“A couple of the places are the only spots where anyone could have stood for the bullet to hit as it did. “He showed us exactly where he stood when he says he shot,” Sheriff’s Capt. Thomas led officials on a tour of his crimes, matter-of-factly demonstrating where he had fired his rifle. “I feel perfectly normal, but maybe I’m not,” he said. He surprised deputies by confessing to the other shootings, too. How did Thomas know that his neighbor had been targeted? Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies called him in for questioning.įriends by fate: Akron-area survivors of 1992 USAir crash recall tragedy in New York April 15 in her Los Nietos home when a bullet crashed through a window, missing her by 3 feet. Joan Hiles, 22, was watching television about 10:30 p.m. His downfall came in 1952 when he picked a neighbor as his next target. He drank heavily in an attempt to forget what he had done, but when the whiskey wore off, he felt the urge to shoot again. “When I shoot at women, I get excited and get a thrill out of it,” Thomas said. 23 while gardening.Īudrey Murdock, 42, was shot on the right side Dec. Irma Megrdle, 40, was shot in the thigh Nov. Patricia Ellen Bryant, 10, suffered a gunshot wound to the arm Oct. Newspapers began to call the shooter the “Phantom Gunman” and “Phantom Sniper.” “It gave me a thrill, though, when I read in the paper I had killed her,” he said. Thomas insisted he didn’t mean to hurt her. I wanted to knock the cup out of her hand. “I stopped about 500 yards away and went into an alley with the rifle,” he said. Nina Marie Bice, 25, a mother of three, was dining at a chili dog stand about 10:30 p.m. One night when his wife and children were visiting her mother in San Gabriel, he said he felt at “loose ends.” It was Aug.
Thomas said he had “no rhyme or reason” for choosing victims. Lloyd Walter and fired a shot through a lighted window. The next night on the way to work, he parked across the street from the home of Mr. When he heard on the radio that a woman had been shot, he felt a mixture of fear and glee, he said. “I shot over her shoulder to scare her,” Thomas said. After walking home, she discovered she had been wounded. 27 about her sick child when she felt a sharp pain in her back. Lois May Kreutzer, 21, was calling a doctor Aug. He pulled over, grabbed his rifle and hid in an avocado grove. “Driving home, I saw a woman in an outside phone booth.” “Two months after I got the gun, I took the first shot after I got off work one morning,” Thomas recalled. He bought a used Winchester .22-caliber rifle for $11 in 1951 and kept it under the back seat of his car. He flunked out of airplane mechanics school, but learned to shoot guns.Īfter transferring to Camp Santa Anita in California, Thomas met his future wife, Hester, a USO volunteer, on Christmas Day 1943 when her San Gabriel family agreed to host a soldier for the holiday meal.Īround 1950, he accepted an overnight job as a switchman for the Los Angeles Railway. Thomas trained at Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi. He returned home to work on the farm and enlisted in the U.S. The lawlessness gave him a thrill, he later admitted.Īt 18, he served in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Idaho and Nevada. The first sign of trouble came at age 17 when he admitted setting grass fires in Stow. He left school after eighth grade and worked on the celery farm. Lab leak: Deadly explosion shook Firestone Research Center in 1962
Thomas didn’t have many friends and never went on dates. “When he was a little boy, he was always good,” his mother recalled. He had five or six operations on his left arm after being diagnosed with a bone infection. He contracted scarlet fever and then typhoid fever.
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