The Coast Fiend - San Diego/SoCal serial murders unsolved - 1930's

I really enjoy this site and writer if you couldn't tell. This story interested me bc of location and bc it is still unsolved.

"The Coast Fiend
Posted by Mark Gribben
Throughout the 1930s, long before the term “serial killer” was coined, the police and the press believed that a murderer was on the loose in the San Diego area slaying at will and leaving brutalized women in his wake. At least six particularly savage murders occurred between 1931 and 1938 until the spree ended as suddenly as it began.
While there was no doubt that the city was plagued with a series of unsolved, random, senseless crimes of violence against women, whether or not they were the acts of a single person is questionable. No one was ever convicted of the murders, nor were there any plausible claims of responsibility. Few clues were left behind and the victims appeared to have been chosen by chance. Although they were mostly young — the oldest was 67 and the youngest 10 — the women had little in common.
Three of the victims were strangled, while one was stabbed, another had her throat cut, and one was beaten to death. Despite the variance in the modus operandi, police considered the killings to be the work of one person.
The killings apparently started when 10-year-old Virginia Brooks was kidnapped while on her way to school on February 11, 1931. Her dismembered body was found almost a month later on a lonely mesa on the Camp Kearny military reservation 15 miles north of San Diego by a shepherd and his border collie.
Police had turned up few clues during their month-long hunt for the little girl, and the discovery of her body yielded few others. She had apparently been murdered by strangulation within a day of being kidnapped, according to the condition of her body. The shepherd, George Moses, walked the mesa daily while tending his flock and he told authorities that the burlap sack containing the girl’s remains had not been at the site the day before — meaning that the killer had not only strangled the girl, he kept her body with him until dismembering it with an ax and disposing of it — along with blood-soaked four-year-old newspapers — on March 9.
The only other clues present at the crime scene were automobile tire tracks that formed a circle around Virginia’s body, and her school books, which were contained in another sack next to her body. The tread marks were never linked to any vehicle, and the books yielded no unusual fingerprints.
There were also indications that Virginia put up a fight before she was killed. Human hairs, not her own, were clutched in her fingers.
On April 19, 1931, the nearly nude body of 17-year-old Louise Teuber was discovered hanging from a tree in a San Diego lovers’ lane near Black Mountain.
Louise was was known as a “modern” young woman, which in the oblique newspaper language of the 1930s could mean almost anything. Her father, a widower, insisted that his daughter, while “modern” was not amoral.
“I wanted Louise to be modern,” he said. ” I never questioned her goodness or her judgment. I trusted my girl to the utmost limit.”
Louise had been strangled before the killer stripped her of everything except her hose and black pumps, tied a double half-hitch knot around her neck and hoisted her up in a semi-seated position so that her legs were stretched out in front of her and her buttocks were only a few inches off an army surplus blanket (from Camp Kearny?) that covered the ground. The girl’s clothes were piled neatly beside her body, leading police to wonder if the scene had not begun as a consensual encounter.
The rope around her neck had been thrown over an oak tree limb 15 feet in the air and then tied to a nearby bush.
As with Virginia’s murder, there were few useful clues. Medical examiners did find skin scrapings under her fingernails.
Sadly, Louise’s last communication with her family was an argument resulting in her sending a note that she was running away that was delivered several hours after her body was found.
Other killings quickly followed.
On April 23, Dolly Bibbens’s body was discovered in her flat clad in blue pajamas, a towel tied around her neck. There was evidence of a death struggle that was so violent police at first did not know if Dolly had been strangled or had her throat cut. It turned out that the killer had slashed her throat.
Huge bruises remained on Dolly’s body testifying to the severity of the fight. Injuries on one hand showed that a ring had been viciously torn from one finger, but robbery was not the motive for her murder. Other jewelry was left untouched although it was in plain sight.
Ten days after Dolly’s slaying, 22-year-old Hazel Bradshaw, a telephone operator who was the sole means of support for her parents and seven siblings, was found dead in Balboa Park. She had been stabbed nine times.
This time, police were able to link one of Hazel’s coworkers to the crime. Moss E. Garrison told investigators that he had been out with Hazel before she was killed. In his apartment police found a necktie with blood on it. Another friend of Hazel’s told authorities that Garrison had threatened Hazel, and Garrison could not provide an alibi for the time that police believed Hazel was slain.
Garrison stood trial for Hazel’s murder, but with such flimsy evidence, he was acquitted.
Things quieted down in San Diego for a few years until August 18, 1934 when 16-year-old Celia Cota was found dead in her backyard. Shortly before dinner Celia had asked her mother if she could go for a walk and invited her younger sister to accompany her. The little girl declined and the Cota family never saw Celia alive again. When she was found near her home, the Mexican-American teen had been raped, mutilated, and strangled. Oddly, clutched in Celia’s hand when she was found was a tuft of gray rabbit fur.
The next killing linked to a killer now known nation-wide as “The Coast Fiend,” was the the rape-murder of Ruth Muir, 48, a social worker in La Jolla. She was assaulted and murdered as she sat beneath a full moon on the beach, police said.
“The slayer crept up on the soft sod, struck her, and dragged her from the bench into a ravine,” said La Jolla Police Captain Harry Kelly.
Ruth was bludgeoned with a slab of concrete. In her hand were several gray hairs.
In March 1938, San Diego police were confronted with yet another apparently motiveless slaying of a woman. Florilla Crolic, 67, was found beaten to death with a piano stool in her home at Sunset Beach. She was clad only in her underwear and stockings, and the house was in disarray. However, Florilla had not been sexually assaulted, nor had anything of value been stolen from her home.
With the death of Florilla Crolic, the Coast Fiend slayings apparently ended although no one knows why — or even if they were connected by anything other than the speculation of reporters."
http://malefactorsregister.com/wp/the-coast-fiend/

Do you think there is any possible connection to the Black Dahlia case?

I never heard about that case , interesting 
 The David Fincher news from the 22nd is he is making another serial killer series for Netflix   based on the mindhunter book could be great 

I love Fincher's work. I will have to keep an eye out for that.