Chapter 14

Day 14 (21 October 2018) Notes for Taxi Driver Task Force initiated on 8 October 2018

(Detective Trish Cavanaugh Badge 3446 SFPD)

It was becoming increasingly clear to me that we had nonchalantly gone along calling this case “The Taxi Driver Serial Killer Case” without really knowing for certain that our killer was actually a Taxi Driver working in San Francisco.

I decided to do some basic analysis and tried to pin down the probabilities that the killer was a Taxi Driver because that would make our job a whole lot easier to bring to a successful conclusion.

My research down at the Hall of Records revealed that there were only six designated Taxi Cab Companies licensed to do business inside the city limits. Outside the city cabs were allowed to bring passengers into the city but not allowed to pick up any passenger inside the city limits unless it was an emergency or some other extenuating circumstance. In a way, that was beginning to lead me to the conclusion that our so-called “Taxi Driver” was actually one of the new generation “pick-up services like “UBER” or “LYFT” or some other similar copycat service with the internet as the clearing house and payments done through cyber payment or company contracts for designated employees. In fact, it could even be a counterfeit driver posing as a “pick-up” service contractor. In the late evening hours, single women were inclined to believe their “ride” had arrived and were more than willing to take the driver’s friendly chatter to be all they needed to jump in and give the address of their destination with little or no suspicion that they were being abducted and would soon be raped or sodomized and listed as another victim of the so-called “Taxi Driver” killer. It seemed to me that we were filling these empty young minds with a false sense of security that the suspected killer was an actual “Taxi Cab Company” employee when it was more likely he was one of the non-Taxi Cab “pick-up” service independent contractors. These young women were jumping into strange vehicles with no markings and thinking that they would be safer than in a registered “Yellow Cab” or some other licensed company with the careful regulation of the city transit authority.

When I first mentioned it to the lead FBI investigator, I was given a look that convinced me no degree of proof other than the killer in handcuffs would cause them to change their mind because it didn’t fit into their “profiler” mentality.

I reviewed the list of known victims and determined that the likelihood was that most of them would fall into that category of rider that would opt for the Uber or Lyft or Gypsy cab services rather than use a phone to arrange a pick-up the old fashioned way because it was too restraining to the new generation and was simply not the “in” thing to do in the current society of doing something new and untested rather than sticking with the traditional concepts of the much maligned past.

I wanted to pin down the actual number of companies involved, the number of drivers involved and to determine which of the companies would be most likely to be picking up a single female after midnight at locations often not well traveled in the after midnight hours.

I discovered that the regular Taxi Drivers were highly unlikely to pick up any passenger outside of a well-traveled and well-lit central gathering point like a bus station or a train station or some hotel or late-night hot spot with a line-up of cabs waiting for customers.

On the other hand, the pick-up services were prone to doing exactly that using cell-phone texting and Internet contacts to set up a pick-up to be paid by a third party or some sort of Pay-Pal like system. The Millennium crowd tended to prefer the Uber or Lyft systems because it seemed so cutting edge and they were distrustful of the conventional cabs that didn’t give them the proper respect because they hated the necessity of “tipping” for anything.

I slowly grew more certain that we should be looking for a non-taxi cab driver and that meant we were wasting valuable leads running down tips about Yellow Cab drivers that always turned out to be from trouble-making enemies.

I managed to weed the licensed taxi cab companies down to six and soon there would only be five and that five would shortly after be only four because two of them were merging and they would change the colors on the smaller one to match the larger company for uniformity. I will not refer to them by name because that might seem an invitation to some idiotic lawsuit, I will use simply numbers to identify them in the analysis. The true taxi cab companies will be numbered 1 thru 6 and the non-taxi-cab companies will be identified by their name like “uber” or “lyft” and the third listing will be for “other non-taxi cab drivers.