New clues emerge in a cold-case killing possibly linked to Manson family murders
Los Angeles police are seeking two men in
connection with the slaying of a 19-year-old Canadian woman who was stabbed to
death in 1969, just a few miles from the most infamous of the Manson family
killings.
Sketches of the men were released
Friday by the Los Angeles Police Department and are based on new information
collected from a witness in Montreal.
The drawings show how the men
might have looked in 1969, when the body of the then-unidentified woman —
stabbed 150 times in the upper torso and neck — was discovered by a child on
Mulholland Drive, not far from the Benedict Canyon home where actress Sharon
Tate and four others had been stabbed to death a few months earlier, in August
1969.
The Canadian woman’s slaying has
long been suspected of being tied to the Manson family murders, but as of April
of this year, police still had no concrete evidence linking the killings.
Detectives began reinvestigating
the killing in 2003, after a retired
LAPD cold-case investigator turned up a DNA sample, said LAPD Det. Luis
Rivera. That sample, along with photographs of the victim, led investigators to
her sister, and eventually, a positive ID was made.
Little was known about the young
woman, Reet Jurvetson, after she traveled to Los Angeles in 1969. She came to
meet a friend named “John or Jean,” Rivera said. She initially kept in sporadic
touch with her family. As time passed without contact, her relatives became
concerned, but they never filed a missing person’s report, he said.
Her sister, Anne, the only
remaining relative in Jurvetson’s immediate family, recently created a website
to help solve her sister’s killing. She posted photos of Reet as a teenager:
celebrating her church confirmation, lounging on a sofa, smiling in a family
portrait.
She describes the young woman as
adventurous but naive, part of an Estonian refugee family who fled to Canada
during World War II.
“Attempts were made to reach her,
but they proved fruitless,” she wrote. “Initially, we believed that Reet was
probably in search of more autonomy, and therefore we waited for her to get in
touch with us.”
As years passed, Anne said, the
family imagined her sister had made a new life for herself. No one suspected
the young woman had been killed, she said.
When Anne found out about her
sister’s slaying, it was “devastating,” she wrote.
The witness in Montreal provided
new details in July about the friend named John or Jean.
The witness remembers meeting
Reet Jurvetson and the man at a cafe in Montreal, police said. The witness also
provided information on an associate, a shorter man with a Beatles-type haircut
who might also have been named Jean.
Authorities said Friday that Anne
Jurvetson had recently found a postcard
sent by her sister about two weeks before she was killed.
Dated Oct. 31, 1969, it read:
“Dear Mother and Father, The
weather is nice and the people are kind. I have a nice little apartment. I go
frequently to the beach. Please write to me. Hugs, Reet.”
The postcard was sent from an
apartment in Hollywood. The building, on Melrose Avenue, used to be the
Paramount Hotel, but it was demolished
in 1989 and replaced with a new structure.
Detectives initially suspected
the Manson family of Jurvetson’s killing
because their other victims had been stabbed to death, Rivera said, and
Jurvetson’s death occurred about the time of the cult killings.
Manson prosecutor Vincent
Bugliosi said in his 1974 book “Helter Skelter” that he believed Jane Doe No.
59 — as Jurvetson was then known — was killed because she had witnessed another
suspected Manson family slaying, the death of John Phillip Haught.
Investigators initially believed
Haught died playing Russian roulette in Venice in November 1969. But Simon
Wells, author of the Manson biography “Coming Down Fast,” found out that Manson
family members were present when Haught died.
Manson and his followers
eventually were convicted of killing nine people during a bloody rampage in the
Los Angeles area in August 1969. Prosecutors said Manson and his followers were
trying to incite a race war that he believed was prophesied in the Beatles song
“Helter Skelter.”
Last year, LAPD investigators
interviewed Manson at Corcoran State Prison, where he is incarcerated, but
Manson did not provide any additional information, according to Capt. Billy
Hayes, commander of the Robbery Homicide Division.
“Talking to Charlie is like
talking to a wall,” Hayes said.
Prosecutors and Manson scholars
have always believed the group was responsible for slayings beyond the nine for
which they were convicted.
Manson is eligible for parole in
2027. Most of his followers remain jailed or have died.