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[Music] in the 1950s police searched all over california for a man who had committed a
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series of heinous crimes including murder all in the same night they checked literally thousands of
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leads but eventually the case went cold almost five decades later advances in computer technology and handwriting
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analysis prove the old adage that you can run but you can't hide [Music] [Music]
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mile and mile of sand warmed by the sun beach beauties everywhere in the 1950s life was much simpler
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it was the golden age of television with shows that reflected the innocence of the times
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beaver how can you lose money just by counting it every time i look at it well i think
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it's something i need and an automobile was more than just a way to get around
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[Music] now the backseat of a car was kind of like a what a motel is now to to the
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young people gave you a chance to kiss your girlfriend and you know be without any interruptions
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and that's what bob was doing on may 22 1957. [Music] he and his date and another couple were
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parked on a deserted stretch of road near el segundo california an area known as lovers lane
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the windows were steamy as they normally get when you're sitting with their girlfriend kissing for an hour
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or however long it is when bob opened the window for some air he discovered they weren't alone
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now you saw the gun is the only thing that came through the window that was my whole life in that millisecond
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the man a white male in his early twenties demanded their money and jewelry then he ordered the two couples
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to get out of the car and to remove their clothes he then tied their hands behind their
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backs and forced three of them into the backseat of the car [Music] then he sexually assaulted one of the
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girls he just we couldn't stop it he had the gun later he forced all four of them out
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into the field and lined them up in a row i thought for sure that he would kill the girl
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because she probably had seen him but i guess he was going to kill all of us and we stood out there stark naked
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for like three or four minutes then we just expected to hear the gun start going off
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but the man drove off in the team's car without firing a shot before the teenagers could report what
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happened their attacker went through a red light in front of two police officers
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the car had not been reported stolen at that time therefore it was not in the system so there was no way for those
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officers to have known that was a stolen vehicle or it had just been used in that crime
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the policeman signaled the car to pull over the driver got out of the car then started shooting
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[Music] both officers were shot three times the last thing officer throat did was
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that he drew his own firearm and fired six rounds in the direction of the fleeing
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suspect but by the time help arrived both officers were dead the stolen car was found a short time
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later just four blocks away there were two bullet holes through the back window and one through the trunk
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how does an officer who's been shot three times point blank in the back who's dying get up and shoot at a car
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fleeing down the road and hit it three times i mean that is amazing two of the bullets were recovered but
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the third couldn't be found was it possible that before he died officer phillips hit
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the assailant you'd look at these photographs and you'd say he had to have been hit
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in el segundo california two police officers were killed after stopping a car for running a red light
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twenty-five-year-old milton curtis had been on the force for only two months he left behind a wife and two children
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[Music] i was like what are they doing here and it was pretty much like he's sleeping why doesn't he come home
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and sleep and she says he's in heaven the other victim 29 year old richard phillips was also married with three
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children his daughter carolyn remembers the promise the police department made to
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her mother we vow to you that no matter where you are no matter how much time goes by
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we will find you if we ever solve this case police soon discovered that the murder
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suspect had been driving a car stolen from the teenagers they had been robbed and assaulted
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doerr described the assailant as a white male in his early twenties six feet tall 190 pounds with dark
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blonde hair and an unfamiliar accent he wasn't from this area and he was soft-spoken and he was
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slow not educated and he kind of had a draw howard speaks examined the stolen car
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for evidence when they called me that there had been two policemen shot and killed
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so i i knew the importance of the situation if there was any evidence that i could get i'd have to get it
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speaks was initially disappointed with what he found nothing on the rear view mirror i
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that's usually a good place if you're going to get a fingerprint if it's been moved to adjusting it you
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know for the driver but nothing on this on the rear view mirror at all but the steering wheel was a different
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story speaks found two partial prints on the steering wheel which appeared to be from
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a left thumb [Music] and by putting that area together the two sides of the thumb put together
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made the whole thumb print the likelihood of finding two partial fingerprints that are the same finger
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it's very remote and in my 18 years of doing latent print work we we have not done it
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since here investigators compared the left thumb print to every print in their files of
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known criminal offenders at the time those examinations were all done by hand it took hundreds of hours but they
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didn't find one that matched thousands of people were checked against that laden
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and like i say since so many people had been changed checked i began to wonder if it was ever gonna
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uh be identified the teenager said the assailant had a southern accent investigators thought he might be from
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one of the nearby military bases i spent the whole week just going up and down the coast fingerprinting army
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personnel but that too was a dead end i felt that at some point he would be caught
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but then over a period of time too it was like nothing was being solved nothing was coming up everything went
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cold on it it took another three years before police got their first real break a homeowner near the murder scene was
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doing some yard work when he came across part of a handgun he was clearing out his backyard
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and found the chamber to the handgun and thought well maybe it had something to do with the frame he found a year
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prior so he went in his garage looked at it put it together and found that it was a match
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police identified the gun as a nine shot harrington and richardson 22 caliber revolver
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from the serial number police discovered the gun was purchased by g d wilson from a sears store in
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shreveport louisiana at the time that they interviewed the the person who sold that gun he told him
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that he believed the man was from out of town and uh his accent didn't sound like louisiana
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accent it sounded more southern than that on the same day he bought the gun a george d wilson rented a room in the
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ymca just across the street from the sears door we actually went into the room where
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this george wilson had checked in and from this window of this uh room you could see the sears store
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um and it was just kind of for us it was kind of overwhelming being in there and seeing that and trying to
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figure out what was going on in this man's mind when he was there george wilson listed his home address in miami
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florida the address turned out to be a rock quarry there was nothing there for approximately four years
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they checked every person with that name in the united states all were dead ends
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it soon became clear that george wilson was not his real name for years police in california searched
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unsuccessfully for the man who robbed four teenagers stole their car then killed two police officers
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despite several promising leads investigators were never able to identify a suspect
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clues in that case that were taken from the time of the incident all through the
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70s 80s 90s clues to other people that may have been involved anybody arrested at a lover's
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lane with a gun anybody that fit the mo of this crime it was considered a clue i can't imagine i wouldn't have i
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i would not have wanted to deal with that investigation that would have been overwhelming
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then in september of 2002 nearly five decades later a woman called the el segundo police
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department with an almost unbelievable story she said that her uncle had once bragged
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about killing the two police officers back in the 1950s this call kind of rejuvenated everything
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with hope when police confronted the man he denied it his prints were compared to the killer's
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thumbprint left in the stolen car and did not match but this dead end piqued the interest of
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a new generation of fingerprint experts dale falcon and don keer decided to take
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a fresh look at the thumbprint lifted from the stolen car they now had computer technology
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not available in 1957 so they digitally enhanced the killer's thumb print which made the images easier to see than
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the original ink fingerprint sometimes there's areas that are not clear they could be smudged there could be
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artifacts in there that are not clear so the computer may count that or read that as a particular characteristic
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the digital copy of the killer's print was then loaded into iafis the fbi's
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computer database of fingerprints of all known criminal offenders from every state in the country
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47 million sets of fingerprints were compared and one seemed to match we stood hovering over his computer
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screen looking at all the ridge structure and the information there and everything coincided my words were oh my
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god i couldn't believe it i had to sit down and have them repeat it and make sure they
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weren't joking the print belonged to gerald mason who is now 70 years old living in columbia south
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carolina he had been arrested for burglary in 1956 a year before the murders officials in south carolina had only
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gotten around to submitting their fingerprints to the nationwide database just two months earlier
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mason was married had children and grandchildren he owned a number of gas stations and had not been arrested for
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any other crimes in the years since the murders now we've got a real suspect but we were
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still a little bit apprehensive okay it's a fingerprint it's an old fingerprint what else do we have
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one of the robbery victims bob door was brought in for a photographic lineup but couldn't identify mason as the man
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who stole the car so police needed to look further so they needed something more
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and what more was me the man who bought the murder weapon in 1956 and rented a room at a ymca in
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shreveport louisiana had printed his name on the register paul edholm a forensic document examiner
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was asked to compare gerald mason's handwriting to the signature of george wilson on the ymca register
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we look at things whether documents are freely and naturally written whether the slant is the same
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the height relationship of letters the alignment to the baseline how the letters themselves are formed and
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whether there's open loops closed loops retraces how you punctuate how you dot eyes and cross t's
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almost immediately ed holm noticed that some letters seemed to jump off the page
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first was the capital g because we had g and george and g and gerald and as far as the height relationship
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as far as the width of the letter as far as the slant the amount of strokes it took to form the letter each one of
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those was consistent and that was very important there were other similarities in the
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letter d and s o n and there was something more what i noted in mr mason's handwriting
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was from 1957 at that time he was 23 years old until 1999 his handwriting did not
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change one iota it was exactly the same ed holm was convinced that gerald mason signed the ymca register with the alias
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george d wilson nearly five decades after the crime mason was arrested and charged with murder
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when we introduced ourselves and told them we were homicide investigators he was a little bit irritated and it was
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almost like you're here for that that happened so long ago i can't believe
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you're here bothering me with that you know 45 46 years later based on the forensic evidence
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prosecutors believe gerald mason bought the gun in louisiana then checked into a
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ymca using the alias george d wilson mason was a drifter when he went to california in 1957.
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he may have been drinking near the hawthorne airport when he saw bob door's car parked in the lover's lane
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[Music] he robbed the teenagers committed a sexual assault then stole the car at gunpoint
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while fleeing the scene mason went through a traffic light and was stopped by two police officers
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the officers didn't know the car was stolen mason got out of the car so the officers
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wouldn't see the stolen goods on the back seat and when officer phillips turned away
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he fired three shots into his back then three more through the windshield killing officer curtis
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while speeding away officer phillips fired three shots with the world class precision
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one went through the trunk hitting mason in the back when gerald mason was arrested
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investigators asked him to remove his shirt sure enough he had a bullet wound on his back
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proof that officer phillips got him very last thing he did in life was to mark forever
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the man who killed him and his partner and that's pretty compelling because it's almost as if
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someone is speaking to you from the grave telling you ladies and gentlemen i told you who it is i pointed him out
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with my gunfire that was never reported as far as i know to the media i said why didn't you tell
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us because we didn't want anybody to know about it and we didn't want him to go and get
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plastic surgery or to you know whatever and it's amazing the gun was traced to shreveport
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louisiana the handwriting was gerald mason's as was the thumbprint on the steering wheel
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of the car [Music] i didn't realize i ran a red light and i got out of the car walked back to their
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car my feelings were that what i had done was going to cause me to go to death row so when the officer
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turned away from me i shot those officers to avoid a public trial gerald mason pleaded guilty to the
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murder of the two police officers and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison
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he only admitted the crime because it was in his best interest to do so so that his family his wife his
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grandchildren would not hear how he raped a teenager he traded the lives of two on duty
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police officers to avoid capture it's impossible to express to so many people that's our name to the homeland
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collected that night i do not understand why i did this it's contrary to one region
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it does not fit in my life it is not the person i know how to test these crimes what people would say
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about him being at 24 years old and committing these crimes and living a life crime free it doesn't matter he's a
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thief he's a rapist and he's a murderer he just got old that's all there is to it all the
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scientific this forensic evidence we're going to see a lot more cold cases being
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solved based on the advancements in technology [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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you