Reward grows for tips on Doodler killer
New sketch of man who terrorized gay community in ’70s
For the second time in a year, the San Francisco Police Department is ratcheting up the reward — this time to $250,000 — for tips leading to the arrest and conviction of the notorious Doodler serial killer who cut a murderous swath through the city’s gay community in the 1970s.
The department is also releasing a new, updated version of sketches done in 1975 and 2019 of a man suspected of being the Doodler. It’s in color, unlike the earlier drawings, and it shows the suspect as he might appear now, a man in his late 60s or early 70s with a bald head.
Police announced the heightened rewards and new sketch Tuesday, nearly 49 years to the day after 50-year-old Gerald Cavanagh became the Doodler’s first victim. Cavanagh, a mattress factory worker, was stabbed 17 times in what investigators called a “rage killing,” his body left sprawled on Ocean Beach on Jan. 27, 1974.
Lead investigator Dan Cunningham said he is working on some promising leads, and believes that if he can get some solid tips that fill in gaps he might nail down the case. The new $250,000 figure is the maximum amount the department authorizes for rewards.
One tip Cunningham hopes to get is a call from whoever phoned the Police Department twice in 1975, after the first drawing came out, and gave the name and license plate of a man she thought matched the sketch and description of the Doodler. She called anonymously, so her name is not in police records.
Meanwhile, “we have some new potential evidence to test, and there is still some documentation we’re working on getting that could turn the person of interest in this case to a suspect,” Cunningham said.
“In a perfect world we would have it all done by the end of the hour, but it’s not like that. It’s not like a TV show. We have to deal with red tape, families, different agencies, people go on vacation, and more. It’s a process. Especially in a cold case.”
The department is also chasing down tips that the Doodler may have taken his murderous ways to the Southern United States when — as investigators suspect — the killer went on a road trip in the late 1970s.
The Doodler terrorized San Francisco’s gay community in 1974 and 1975 by picking up his victims at gay bars, then stabbing them to death in parks or on the beach so savagely that investigators concluded he was driven by fury of some kind. Legendary detectives Rotea Gilford and Earl Sanders concluded at the time that the killer would snare a victim by sketching him in a bar, approaching him with the doodle — thus the name — and flattering him into peeling away for sex.
That’s when the knives came out. Sanders and Gilford identified five victims back then, and a sixth was added to the count in 2021 after investigators and Chronicle reporters found similarities to the other slayings.
The Doodler got sloppy in 1975 and let three victims slip away, and one of them — known only as “The Diplomat” — helped police generate the first sketch of the suspect, a closely detailed rendering showing a young Black man in a knit cap with smooth features. Releasing the sketch generated calls from the anonymous woman Cunningham would like to hear from again — and then a call from a East Bay psychiatrist who said he’d treated a man he believed to be the Doodler.
Sanders and Gilford interviewed that man, but couldn’t solidify a case against him. This was back before DNA was used, and the Doodler had been careful not to leave traceable clues at his murder scenes. Also,
with sodomy laws still on the books in the mid-1970s and anti-LGBTQ bigotry rampant, some witnesses were hesitant to come forward.
The man the doctor fingered became known only as “a person of interest.” Cunningham interviewed the same man, who is alive in the East Bay, and still considers him “a focus of the investigation.”
The psychiatrist was apparently limited in his involvement by medical ethics, and his full name and contact information were not retained in police records. In 2021, The Chronicle located a man believed to be the psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Preece, but he had died in 2005.
Cunningham revived the cold-case Doodler investigation in 2017. Two years later, the department released an age-enhanced version of the 1975 sketch along with the offer of a $100,000 reward. Last Jan. 27, on the anniversary of Cavanagh’s death, the department doubled the reward to $200,000 and added the sixth victim — 52-year-old lawyer Warren Andrews.
The Doodler remained littleknown from the 1970s until the spring of 2021 when The Chronicle ran an eight-part podcast and seven-part story series examining the mystery, attracting international attention and dozens of encouraging tips.
Cunningham has been sending new evidence tied to several of the murder scenes for DNA testing, chasing down documentation that could flesh out details of witness accounts, and contacting other police agencies for potential connections for nearly five years now. Meanwhile, for many relatives of the Doodler victims, the horror from that age of bigotry and fear so long ago is never far away.
“In my mind it’s still very vivid,” said Melissa Stevens Honrath, whose 27-year-old brother Jae Stevens became the Doodler’s second victim on June 25, 1974. Stevens was a drag-queen star, Honrath was in a trio act with him — and they were poised for a national tour when he was so savagely beaten and stabbed that his family was barely able to recognize his corpse after it turned up at Spreckels Lake.
Then three months after Stevens’ death, Honrath’s sister Alma Teresa Stevens dismembered their mother, burned her in the family home’s Concord fireplace and attacked Honrath with a sledgehammer — all because she thought evil spirits had emerged from Stevens’ murder. Alma Stevens was institutionalized, and Honrath recovered and had a successful career as a nurse. But time has not erased her hunger for justice in her brother’s death.
“That whole year 1974 is right up front for me,” Honrath said. “That Dahmer show (“Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” which just won a Golden Globe) brings back memories of what my sister did. You cannot glorify things like that. That kind of pain never really goes away.
“If they think a bigger reward could help catch the Doodler, then that’s great,” she said. “I would very much like to have the case solved.”