What pushed John A. Getreu's to murder?

With Getreu now tied to two slayings, in 1973 and 1974, California authorities are reconstructing his backstory. Getreu, 74, attracted no police attention between 1975 and 2018. But there’s a good chance he might’ve committed crimes between those years, says Rick Jackson, a retired Los Angeles Police Department homicide detective who now serves as a cold case investigator with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office.

“It’s hard to rein in that impulse if you’re enjoying what you’re doing,” says Jackson, whose work helped lead to charges filed this month against Getreu in one of the ‘70s murders. “And he enjoyed what he was doing.”

But why did he enjoy what he was doing? Jackson says police don’t yet know. That’s why they’re looking beyond California and the ‘70s cases.

They’re even going back toward 1963, when Getreu murdered the 15-year-old of a U.S. Army chaplain an American military base in Germany. As told in this space days ago, that victim was the sister of the current pastor of a church in Sunnyland. Investigators are looking at that case and the ‘70s slayings to seek a common motive, as a way to perhaps find similarities with other unsolved homicides.

“I don’t know what drove him to kill,” Jackson says.

But a woman in California says she might.

Last week, while reading the Journal Star story on Getreu online, Sharon Lucchese of Simi Valley spotted Getreu’s police mug shot and stared into a familiar pair of eyes.

“I was looking for 50 years for that face,” she says, her voice sounding spooked.

Though the face looks a bit different after the passage of decades, the eyes look the same as those that bespoke death one harrowing night long ago: when she was about 19, she spent hours in the grip of a man with hands around her throat.

She remembers those eyes — the last eyes she thought she might see in this world. And she believes those eyes to be Getreu’s.

Police hope her information can help them understand Getreu’s impulses and motives — and maybe unlock more cold cases. Sharing that hope is Evan Williams, the Sunnyland Christian Church pastor whose sister was killed by Getreu in ‘63.

“I would not be surprised if the list expands exponentially of people who were terrorized and raped and survived, and of more rape-murder victims in California and perhaps in other states as well," he says.

Killer's history



California detectives are just starting to dig deep into Getreu’s history. As far as they know, his first crime occurred in 1963 at a U.S. Army base near the town of Bad Khisreuznach. On the night of June 8, 1963, Margaret Williams, the 15-year-old daughter of the base chaplain, attended a dance hosted by a church group. Also there was Getreu, 18, a native of Ohio and the son of a sergeant major at the same Army base.

Police are unsure of any prior interaction between Getreu and Williams. Her brother says there was no indication the two had a romantic relationship.

Later, to German and U.S. Army investigators, Getreu said that after the dance, the two met up outside and went for a walk, according to Associated Press reports at the time.

She never made it home. She was strangled and sexually assaulted, her body found on a baseball field adjacent to the site of the dance.

Germany authorities soon arrested Getreu, charging him with the rape and murder of Margaret Williams. However, because of his age, German law demanded the case be handed in juvenile court.

During the trial, Getreu at times disparaged the character of his victims, according to her survivors. He also denied turning lethal.

“I raped her,” the Associated Press reported. “But it did not occur to me that I could have killed her. I just wanted wanted to knock her out.”

Still, he was found guilty of raping and murdering Williams. He was sentenced to the maximum juvenile term, 10 years. But police say he served maybe three or four years, then was sent back stateside.

In 1975, he was convicted of the statutory rape of a minor in Santa Clara County. He was sentenced to six months in prison.

But between that time and late 2018, Getreu went unnoticed by law-enforcement authorities. Police are still creating a timeline of his life. But he apparently spent those decades in California, working as a carpenter. He married at least twice — one wife died of natural causes — and had multiple children, police say. Investigators are looking into those relationships.

From the outside, however, nothing looked amiss with Getreu. But authorities began to take a hard look at him in 2017.

Digging into the murders

That’s when the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office began to make a fresh review of the unsolved murder of Leslie Perlov, 21, on Feb. 13, 1973. Perlov was last seen leaving her job as a clerk at a law library in Palo Alto. She was strangled, her body found by an oak tree.

Looking over old records, modern detectives noticed that the original probe had noted similarities between her death and that of Janet Ann Taylor, 21, who vanished March 24, 1974 while hitchhiking from a friend’s house in Palo Alto to her home in nearby La Honda. She also was strangled, her body found on the side of a highway in neighboring San Mateo County

Beside the same manner of murder, each death was “sexually motivated,” police said. Plus, shortly before dying, each victim had been seen near Stanford University, where at the time Getreu was working as a medical technician.

Last year, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office (including cold-case expert Jackson) began reexamining the Taylor homicide. Meantime, in that no police database had any record Getreu’s DNA, Santa Clara authorities obtained a genetic sample from a distant cousin of Getreu’s: the results matched DNA evidence recovered from the Perlov crime scene, Jackson says.

From that, police focused on Getreu. Santa Clara sheriff’s investigators stealthily obtained an object discarded by Getreu, Jackson says. DNA from that sample matched the crime-scene genetic markers. According to police, the odds of a random, unrelated individual having left matching evidence at the crime scene are 1 in 65 septillion — or, a million to the seventh power.

In November, Getreu was picked up at his home in Hayward, across the San Francisco Bay from San Mateo County. He was charged with murder and jailed in Santa Clara County.

He was still locked up May 16, when he was also charged in San Mateo County with the murder of Taylor. His DNA matched genetic evidence recovered from the clothes she was wearing at the time of her death, police said. He is being held on $10 million bail, with a hearing in the Taylor case scheduled for next week.

Investigators are now contacting police agencies in other areas Getreu has lived, in California and Ohio. He has never resided in Illinois: the only connection here are the siblings of his Germany victim: the Sunnyland pastor as well as a sister in Springfield.

Police are also mindful that the California slayings were similar — regarding rape and strangulation — to the Germany murder. Meantime, as investigator Jackson works up a profile of Getreu — “It might or might not help our case,” he says — police hunting for clues as to Getreu’s impulse to kill.

As Jackson says, “Who knows what caused the situations of their deaths?”

Sharon Lucchese says she might.

Horrific encounter

Lucchese, 69, now lives in Simi Valley, a little over 20 miles northwest of Hollywood. But in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lucchese was living in Hollywood, where she often would attend a young-adults social ministry at a Christian church (though she forgets the name). After such a gathering one night — possibly in 1969, when she was 19 — she was asked out by another attendee. She felt apprehensive about the man, who was older by five or so years.

But he’d made his overture in front of two white-hair women involved in the ministry. As Lucchese demurred, they told her, “Oh, just go have coffee. You need to represent Christ and meet people.”

So, she accepted his offer. They headed off in his car, but he did not drive to a coffee shop. He drove up Hollywood Hills, finding a secluded spot to park the car. He then approached her closely, but not in a romantic or sexual way. Rather, he put his hands around her neck and began to choke her.

“I spent the entire night with his hands around my throat,” Lucchese says.

Repeatedly, he would let up, just in time.

“I thought he was going to snap the tiny bones in my neck,” she says.

Between chokings, he would chat, mostly to explain himself. He said God have given him a deadly directive.

“He said he had to kill me. He said God told him he had to kill beautiful women who were temptation to his Christian brothers.”

As he stared into her eyes, hands on her neck, she did not panic.

“God just let me have peace that I would survive the evening,” she says. “I thought I was supposed to just stare into his eyes and keep calm.”

The choking and releasing continued for hours, until dawn. All the while, she started into those eyes.

“For some reason, when the sun came up, he decided to let me live,” she says.

Lucchese thinks there might be two reasons for her survival. For one, if he had hoped for fear-triggered excitement, her calmness denied him. For another, after spending hours with her, perhaps he reconsidered his assumption that she was some sort of temptress.

“He decided I wasn’t the kind of girl he wanted to kill,” she says.

Whatever the case, she got out of the car, and he drove off. As she started to make a long trek on foot toward home, she planned to tell her story to police, as soon as she came across a patrol car or police station. But she had no such encounter along the way.

Though cool and collected while walking, once home she lost her composure.

“I just fell apart,” she says. “ … I didn’t know there was such an evil in the world.”

Fear prompted her to report the attack to no one — not police, not her parents. She kept her secret for decades.

“I was just a dumb kid,” she says. “I (afterward) had guilt about where he was and if he (later) murdered anyone.”

Eventually, she revealed the episode to the man she would marry in 1989. She later told their lone child, a son, so he would be careful when meeting strangers. In time, she also would share the store with other women, to encourage safety.

Through it all, as years passed, she remained haunted by the assault.

“I’d wake up at night with nightmares and see those eyes,” she says.

Is that possible? Jackson, the cold-case investigator, says Detreu would have returned stateside by then. And though Hollywood is hundreds of miles from San Clara and San Mateo counties, perhaps Detreu lived in Hollywood before moving to the Stanford University area. Or, maybe he just paid a visit to Hollywood.

“Everyone gets to Hollywood eventually,” Jackson says.

Lucchese said she is willing to talk to detectives who continue to investigate Detreu. Jackson admits that it's hard to recreate an individual's backstory after so many years, just as it'd hard to crack cold cases. But, given the nature of Getreu's four known crimes, Jackson says it would be naive to think Getreu otherwise kept his nose clean.

"I doubt it," Jackson says.

PHIL LUCIANO is a Journal Star columnist. He can be reached at pluciano@pjstar.com, facebook.com/philluciano and (309) 686-3155. Follow him on Twitter.com/LucianoPhil.