Vaughn Greenwood: The 'Skid Row Slasher'
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Vaughn Greenwood, the 'Skid Row Slasher', preyed on the most overlooked people in 1970s Los Angeles — homeless and transient men, killed and left in the city's poorest districts. He murdered eleven men across Southern California, with a decade-long gap in the middle of his crimes, and the ritualistic touches he left at the scenes gripped the city with fear. His case is also a stark example of how a flawed police profile and society's neglect of the homeless helped a killer operate. Out of respect for the victims, this account avoids graphic detail.
Behind the lurid headlines were real men — fathers, sons and brothers — whose lives were treated as disposable both before and after their deaths.
Key Facts at a Glance
Full name: Vaughn Greenwood
Born: 1944, Pennsylvania, USA
Known as: The Skid Row Slasher
Victims: 11 men in Southern California (late 1960s–1975)
Caught: 1975
Outcome: Convicted of 9 murders; sentenced to life imprisonment
A wandering life
Born in Pennsylvania in 1944, Greenwood left a foster home as a teenager and drifted across the country, riding the rails and working as a migrant labourer between Chicago and the West Coast. He lived on the margins himself, which gave him both knowledge of and access to the transient world in which he would hunt.
Two waves of murder
Greenwood's killing came in two distinct phases. In late 1964 he murdered two transient men in Los Angeles, before a conviction for a separate knife assault in Chicago sent him to prison for several years. After his release, he returned to California and, between December 1974 and early 1975, killed nine more men in the space of about two months — an intense spree that terrified the city's Skid Row.
Ritualistic scenes
What made the killings especially chilling were the ritualistic elements Greenwood left behind. Victims' throats were cut, and the scenes were marked with cups of blood and rings of salt around the bodies, with some shoes removed and pointed toward the corpses. The macabre staging fuelled lurid speculation about satanic or occult motives, though such theories were later disputed.
A flawed profile
The investigation was hampered by a profile that led police to search for a white man in his late twenties or thirties, possibly with a deformity. Greenwood was a Black man, and the mistaken description badly slowed the hunt. The episode became a cautionary example of how rigid, inaccurate profiling can obstruct an investigation and let a killer continue.
Capture and conviction
Greenwood's spree ended when he attacked a man in Hollywood who, with help, fought him off. Fleeing the scene, Greenwood dropped a letter addressed to himself, which led police to his residence, where they found a victim's belongings. He was convicted of nine murders in 1977 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in December 2020.
The Skid Row Slasher case is remembered for its horror, but its deeper lesson concerns the neglect of the homeless — people whose disappearances and deaths drew far too little urgency. Documentaries and journalism have since worked to restore the humanity of his victims, and it is those overlooked men, not the killer's grim theatrics, who deserve to be at the centre of the story.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people did Vaughn Greenwood kill?
He murdered eleven men, mostly homeless, in Southern California between 1964 and 1975.
Why is he called the 'Skid Row Slasher'?
Many of his victims were homeless men killed on or near Los Angeles's Skid Row, their throats slashed.
What happened to Vaughn Greenwood?
He was convicted of nine murders and sentenced to life imprisonment; he died in prison in 2020.
Justice and Legacy
Greenwood's victims — homeless and transient men in 1970s Los Angeles — were precisely the kind of people whose deaths often went uninvestigated, and a flawed early profile of the killer slowed the hunt still further. He was ultimately caught after an unrelated attack led police to evidence linking him to the Skid Row killings. In 1976 and 1977 he was tried and convicted of nine murders and sentenced to life imprisonment. His case drew belated attention to how the neglect of the homeless can leave a predator free to operate for years, and to the danger of investigative assumptions that narrow a search too soon.
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