up sailors or surfers along the highway, but we did it - my pals and I. If it was just myself and one other girl we would limit ourselves to two sailors or surfers in the car. If there were three of us it would be a trio of sailors or surfers, and so on, as many as would fit.

When I say, “pick up” I mean that in the most direct sense of the word. We picked them up and gave them rides to wherever they were headed. Typically that was either away from or back to their ships or up the coast to a better set of waves. It only amounted to flirting, conversation, and if we were lucky, lunch. Nothing awful ever happened. Then again it was 1963 and times were a lot different, but I suppose it was still not a terribly smart thing to do.

The dead girl lying on the morgue table had picked up a hitchhiker, although at that moment the detectives did not know what had really happened. She had been strangled and her body had been found in a small motel room along Highway 17 north of Phoenix and well inside the Yavapai County line.

She had no identification on her and in such cases it is common to run a photo of the victim in the local newspapers to try and locate next of kin. This is possible if the victim doesn’t appear dead, but in the case of this young woman it was very obvious she wasn’t living and it would have been a very shocking thing if her mother had picked up the Sunday paper and seen her daughter’s morgue photo on the front page with a caption that read: “Do you know this woman?”

So, Forensic Woman to the rescue.

The request of me was to make her “look alive”, just as they had instructed me to do with Baby Doe. It was much easier this time, however. The victims’ features were in tact, I could even tell her hazel eye color. The features were a bit distorted in her death rigor but my imagination had no trouble putting them back into their rightful proportions. The resulting sketch was of a rather attractive, blonde, twenty-something woman. I didn’t reproduce the severe bruising about her throat and face.

Meanwhile, detectives had done their own footwork and found a name in the motel register belonging to one Howard Smith. Neither Howard nor Smith were his real names but we’ll use them for the purpose of this story. The motel manager also remembered that Mr. Smith was a very young man and extremely tall. Six foot five at least. He had the license number of the car Mr. Smith had arrived in. With these clues, they put out a warrant for the arrest of Mr. Howard Smith; just about the time I was drawing a postmortem sketch of his victim for newspaper publication...