Murder & Worse

South Lake Tahoe, California, is the town at the centre of this episode. It sits at the southern end of Lake Tahoe on the California-Nevada border, in El Dorado County, at 6,237 feet above sea level, with zip code 96150 and area code 530. US 50 runs through it between Carson City, Nevada, and Sacramento. The population is 21,706, down 8% since 2000, spread over 16.9 square miles, only ten of which are land. The town is 53% male against a national average of 51% female, 44% of residents are married against a 50% average, and 58% are white, 32.33% Hispanic, 4.62% Asian, 1.3% black and 0.72% Native American. Only 29% are religious, against a 50% average, with 13% Catholic, 4% Mormon, 0.07% Jewish and 0.62% Muslim. The median home price is $380,000 against a national average of $185,000, 47.45% of homes are vacant, and the cost of living index is 139. Property crime is about 20% below the national average while violent crime is a little less than 20% above it.

James sketches the town's history. In 1944 Harvey's Wagon Wheel Saloon and Gambling Hall opened on the state line on the Nevada side of the lake, built by Harvey and Lou Eileen Gross; it is now Harvey's Lake Tahoe. Roads began to be ploughed all year round to bring gamblers in. The 1960 Winter Olympics at nearby Squaw Valley, in Placer County, turned the area into a worldwide ski destination. South Lake Tahoe was incorporated in 1965 by combining several rural unincorporated communities, and got a post office in 1967. On August 27, 1980, a 1,000-pound bomb planted by John Briggs, a Fresno landscaper $1 million in debt from gambling, exploded at Harvey's Wagon Wheel after the FBI accidentally detonated it, leaving a three-storey crater; Briggs had meant to extort $3 million from the casino. In 1991, 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted while walking home from the school bus stop in South Lake Tahoe and was found alive in Antioch, California, 18 years later.

details of the account remain covered until revealed He was born in 1957 and grew up in Brewerton, New York, in Onondaga County, in a comfortable family. His father was an electrical engineer at General Electric, his mother a part-time dental technician who volunteered at St. Agnes Church. He was highly intelligent, with an IQ over 140 and SAT scores of 1310, but socially awkward. He was obsessive as a child, played chess with teachers at recess, sold toys to classmates from a briefcase in third grade, and was forced to attend Catholic church by his mother, which he resented. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He took his savings to Las Vegas at 18 without knowing he had to be 21 to gamble. this part of the story is covered for now

In 1980 he moved to Las Vegas, worked at two casinos and became a professional card counter and gambler, writing two books on the subject. He became friends with the mathematician Michael Zarameda and with the card-counter hanger-on Alan Hacker, and he developed an interest in methods of killing women, discussing a booklet about them in a gun shop in 1982. He lived with Kelly Cluff, who later described him as sexually peculiar and said he shaved her pubic hair and told her she looked like a ten-year-old. On August 18, 1981, the body of 12-year-old Sheila Joe Keaser was found partially clothed in a wash in the desert east of Las Vegas; she had been raped and strangled and had bite marks. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it In 1985 he moved to South Lake Tahoe, and early in 1986 he moved into the Tahoe Verde trailer park using a childhood friend's name without permission. He lost $150,000 in a year and a half of gambling, and his parents lent him $300. A doctor, Mark Mills, later examined him and described how he had abandoned his betting system and persevered while delusional.

Early in 1987 his landlord noticed large deliveries of carpet, wood and plywood going into his trailer. In early May he began calling the blackjack dealer Candice Smith at three in the morning, claiming to be John Parrot of Parrot Communications in Atlanta and offering her work in a beer commercial, and mentioning her young daughter. She hung up. On May 14 he phoned the Barbizon modelling agency in Reno as Mark Bloomfield, saying he wanted teenage girls for an anti-drug commercial. The next day a man using the same name visited the agency with dyed black hair, a false moustache, horn-rimmed glasses and a business card reading John Parrot; the agency declined to provide models. Maybell 'Mabs' Martin, 69, who ran the Showcase Finishing and Modeling School, set up an audition for about a dozen girls. He chose three, including 14-year-old Alicia Toma and 12-year-old Monica Burge. On May 16, at 7:30 a.m., Mabs told her son she was going to Tahoe for the shoot and picked up her friend Dorothy 'Doddy' Walsh, 67. The four drove in Mabs's Chrysler Fifth Avenue to the Nugget Casino, where Bloomfield met them, got into the back seat with the girls and directed them to the Tahoe Verde trailer park. Inside his trailer he sent the girls to a back room with plywood walls and pictures of models and no mirror. They turned to face him, and the episode ends there.