Just days after Daniel's murder, LAPD officers from the neighboring Hollenbeck Division found another dead transvestite hooker, this one also killed with a .25 caliber pistol. The Hollenbeck murder scene was just two miles from 12th and Compton.
Were the two killings connected? Could they be the work of a serial killer? Could the victims have been randomly selected?
The surprising second murder threw the Newton Division detectives a curve ball. If the new murder was the work of the same killer, backtracking Daniel's last 24 hours might be a waste of time.
Most murder victims are killed by someone they know, usually someone close to them. The purpose of developing a reverse timeline for the last day of a victim's life is to reveal clues about whatever conflict led to the victim being killed.
Stranger murders are different. They are harder to solve because there are no simmering conflicts to uncover. The killing is a random event carried out by someone with no apparent connection to the victim.
At the LAPD Crime Lab, forensic scientists with the Scientific Investigation Division worked as quickly as possible to try to figure out if the two killings were connected. Circumstances indicated a link that science needed to verify. SID's answer would be another surprise for the detectives.
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