(3 of 5)
Ordering the first six girls to lie on the floor, the intruder used his knife to rip strips from a bunk-bed sheet and from a cotton dress, then tied the girls up. Meanwhile, three other nurses who had been out late—Sue Farris, Mary Jordan and Gloria Davy—returned home before their 12:30 a.m. curfew, were surprised by the intruder, and were forced to join his bedroom captives. "There were some light outcries by the girls who came in late, but it wasn't much," said Miss Amurao. "He made them lie on the floor with the rest of us." Before binding and gagging each girl, the tormenter asked where she kept her money—but took pains to put his prisoners at ease. "He sat on the floor with them," said Corazon. "He indicated he was in need of money. They gave him money and thought that would satisfy him. They obviously had no idea what was in his mind."
"A Little Scream." Then, Miss Amurao related, "he took one of the girls out of the room. After a few minutes he came back alone and took another of the girls. He kept this up." One by one, the nurses went like lambs to the slaughter. None uttered more than "a little scream," said Corazon. The windows were open, but a second group of nurses who lived next door was on vacation; the victims' muffled cries were not loud enough to awaken other neighbors.
Despite his systematic savagery, the slayer either miscounted or forgot the one victim—possibly because he had learned that eight girls lived in the house and did not realize that a ninth, Mary Ann Jordan, was spending the night. "While he was out of the room on one trip," Corazon recounted, "I rolled under the bunk bed clear against the wall. I stayed under the bed for hours and hours." Throughout the terror-filled night she lay frozen with fear, not knowing whether the murderer was still in the house or gone. At 5 a.m., an alarm clock went off (a hospital Jeep was due to pick the girls up at 6:30 to take them to work), and slowly ran down. After summoning her courage, the lone survivor wriggled free of her bonds. Stumbling over her classmates' corpses, too afraid to venture downstairs, she beat out a front bedroom screen, crawled onto a balcony ledge, shrieking hysterically: "All my friends are dead! Oh, God! I'm the only one alive!"