The Doodler is an unidentified serial killerbelieved responsible for 14 slayings and three assaults of men in the gaycommunity of San Francisco, California between January 1974 and September 1975. To the extent the case has been written about, the Doodler has been credited with fourteen victims. One encounters this figure in the era’s press accounts and books of recent vintage. But it is far more likely there were, in fact, five or six. (The larger figure may be due to the frequency with which gay men were murdered in those years; it’s possible that several distinct cases were conflated and the Doodler given too much credit.) Five men were contemporaneously identified in the newspapers as Doodler victims, but the count shouldn’t be considered definitive. It’s a fool’s errand to say any single victim is definitely the work of the Doodler, or to rule out the possibility of others. As a veteran detective once said, “Anyone in my position who tells you otherwise, especially when there hasn’t even been an indictment, is either untrustworthy or lying.” Forty years after the fact, the story of the Doodler killings has not been even cursorily told. Unlike cases with similar body counts this one was quickly forgotten. It was, perhaps, somewhat a matter of timing. When the killings began, it had been just a year since the American Psychiatric Association Board of Trustees ceased classifying homosexuality as a disorder. Most media outlets, just maybe, did not consider gay men sufficiently sympathetic to rate coverage. And then, four and half years after the killings ended, San Francisco’s own Ken Horne, a ballet school dropout, was reported to the Centers for Disease Control with Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Five murdered men would become, relative to what followed, a statistical blip.
It is believed the Doodler would sketch his victims nude before murdering them. Though 3 victims survived, and a suspect was identified, none were willing to "out" themselves in open court in order to convict the suspect. This is one of the reasons gay men have been the focus of several serial killers, not only are they gay and needed to be secret about it, but often would the serial killer also be gay and quite uneasy about it and being secret about it. Easy prey when they have nowhere to go. Sad and scary, almost the same scinario with many prostitute serial killings.
