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When Sophia Friendly opened the door to her killer, she was dressed for dinner.
It was October 12, 1978. In Palm Springs, California, a resort-home destination for presidents and entertainers—where Elvis and Priscilla honeymooned, where everyone from Frank Sinatra to Liberace held court—dressing for dinner was the protocol observed in many of the houses nestled in the desert valley. Sophia, age 71, donned a floor-length dress and gold shoes. Her husband, Ed Friendly, 74, put on a jacket. The couple’s maid set the dining-room table with crystal and a six-piece silver service that included slender fish knives.
At about 7 p.m. the killer walked in the front door of the three-bedroom Mediterranean-style villa at 893 Camino Del Sur. Something happened—words were spoken, a weapon revealed—and Sophia Friendly turned to flee down the hallway. She was shot in the back of the head and died instantly. Frances Williams, the Friendlys’ 67-year-old cook and housekeeper, had just slipped a fish dinner into the warming oven. When the killer bore down on her in the kitchen, she dropped to her knees. A bullet to the head, fired point blank, ensured she died just as swiftly as her employer.
Ed Friendly wore a hearing aid. It is thought possible that, sitting in the bedroom, watching television and sipping a drink, he was unaware of the shots. He’d turned in his chair but had not risen to his feet when the killer struck a third time. Ed Friendly was shot twice—in the chest and in the head.
Photos and papers were tossed around, pants pockets turned inside out. Nothing was taken, including the $400 in cash in plain view in a wallet. But something was left behind: shell casings on the floor of the hallway, kitchen and den. Those casings would prove crucial but not for more than 30 years, after waves of police work drew tantalizingly close to an arrest time and again. The casings held the clues.
The killer did one thing more in the house on Camino Del Sur: A man’s fedora was tossed over the face of Sophia Friendly. It was as if to deliver the message that her death held the most meaning.
No neighbor observed anything out of the ordinary; no one heard gunshots. A car could have easily glided down the dim, quiet, palm-lined street unnoticed, the smell of dust and fig groves in the arid breeze.
It was the first triple homicide in the history of Palm Springs.
