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Victim #2: Joseph “Jae” Stevens Joseph “Jae’ Stevens. He was Catholic, had never married, and was apparently closeted. The chubby, balding Canadian immigrant had been stabbed sixteen times. In the middle of the night in late January, 1974, the body of 49-year-old factory worker Gerald Earl Cavanaugh was found lying face-up at the water’s edge on Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Victim #1: Gerald Cavanaugh Gerald Cavanaugh. Officials offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide evidence leading to the Doodler’s arrest and conviction. The therapist also allegedly said that his client was struggling with his own homosexual impulses and may have turned to murder as an attempt to exorcise his inner demons.
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They also say that they were searching for a therapist from the East Bay whose surname was “Priest” and who claimed that a young black male confessed to the murders during private therapy sessions in the mid-70s. Police asked for help identifying the caller’s voice. I thought I saw somebody lying there, but I didn’t want to get too close to him because you never know what could happen….I just wanted to let somebody know. I believe there might be a dead person on the beach. They also released an audio recording of an anonymous 911 call made in 1974 afer someone discovered the cadaver of the first victim, Gerald Cavanaugh: In February 2019, San Francisco police announced that an artist had released a new sketch based on what he might look like today: (San Francisco Police Department} Instead, based on witness testimony, they released the following artist’s rendering of the suspect in 1975: (San Francisco Police Department) Police have never released his sketches to the public, though. His moniker sounds so supremely silly and unthreatening, almost as if he was called “the Cuddler.” But he earned it after survivors described seeing him at bars and diners, sketching their portraits that he’d show them in an apparent attempt to flatter them before luring them away for a bout of gay sex, followed by an attempted violent stabbing murder. One was identified as a prominent San Francisco politician. The murders also happened during an era where homosexuality was still so largely stigmatized, three survivors of his attacks refused to testify against him for fear of being outed as gay.
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Although the mainstream press ignored the Doodler murders, San Francisco’s gay alternative press diligently covered the case until the murders stopped, leads dried up, and they switched their attention to the corpses that AIDs was leaving in its wake. The murders happened during a moment of flux in gay history, beginning only a year after the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder and ending about six years before the CDC classified San Francisco resident Ken Horne as the first confirmed HIV patient. He is suspected of leaving up to 16 total victims. But almost no one has heard of the Doodler-AKA the Black Doodler due to the fact that survivors described him as a skinny black male in his late teens or early twenties-who left five confirmed victims, all with a similar pattern of stab wounds and all of them gay white males, in San Francisco from 1974 to 1975. Nearly everyone has heard of the Zodiac Killer, who left five confirmed victims in the San Francisco area in the late 1960s but has never been captured. Police sketch of 'The Doodler' from 1975.