It was a routine traffic stop on a quiet summer night. Two El Segundo police officers had pulled over a man on Rosecrans Avenue, then a quiet, semirural road fringed with woods, fields and a vast Standard Oil refinery. The year was 1957.
Six shots rang out, mortally wounding the young officers, one of whom managed to gasp a dying request into his patrol car radio: “Send … ambulance.” The killer drove a few blocks in a stolen 1949 Ford, then slipped away on foot into the predawn darkness, never to be found.
At least, that was how it seemed until Wednesday, when authorities knocked on the door of a retired, 68-year-old businessman in Columbia, S.C., and arrested him on charges of murdering Officers Milton Curtis and Richard Phillips more than 45 years ago. He was also charged with robbing four teenagers at gunpoint and raping one of them on a lover’s lane a short time before the shootings.
The suspect, Gerald Fiten Mason, was described as a pillar of his community who had enjoyed a round of golf the day before his arrest and apparently had no idea of the net that was about to encircle him.
“He said he was very stunned,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Kevin Lowe, who was among the arresting officers. “We explained to his wife why we were there and what the charges were. She was also very shocked at what we had to say. She lived with this man for over 40 years and apparently never knew that part of him, that hidden past.”
At a news conference in El Segundo, Los Angeles District Atty. Steve Cooley expressed the satisfaction of law-enforcement officers at apparently cracking the case after so many years: “The message is, when it comes to killing a police officer, we don’t forgive. We don’t forget. We don’t give up.”
Manhunt fades into history
On the contrary, investigators had largely given up on the case after an intense but frustrating manhunt in the years immediately following the crime. Evidence was scanty; leads led nowhere; suspects were arrested and freed.
Detectives had one prize–a vivid fingerprint left on the dusty door of the Ford. But without a finger to match it with, the print was no more useful than the dust in which it was etched.
Then, in the last two years, two developments–one a fluke, the other a forensic leap forward–brought the creaky case back to life.
In September 2002, El Segundo police received a tip about a possible suspect. Police investigators, with help from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, checked out the tip, which turned out to be yet another dead end. But the old case piqued the interest of two sheriff’s detectives, Lowe and Dan McElderry.
The fateful connection
In February 2002, the sheriff’s department had become linked to a national FBI fingerprint database. McElderry and Lowe ran the old print. It had a match: Mason’s.
It turned out that Mason had been convicted in South Carolina in 1956 for burglary, according to Sheriff’s Capt. Frank Merriman. He had been routinely fingerprinted, and his prints eventually found their way into the FBI database.
With that link, it was relatively easy to track down Mason, a retired gas station owner living in an affluent subdivision of Columbia.
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Detectives began trailing him while they assembled their case.
On Tuesday, Merriman said, they watched Mason play golf–a regular pastime, according to neighbors. On Wednesday morning, they pounced.
The arrest was announced at a news conference outside El Segundo police headquarters, a few blocks from the scene of the murders, in front of a memorial wall that contains plaques naming the department’s fallen officers.
“This is the oldest homicide I am aware we have ever solved,” Merriman said. “And it’s especially important because it’s the murder of police officers.”
Mason was booked into jail in Columbia pending extradition proceedings.
Mason’s attorney, Chris Mills, said it was too early for him to discuss the case.
Curtis left behind a widow and two young children; Phillips, a widow and three children. Phillips’ son, who asked not to be identified, said Wednesday that he was shocked but grateful that the case apparently had been solved.
“This many years later, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that the guy got away with it,” he said.