Crime Writer Tracks Mystery Of His Mother's 1958 Murder

EL MONTE, Calif. - A cab brought 10-year-old Lee Ellroy to his rental house on Maple Avenue after he spent the weekend with his father. The yard was crawling with cops. The boy had watched "Dragnet." He knew the score.

His mother was dead.

And he wasn't sure he was sad.

Lee Ellroy forced himself to cry. But he also knew he'd be leaving Geneva Ellroy's care and all that entailed - her alcoholism, her mood swings, the occasional beating - to go and live with his accountant father.

That was 38 years ago. Lee Ellroy would grow up and become an alcoholic himself, as well as a drug abuser, a petty criminal and, eventually, the best-selling author of taut, dark, violent police novels under the name James Ellroy.

Over the years, Ellroy talked tough about his mother's strangulation in 1958. Like the rogue cops of "L.A. Confidential" and "The Big Nowhere," Ellroy would say his mother got "whacked" or refer to her death as "the Geneva snuff."

No more.

An author never afraid to shock, Ellroy is working on a project that might surprise his fans most of all: a book honoring his mother.

In writing "My Dark Places," due out next fall, Ellroy is at last coming to terms with Geneva Ellroy, her death and how his emotionally turbulent life was shaped by her.

But the book is just part of it. Ellroy wants to accomplish what police have failed to do for nearly four decades: Find the killer.

Ellroy recruited retired sheriff's homicide detective William Stoner. They are reviewing old files, re-interviewing witnesses and looking at the evidence, including the blue-and-white floral dress his mother wore the night she was killed at age 43.

"Time stood still," said Ellroy, 47, recalling the day he opened the evidence envelope in a sheriff's warehouse. "I remembered that dress."

The last year has been full of such moments, one confrontation after another with a past that has come alive in black-and-white crime-scene photographs and typed reports.

Ellroy is living out, in some ways, his "Black Dahlia" novel, a fictionalized account of Los Angeles' most-famous unsolved case, the slaying of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, whose body was cut in half and dumped in a vacant lot. Ellroy's book involved a detective obsessed with finding a beautiful woman's killer, a case, Ellroy said, that "haunted me."

Like the Dahlia murderer, Geneva Ellroy's killer probably will never be found - not alive anyway. Too many years have passed. Too many people have died or gotten too old to remember important details.

But the emotional journey is yielding more than Ellroy expected.

"I'm coming to the realization that I have been running from this woman for many years," Ellroy said recently at the El Monte restaurant where his mother was seen the night of her slaying. "I always had to prove that she didn't ruin me, or I could walk from it. But you don't walk from things like this."

The search for Geneva Ellroy's killer started last year when a friend asked Ellroy whether he wanted to see the police file on his mother.

After talking to his wife, who encouraged him to "confront my mother," Ellroy opened the accordion file that held case number Z-483-362.

There were witness statements, the homicide report, the autopsy report and photos of Geneva Ellroy, her half-nude body crumpled on the ground.

There are two composite sketches of a dark-haired suspect - Ellroy calls him Swarthy Man - and numerous booking photos of sex offenders and drunks from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Geneva Ellroy was not the stuff of 1950s TV moms. She was a divorcee raising a son alone. She hit Ellroy once when he said he'd rather live with his father. Ellroy remembers her drinking - she preferred Early Times bourbon - on her nights out in El Monte's second-class bars. She'd bring men home, Ellroy said frankly. She worked for an aviation company in Los Angeles. She had a hairdresser with a French name.

Otherwise, Ellroy didn't know much about his mother. "She was a secretive woman," he said.

And a loner. The rental house in El Monte didn't have a telephone. Ellroy didn't know whether his mother had close friends. A neighbor identified her body.

That summer Saturday night, Geneva Ellroy wore a lined jacket that matched her sleeveless dress, a string of imitation pearls and a ring with a large fake pearl.

El Monte, 15 miles east of Los Angeles, in those days was her kind of town. It was a pickup spot for smooth-talking guys looking for lonely women, Ellroy said. The main thoroughfare was lined with clubs where Las Vegas' falling stars performed on their way to oblivion.

At about 11 p.m., Geneva Ellroy entered one of those clubs, the Desert Inn, and had drinks with two people. One was Swarthy Man, who had been with her earlier at Stan's Drive-In, a nearby burger joint.

The other was a woman with a ponytail. Ellroy calls her the Blonde. She never came forward. She might have been a friend, maybe a co-worker of his mother's.

Geneva Ellroy and Swarthy Man left the Desert Inn together about midnight. They were back at Stan's about two hours later.

"The woman appeared to have been drunk and was very jovial," said a police report based on an interview with a car hop. But the man appeared "reserved and bored."

At 2:45 a.m., after Geneva Ellroy had a snack, they left.

Her body was found eight hours later by Little League coaches. It was lying beneath the oleanders alongside Kings Road, a lovers' lane.

She had been struck six times. The cause of death was asphyxiation. It appeared she might have been raped.

During a recent visit to the crime scene, where the oleanders have long since been chopped down, Ellroy and Stoner suggested the assailant raped Geneva Ellroy when she refused to have sex, then killed her in a panic.

They also suspect the killer murdered another woman in the same way around that time. That case, too, is unsolved.

The keys to the case, Ellroy and Stoner say, are the Blonde and Swarthy Man. Ellroy wants desperately to find them, especially the man. He set up a toll-free number for tips.

"I want to know who he is," Ellroy said. "I want to understand, if possible, the psychological forces that shaped him."

One lead went cold. A possible suspect, a dark-haired, high-cheekboned man, died in 1979.

Still, the author keeps looking. He set up a toll-free number for tips. Stoner will track down leads.

Ellroy, for now, is back home in Kansas City, writing. His outline is finished, save for the last eight chapters.

"It's one ending if we find him," Ellroy said, "and one if we don't.'

The national toll-free number for tips is 1-800-717-6517.