Luis Alvarez, a 26-year-old Hispanic man, was killed on January 21, 1979, one of eleven men believed to have been murdered in a series of attacks in downtown Los Angeles between October 1978 and January 1979. The spree, attributed to a perpetrator later called the Skid Row Stabber, targeted homeless men and transients; victims were frequently found stabbed in alleys, parking lots, or behind buildings and often bore multiple stab wounds. Some scenes contained ritualistic elements, including references to Satan scrawled in blood.

The killings were concentrated within a fifteen-block radius and created widespread fear among the city’s transient population. An arrest was made on April 4, 1979, when Bobby Joe Maxwell was charged in connection with the murders; he was later convicted on two of ten counts of murder in 1984 and sentenced to life without parole, a conviction that was overturned in November 2010. Alvarez’s death remains part of that unsparing sequence of slayings.

Did anyone who lived or worked in downtown Los Angeles at that time see or hear anything that could shed light on these attacks?