My wife has strolled along the path at Corte Madera Creek in Kentfield, California almost every work day for the past 5-years. Occasionally, she will call to tell me that a deer has crossed her path, or that she is joining friends for lunch at one of the charming restaurants near her office. However, until recently she had no way of knowing that decades earlier, in the waning hours of November 14, 1959, twelve-year-old Lorna Jane Lax was savagely raped and murdered along this same creek bank. Violet would have felt far less secure had she known that Lorna’s killer, who lived in Marin County until his death in 2012, was never punished for the vicious, predatory crime that he confessed to having committed.
Lorna Lax was not expected to live when she was born at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco on March 27, 1947. Her mother Amy said, “She arrived in this world with not two, but four strikes against her. She was not able to feed, had a cleft palate, and a collapsed lung which required oxygen for the first four months of her life.” The cleft palate caused Lorna’s arms to be splinted so that she couldn’t put her tiny hands into her mouth. She couldn’t suck so she was fed through a tube in her nose. The staff told Amy not to visit too often. “It makes it hard on the nurses because she cries when you leave.”
After six months her arms were liberated from the splints, she was discharged from the hospital and taken home to 636 Missouri Street in San Francisco. Over the course of the next several years John and Amy Lax focused on their daughter’s health and wellbeing. “We struggled to correct her inherent handicaps,” her mom said. “After four major operations and four years of speech therapy, Lorna could now speak almost as well as a normal eight-year-old.” In 1955, John and Amy wanted to give their tiny, eccentric child a chance at acceptance so they moved across the Golden Gate Bridge to the bucolic Marin County suburb of Kentfield.
Lorna was a 4’6″ tall, 65 pound red headed stick of a girl who attended church with her mother twice a week and earned numerous Girl Scout merit badges. She was popular in her neighborhood and liked to help her friends by staging little puppet shows or circuses. She charged the kids whatever they could afford and then bought them ice cream with the proceeds. She was an athletic girl who would rather swim than go to a movie and could occasionally be found sleeping under the stars on the neighbor’s deck.
Lorna was also a troubled child with explosive, dark secrets that she held close, too close, until it was too late. Her cleft palate had not been totally corrected so she suffered from hypernasality, a speech impediment caused when air leaks from the nose during speech. This contributed to bullying that continued even after the family moved to Kentfield. The little girl who wanted nothing more than to fit in was deeply wounded by the sharp barbs of her tormenters. She regularly returned home from school sobbing and holding a grudge against the world.
When she was eleven Lorna started leaving home for extended periods of time. One time after a quarell with her mother she was found sleeping in a bus at Kentfield’s Greyhound Station. Another time Lorna was found wrapped in a neighbor’s discarded comforter, nestled in the trees along the bank of Corte Madera Creek. In September, 1959 the police were alerted when Lorna tried to check into a Sacramento motel where she and a girlfriend hoped to attend the State Fair.
In the spring of her twelfth year Lorna began to turn inward, keeping her own counsel and closing out her parents. John and Amy sought psychiatric counseling in hopes of understanding her dark moods and reconnecting with their daughter.
On Saturday morning November 14, 1959 Lorna left her mother a note. “Dear Mom, I’m mad at the world, so there is only one thing I know to do and that’s get away from these seroundings. So I’m leaveing. I’ll promise to be back Sunday morning. I’m going to the city. Your daughter, Lorna Lax.”
Lorna was a devout Catholic who had not missed church since she was six-years-old, so when she had not returned home by Sunday, November 15, her parents called the police. On Monday, November 16, her friends and family began posting missing flyers in and around Kentfield.
The little redhead’s ravaged and beaten body was discovered at 3:30 Monday afternoon when her thirteen-year-old friend Norman Fortner stopped to check out the fort Lorna hacked out of the wild blackberry bushes on the bank of Corte Madera Creek, about a block from her home.
She was wearing a blue pajama top, her legs were stuffed into a sleeping bag, and her body was held erect by a rope knotted around her neck and lashed to an overhanging fig tree branch. Her head had been bashed in and she had been stabbed in the abdomen six times. Her shoes and bobby sox were placed neatly side by side next to the sleeping bag. Make no mistake: it was a scene reminiscent of Jack the Ripper.
On Monday
The Devil and Lorna Lax: Forget Me Not
