Fishing should have been better than it was on that early spring afternoon of April 19th, 1975, in Salem, Oregon. The fisherman decided to try one more spot in the slough near the Brown’s Island Sanitary Landfill south-east of the state capital. He moved to a stony bank beneath a wooden bridge and prepared to drop his line again, when his eye caught what appeared to be parts of a tailor’s dummy floating among the reeds in the shallows at the west side of the bridge. Some clothing was there, too, and a white towel.
When the man looked more closely at the dummy’s legs, however, he drew back in horror. He could see skeletal ball joints at the tops of the limbs undulating slowly in the water. Half aloud, he murmured: “Dummies don’t have no ball joints…” All thoughts of fishing gone now, the man ran to his car and headed for a telephone…
Many of the detectives who converged on the Brown’s Island site had worked on scores of homicides. But none of them had ever seen anything like the horrendous montage of human tissue that floated in the slough. Clearly, it had been a woman; two breasts bobbed near the surface. Her head, arms, legs, torso and unidentifiable pieces of flesh were there too – all dissected as neatly as if they had never been an intact human form. And, as if his desecration of the body by amputation were not enough, the unknown butcher had scored the limbs with a sharp instrument, laying the flesh open to the bone in wavering vertical cuts…