Beauty and the Beasts

When Fresno Police Det. Al Murrietta asked why the big interest in the murder of a Hollywood beauty queen, I had no immediate answer.

“Aren’t girls like her a dime a dozen down there?” he wanted to know. “Why all the fuss over this one?”

We were talking about Jill Weatherwax. Her case has been in the newspapers, in a magazine and lately on television. She was murdered a year ago at the age of 27 and her body dumped in a vacant lot behind a Fresno animal shelter.

I should have told Murrietta that it doesn’t actually happen that often. But when it does, it’s the Black Dahlia case revisited. A beautiful young woman comes to Hollywood to make it in show biz, gets used and then gets killed.

That’s putting it in shorthand cop-reporter terms: Life and death distilled and simplified, shorn of anything but a series of tidy, relevant facts. Girl comes west, girl gets used, girl gets done in.

But there remains a haunting quality about each case--the beautiful, vulnerable innocence of a life ending in despair and violence. What goes wrong in the dreams of stardom that become nightmares of reality?

Mystery is an element of eternal interest. We don’t know what happened to Jill Weatherwax any more than we know what happened to Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia, an actress wannabe murdered half a century ago.

We only know that beauty came to Hollywood and the beasts got her.

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The beasts sometimes dwell in beauty’s own drive to succeed. That may have been the case with Jill Weatherwax. Born in Fenton, Mich., a onetime apple growing empire about 60 miles northwest of Detroit, she displayed talent and ambition early on, singing along with her musician father when she was, as a friend has said, no bigger’n a grasshopper.

Outgoing and strikingly pretty, she was a cheerleader in high school, won beauty contests, studied dancing and modeling, and wrote music.

“She was energetic and vivacious,” her older sister Julie said in a telephone interview. “The world was a wide and wonderful place to her, just waiting to be explored.”

A career in acting as well as music was on her agenda, so she came west to the place where acting and music and dreams converge, an ideal fantasy intersection for a young woman bursting with starry self-confidence.

At first, there was promise. Through an agency she met an old-time manager who introduced her to Ciro Orsini, an international restaurateur who had opened a place in Los Angeles called Ciro’s Pomodoro. They fell in love.

Orsini let her sing in his restaurants here and in London and helped her win a “Miss Hollywood” crown in 1991. He also introduced her to Hollywood character Hal Stone, who produces a female boxing-wrestling show.

She sang in Stone’s national revue and produced a couple of Orsini-financed CDs but was never good enough to make it beyond the charity of her friends. She knew that. And that’s when her life began to unravel.

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Frustrated at her failure to make it, Jill turned to booze. Stone says Orsini found her “uncontrollable” and their romance cooled. What happened thereon becomes murky. She moved in with a troubled brother in Oxnard and began an affair with an ex-con known as Butch.

Somehow, and no one knows how, she ended up in Fresno. Witnesses saw her with three men on the night of March 25, 1998. Some hours later, her stabbed and beaten body was discovered in a vacant lot habituated by prostitutes and their customers.

Stories abounded that Jill Weatherwax had turned from booze to drugs, and to support the habit had become a hooker. An autopsy showed enough alcohol in her system to make her drunk but no sign of narcotics.

Det. Murrietta doesn’t think she was a full-time prostitute. “Maybe she just got herself in a jam and needed money to survive,” he says, not unkindly. “So she turned to ‘Mother Nature.’ ”

Orsini, who stays in touch with the family, has offered a $30,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of her killer or killers. He’s contacted psychics and an Indian medicine man to help with the case. Stone investigates each lead. The metaphysics haven’t helped. The case remains unsolved.

So why the big interest in Jill Weatherwax? I’ll know what to tell Murrietta the next time we talk: She was young, she had dreams and, in the way that dreams drive the young to us, she was one of ours, and she’s gone. Beauty was lost, the beasts had won.

Al Martinez’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. He can be reached online at [email protected]