San Francisco, 1974. The Summer of Love was long past. Many of the hippies who had stayed had shed their idealism but kept their drug habits, and the city they’d dreamed of remaking had drifted somewhere darker. SF had become the capital of the American porn industry; strip clubs and peep shows lined the streets. That spring, police caught the Zebra Killers, ending a months-long terror that had claimed 15 lives. 

But on the city’s western edge, another killer was at large. Now, a San Francisco Police Department inspector believes the so-called Doodler — who killed gay men on and near Ocean Beach — may be alive in the East Bay. As part of the cold case review, the SFPD is offering $250,000 for information leading to his identification.

The detective leading the case spoke to The Standard about the evidence, a person of interest, and why he believes an arrest is possible.

The first victim, Gerald Cavanaugh, was found in January 1974 on the beach near Ulloa Street. The killer had developed a playbook which he repeated time and again. He would walk into a gay bar in the Castro or Polk Gulch, pick out a man, and sketch his portrait. Then he’d saunter over with the drawing: Like my doodle? It worked. He told his targets he was a cartoonist, and once he had gained their trust he would suggest they move somewhere private — a beach, a park — where he would stab them in violent “rage killings.” 

The approach made him almost impossible to guard against: He wasn’t a stranger lurking in the dark but a man his victims had chosen to go with. The SFPD has connected six bodies to the killer, but some estimates put his death toll as high as 16.

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Victims who survived described their assailant as a handsome, svelte Black man in his early 20s. One survivor of 1975 attacks at the Fox Plaza apartments on Market Street identified his assailant, and police questioned the suspect.

“Once this person was made aware that they were a suspect in these murders, the murders stopped,” said Dan Cunningham, the leader of SFPD’s cold case unit.

That same man police questioned in 1975 remains a person of interest in the case. He’s now in his 70s and lives in the East Bay. Cunningham brought him in for questioning when he reopened the case in 2018 and ran into him on an unrelated assignment a few years later while stopping for coffee.

“He came out of his residence and looked at me, recognized me,” Cunningham said. The two men made eye contact but did not speak. That was the last time Cunningham saw him.

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Cunningham said the Fox Plaza attacks were never definitively connected to the Ocean Beach killings, although there are striking parallels. The Fox Plaza victim — who has always remained anonymous — said he met his attacker at the Truck Stop, an after-hours restaurant near Market and Noe. The man was young, slender, and sketching animals on paper napkins. The two got to talking, and eventually the victim invited the man back to his house.

There, the victim changed into a robe and sat on his bed, with his back to the bathroom door. His guest went into the bathroom for about 30 minutes and was behaving strangely, the victim said afterward. Suddenly, the man emerged from the bathroom and began stabbing the victim in the back with a steak knife so ferociously that the blade broke off in the victim’s flesh. He was able to turn around and push his attacker up against a wall; then his attacker fled. The victim went to the emergency room and never returned to the apartment, Cunningham said. Two weeks later, another man was attacked in the same apartment complex.

Cunningham thinks the attacker was the same man he interviewed, the one in the East Bay.

“I can tell you for sure, I feel pretty confident that he is one and the same person who  attacked two men at the Fox Plaza,” he said.

Not long afterward, an East Bay psychiatrist called the police and said he believed the Doodler was one of his patients, the San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time. But Cunningham has been unable to track down that psychiatrist or anybody who knew him. (Credit where it’s due: The Chronicle made a valiant effort with its seven-part series (opens in new tab) in 2021.)

Fifty years later, Cunningham and his team are still hunting for evidence that could lead to an arrest.