LA police make arrest 46 years after killing of officers

For almost half a century, John Booterbaugh never quite believed that the man who murdered two of his uniformed colleagues from the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department would be caught.

The suspect, who held up four teenagers at gunpoint, raped one of them and stole a car before shooting the police officers and making his getaway on a balmy summer night back in 1957, had long ago vanished, apparently without trace.

The only clue to his identity was a single fingerprint left on the dusty door of the stolen Ford, but without a match or a lucky break in the case the print was next to useless.

Over 46 years, the case became buried amid thousands of other unsolved crimes, and most people in the Sheriff's Department – those with memories long enough to remember, that is – assumed the culprit was dead.

Now, though, Officer Booterbaugh's long-harboured hopes of justice have been revived. Thanks to a computerised national database of fingerprints that recently went online, as well as the assiduous spadework of two much younger colleagues, the Los Angeles police believe they have finally tracked down their suspect.

Earlier this week, Los Angeles detectives, supported by US marshals and a team of local police officers and emergency-response experts, swooped on the modest three-bedroom house of a retired petrol station owner in Columbia, South Carolina. His name is Gerald Fiten Mason and, as far as the neighbourhood was concerned, he had lived an exemplary life as a businessman, husband and father to three children. What alerted police, though, was a conviction for burglary in South Carolina dating back to 1956, the year before the murders. The fingerprints taken from him at the time were a perfect match for the clue from the stolen Ford, police said. Having established that, they cross-checked the other details of his life at the time and concluded they had cracked the case.

"We knocked, and he came to the door," Ray Peavy, a Los Angeles police lieutenant, told reporters. "He was extremely surprised." So, too, did his wife, who listened to the allegations against Mr Mason as though the police were describing another man.

"She was very surprised and I believe very much a victim herself," Lt Peavy said. "She was devastated." This is the oldest crime on the Los Angeles police books to go unsolved, police say. For Officer Booterbaugh, who has long since retired from the force, this is a moment of quiet satisfaction. "I prayed for this day. I never thought I'd make it," he said. "We never forgot."

The murders of Officers Milton Curtis and Richard Phillips go back to an era when Dwight D Eisenhower was President, bobby-socks were all the rage and Los Angeles was only beginning to see the growth of its freeways, six-lane highways and endless sprawl of residential neighbourhoods.

The mini-city of El Segundo, where the murders took place, is now a busy, concrete district of chemical factories and car dealerships just south of the Los Angeles international airport, but at the time it was a wooded suburb where murder was almost unheard of.

The teenagers were parked in two separate cars at a popular lovers' lane when their assailant pounced. He flashed a gun, tied them up and ordered them to drive a short distance. There he raped one of the two girls, stole watches, jewellery and cash, forced his victims to undress and took off in one of their cars, a 1949 Ford.

About 90 minutes later, Officers Curtis and Phillips saw him run a red light and pulled him over. While Officer Phillips wrote out a ticket, his colleague radioed the police dispatcher to see if the car might be stolen. The assailant got out of the car, pulled out a .22 calibre handgun and shot both men at close range. After driving a few more blocks, he abandoned the Ford and escaped on foot.

The case triggered a nationwide manhunt, but suspect after suspect was ruled out and the case went nowhere. In 1960, the watches, jewellery and handgun turned up thanks to a Manhattan Beach resident who said he had found them in his garden.

Mr Mason, who is 69 today, is awaiting extradition to California. Authorities there have charged him with murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping.