She was found in the mud by children looking for discarded spray cans among the unfinished concrete pillars and dirt mounds of a Century Freeway construction site. An average of more than one prostitute a month is killed in the city, 69 all told in the four years from through , according to the Los Angeles Police Department. William Booth said.
There is just nothing that carries the risk with it, in peacetime, as streetwalking prostitution. Ready-made victims almost by definition, streetwalkers have become even more vulnerable since crack cocaine laid claim to the inner city. Crack has dramatically altered the streetwalking scene as women forsake caution and the protection of pimps to hustle for the next high, police and people who work with prostitutes say. At times they are so drug-dazed that they fail to recognize undercover vice officers who have repeatedly arrested them, much less the subtle danger signals of a potential killer.
Rather than taking their customers to the relative security of a motel room, they often drive down the block to park in the dark, down a dead end street or next to a vacant lot. When they turn up dead, dumped into an alley or parking lot, their lives on the streets offer few clues as to who ended them.
They arrive at the morgue as Jane Does, their past frequently an unreliable web of aliases, temporary addresses and false birth dates. Motels, liquor stores, storefront churches and auto salvage yards abound. I tried to tell her to slow down.
When she was finished, she would go home, eat a big meal and wait until midnight. Simpson would work the streets, get some cocaine, go back to her room, and when she needed more crack, return to the dimly lit street corners to smile at cruising men. In that part of Los Angeles, drug dealers are never far away. She lived, after all, in a world where 2-year-olds are slaughtered in their front yards in drive-by gang shootings, where the next customer may have AIDS acquired immune deficiency syndrome , where an argument can quickly flare into a brutal knifing.
