Adolph Laudenberg

Adolph Laudenberg was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1926, to a German immigrant butcher and his wife, who died a few years after his birth. At some point, he took up whittling unique walking canes, made from salvaged wood and manzanita shrubs, which he would either give away or sell for $10 on the street.[1] While serving in the naval construction battalion in Trinidad, British West Indies in 1944, Laudenberg met his future wife, Annelle. He adopted her son, Steve, and the couple then moved to California permanently, after Adolph left the service. He then got a job as a security guard at a steel plant, before turning towards being a cab driver in the San Pedro area in the late 1960s.[1]

According to neighbors, the Laudenbergs were an odd fit - Annelle worked at a dance studio, was outgoing and health conscious, while Adolph was a generous, but reclusive man who mostly kept to himself. Despite their differences, their marriage lasted 30 years before the couple separated, as Annelle, who didn't return her husband's feelings of love, outed herself as a stripper. Adolph remarried, but divorced again. At some point, he travelled for a short time to New Orleans, before returning to San Pedro.[1]

Using his job as a cabby, Laudenberg's modus operandi consisted of picking up lonely, alcoholic or ill women who reminded him of his ex-wife, whom he would then bind, rape and strangle, either in Los Angeles or San Francisco. He was questioned by police during the initial investigations, but denied everything, and since the perpetrator left barely any clues behind, he was let off.[1]

In 1975, Laudenberg confessed to his future daughter-in-law that he had killed four women, three in San Pedro and one in San Francisco, which he called his 'four sins'. The woman believed his story and told the authorities, and despite their efforts, they couldn't prove the veracity of the claims. In 2002, however, he did the same to his son's ex-wife Darlene, explaining what he did in far greater detail.[3] She notified the San Luis Obispo police, who, now armed with advances in DNA, began re-examining the cold cases. Since Laudenberg had no criminal record, they had to find a way to obtain his DNA through other means.[1]

An undercover officer invited Adolph over some coffee in a Torrance restaurant, to which the latter agreed. After discussing various topics, and almost getting caught in the act, Laudenberg walked away without throwing out his coffee cup. The other officer then swept in and got the cup, from which DNA samples were extracted and sent for testing - they matched seminal fluid found on Lois Petrie's corpse.[2] Armed with this evidence, authorities tracked down Laudenberg's camper van and arrested him, holding him on a $1,000,000 bail. He was charged with Petrie's murder, but denied her and the others' murders.[4] Nonetheless, he was found guilty of the Petrie killing, and sentenced to life imprisonment.[5]

The circumstances surrounding how the officers obtained the DNA sample raised some privacy issues, with the policemen arguing that discarded items were considered public property and therefore, no legal permission was required to get a sample.[5] The appellate court upheld the conviction, rejecting Laudenberg's argument that the expectation was that a restaurant employee should've thrown the cup out.[2]

• List of serial killers in the United States

• Dateline NBC article with interviews from both daughters-in-law