Ten years before the first discovery of AIDS, the gay community in San Francisco was confronted with another lethal menace, wrought in human form. Between January 1974 and September 1975, the faceless stalker was responsible for seventeen attacks, with fourteen deaths, that baffled homicide investigators in the city by the bay.

Initially, considering discrepancies in choice of victims , the police believed they had three manic killers on the prowl. Five of the victims were Tenderloin drag queens, mutilated by a slasher who apparently despised transvestites. Six others were selected from the sadomasochistic world of "leather bars" -- the dives with names like Ramrod, Fe-Be's, Folsom Poison -- and dispatched with hacking knife wounds. (One, attorney George Gilbert, was slaughtered at his home in San Francisco's poshest high-rise.) The last six were middle-class businessmen, stabbed by an assailant who picked them up in Castro Village bars, wooing his victims with cartoon portraits and pausing for sex before wielding his knife.

Three of the latter victims survived their ordeal, providing police with descriptions of the killer, although they would ultimately refuse to testify in court. The slasher's taste for comic art provided newsmen with a handle on the case, and so the "Black Doodler" was born.

In time, as leads were run down and eliminated, homicide investigators realized that they were searching for a single killer in their string of unsolved homicides. In 1976, suspicion focused on a particular suspect, described by police as a mental patient with a history of treatment for sex-related problems. Questioned repeatedly, the suspect spoke freely with police, but always stopped short of a confession . Meanwhile, the surviving victims stubbornly refused to make a positive I.D., afraid of ruining their lives by "coming out" with an admission of their homosexuality.

On July 8, 1977, frustrated authorities announced that an unnamed suspect had been linked with fourteen deaths and three assaults in San Francisco during 1974 and '75. Indictment was impossible, they said, without cooperation from survivors of the "Doodler's" attacks. At this writing, the case remains a stalemate, officially unsolved, with the suspect subject to continuing police surveillance.