Another Day of Death

A former San Francisco official kills the mayor and a supervisor

The gathering constellation of torchlights nickered first at the corner of 18th and Castro streets, in the center of the homosexual community that makes up about one-eighth of San Francisco's population. Held high by marchers stepping to the slow cadence of three drums, the bobbing lights moved down Market Street, their brilliance growing as the grieving crowd multiplied. By the time they reached the steps of the bronze-domed city hall, the crowd of youthful homosexuals, male and female, had been joined by many more conventional citizens, and an army of some 30,000 mourners expressed the sorrow of the shaken city.

At the flower-strewn steps, the mood of the civil rights rebellion of the 1960s was evoked as the crystalline voice of Folk Singer Joan Baez led the assembled marchers in the familiar songs: Kumbaya, Amazing Grace and Oh, Freedom. More candles were lit, more wreaths dropped on the steps, and an undercurrent of bitterness broke through the sadness. "Are you happy, Anita?" asked one crudely lettered sign in cruel reference to homosexuality's hated foe, Anita Bryant.

Once stately and even staid, a very citadel of culture in California, San Francisco has been scarred repeatedly in recent years by outbreaks of violence and turmoil (see following story). It was horrified two weeks ago when it awoke to the realization that it had nourished the Peoples Temple, an ostensibly humanitarian and religious cult whose leader, Jim Jones, had ordered the assassination of California Congressman Leo Ryan and then led 911 followers to their deaths in a frenzy of mass suicide and murder in remote Guyana. But San Francisco's shock was more centrally focused last week from the moment when a tearful Dianne Feinstein, president of the board of supervisors, stepped outside her city hall office to tell a stunned group of city employees and reporters: "It is my duty to inform you that both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed."

Mayor George Moscone, 49, had learned only a few days before of the deaths of Jones, whom he had once appointed head of the city housing authority, and of the other Guyana victims. "I proceeded to vomit and cry," Moscone had said. Supervisor Harvey Milk, 48, who had spoken at political rallies at the Peoples Temple, had candidly proclaimed his homosexuality and won election to the city's eleven-member governing board. He had also left a tape recording predicting that he might be killed because he had become such a prominent political spokesman for gays. The man charged with killing the other two was not some wild-eyed lunatic but an ex-member of the board of supervisors, Daniel James White, 32. White was a clean-cut former police officer and fireman, who was described by most acquaintances as a handsome, athletic, ever-achieving all-American boy. "If he had been a breakfast cereal," said one acquaintance, "he would have had to be Wheaties."

Amid the sorrow and confusion, hasty theories flourished over why both officials had died. One was that the murders might somehow have been connected with the Peoples Temple. Far more plausible was the notion that White, the only supervisor on the board who had voted against a city ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual preferences, had vented his anti-gay feelings in a murderous attack against Milk and the mayor. Moscone had appointed a few representatives of the gay community to low-ranking government offices.

White was a law-and-order conservative who viewed both the progressive mayor and Milk as overly tolerant of criminals and nonconformists. White had, in fact, won election as supervisor last year partly by campaigning, in effect, against gays. "There are thousands upon thousands of frustrated, angry people waiting to unleash a fury that can and will eradicate the malignancies which blight our city," his brochures declared. "I am not going to be forced out of San Francisco by splinter groups of radicals, social deviates, incorrigibles."

Yet other facts contradicted any tidy theory. White was no political extremist. "I respect the private rights of all people, including gays," he had insisted during debate on the gay rights ordinance. (He was also in favor of handgun controls.) He and Milk got along well on the board, at least until recently.

While White reportedly confessed to the crimes, his motivation was not revealed. He apparently $9,600 salary. His wife Mary Ann had to quit her teaching job when she became pregnant. They later tried to operate a waterfront potato stand, but his city hall duties consumed too much of his time. He decided to resign the post on Nov. 10, then changed his mind and waged a vain fight to get the post back. Moscone had refused to reappoint him.

"I'm really sorry to see him go," Moscone had said after White turned in his resignation. "I think he's a good guy." But while White was out of office, opposition to him had developed in his ethnically mixed district, and the affable but politically shrewd Moscone had decided it would be smarter for him to appoint a more compatible, liberal man to White's position on the board.

The final day began happily for Moscone, a 15-year political veteran, former Democratic leader of the California senate and father of four children. He was visited in his city hall office by State Assemblyman Willie Brown, a black leader and close friend.

"The mayor was really in high spirits, glowing," recalled Brown. "He yelled, 'C'mon in, this I've got to tell you!" Moscone's news was that he felt he had pulled off a political coup in selecting Don Horanzy, 42, a real estate loan officer of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, to fill out White's four-year term. Horanzy had not sought political office but had developed local support by founding a neighborhood "All People's Coalition" in White's lower-middle-class, partly black, Oriental and white ethnic district. The volunteer coalition helped combat crime and spruce up the neighborhood. Moscone had scheduled a press conference for 11:30 a.m. to announce Horanzy's appointment.

White was picked up by an unidentified woman in a red sports car at his modest bungalow on Shawnee Avenue and taken to city hall. Shortly before 11 a.m., White tapped on a basement window just off the parking ramp on the north side of the ornate, gray granite building. He told an engineer inside that he had forgotten his keys to the locked double doors by which supervisors can enter conveniently from the parking area. The engineer recognized White and let him in through the window.

Minutes later, White slipped into a normally locked side door to the mayor's second-floor suite of offices. This entry let him avoid the busy outer reception room. White asked Moscone's secretary, Cyr Copertini, if he could see her boss. Moscone's press aide, Mel Wax, passed by, saw White and sent word that Horanzy and his family should wait in an outer office to avoid a collision with the disappointed former supervisor. Wax figured that White was making a last-minute plea to get his job back. Said Wax: "I didn't talk to him. I was worried that [Horanzy] and White would see each other and we'd have a scene."

Moscone, smiling and in shirtsleeves, came out to greet White. Copertini asked if the mayor wanted anyone to sit in on the meeting, as he usually did with visitors. He laughed and said, "No, I'll see him alone." The mayor then led White through his formal office and into a cozier rear sitting room. "When he wants a heart-to-heart with somebody, the back office is a more informal setting," Wax later explained. "He liked to sit on the couch."

Shortly after 11 a.m. Copertini heard several sharp noises. "I had an awful feeling," she said later. "I went over to the window and looked out, thinking they were shots, but hoping they weren't." At that moment, Deputy Mayor Rudy Nothenberg arrived for an 11 a.m. appointment with Moscone. Nothenberg looked in the mayor's office, did not see him, and walked into the small rear room. He saw the mayor lying on the floor, his head facing downward between the couch and a coffee table, his body bleeding badly.

Nothenberg raced out a side door and into the public corridor, shouting for police. White, meanwhile, headed for the suite of supervisors' offices on the opposite side of the building. He entered a main reception area, then went directly to Milk's office and asked: "Harvey, can I see you a minute?" Milk accompanied White to White's former office, where his nameplate had already been removed.

Dianne Feinstein, sitting near by at her desk, suddenly heard five slowly repeated shots. She picked up her telephone and called the police. White ran into the reception area, yelling: "Give me my keys! Give me my keys!" Somebody gave him the keys to his assistant's car. "He was a wild man--he was just a wild man," one witness said.

Within 35 minutes of the murders, White and his wife walked into a police station four blocks from city hall. It was, ironically, a station out of which White had once worked as a patrolman. He turned in a five-shot, snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special Revolver, nine expended shell casings and eight unexpended rounds of hollow-point ammunition. He spent some 90 minutes under questioning by homicide detectives, then was taken to an upstairs jail and booked. After visiting him there, Mrs. White left weeping.

The coroner reported that Moscone had been shot in the right lung and the liver, then twice in the head at extremely close range. Milk had been shot three times in the body, then twice in the head, also at close range. The nine shots meant that White had reloaded his revolver after killing the mayor. At his arraignment, a controlled but subdued White asked for more time to hire a lawyer and decide how to plead to charges of first-degree murder. He was given until this week to do so.

As the city went into mourning and held services for the victims of the tragedy, Supervisor Feinstein, who had twice run vainly for mayor, emerged as a calming, compassionate leader. "If there was ever a time for this city to pull itself together, this is that time," she pleaded. "We need to be together and bring out what is good in each of our hearts." She praised Moscone at a public service for never abandoning the poor, even, as the mayor had recently said, "now that it has become fashionable to be hard-line and ultrarealistic about social goals." She said of Milk: "His homosexuality gave him an insight into the scars which all oppressed peoples wear."

Milk, a native of New York who moved to San Francisco as a financial analyst in 1969 and later opened a successful camera shop, had been very frank about his homosexuality. At his swearing-in ceremony as supervisor last January, after other officials had introduced their wives, he had presented Jack Lira, 24, as "my lover--my partner in life." Lira committed suicide three months ago in a state of depression. In the remarkable tape recording predicting that he might be killed, Milk urged that if it happened, other gays should "turn that anger and frustration and madness into something positive so that hundreds will step forward, so that gay doctors will come out, gay lawyers, gay judges, gay bankers, gay architects. These are my strong requests, knowing that it could happen, hoping it doesn't."

As is often true in such tragedies, no one could believe that the man who did the killing was capable of such a deed. "I never thought he was at all unstable," said former Supervisor Terry Franc,ois. "Just a normal young father," added another acquaintance. Intensely competitive, White had been captain of both the baseball and football teams and a Golden Gloves boxer while attending San Francisco's Woodrow Wilson High School. Son of a San Francisco fireman, he served in Viet Nam, then worked 3 1/2 years as a policeman. He somehow managed to buy first an $8,000 Jaguar, then a $15,000 Porsche, before taking a leave of absence to hitchhike through the U.S. After joining the fire department in 1973, he was cited for heroism for rescuing a mother and her child from the 17th floor of a burning building. He was to have received the medal last week.

Mayor Moscone, whose father had been a guard at San Quentin and once showed his young son the gas chamber, had long opposed the death penalty. Last week the charges lodged against Dan White were carefully crafted to permit a court to decree that he must die for those murderous moments at city hall.

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