Honolulu Star-Bulletin from Honolulu, Hawaii • 28

Star-Bulletin Wednesday, May 14, 1986 A What's on TV 2 Oscar de la Renta 3 Donnelly and Comics 4 Judd Nelson 6 Features and Entertainment Here are glimpses of five women whose deaths over the past year may be linked to a single killer. Besides their Caucasian features, their youth and the general location in which their bodies were found, they had little in common. Most were just embarking on adult lives. But some had done a lot of living at a relatively young age. None were raised entirely by their biological parents.

But all had some kind of family, blood-related or not, who cared. They were described by friends and family as aware and not likely to jump into a stranger's car. Some were called "streetwise," as If that afforded protection from the seamy side of street life. Only patches of the jigsaw profiles have been filled here. But before they became statistics in what may be one person's insanity, these women were working, loving and learning how to live.

1 TP r-' rr i Honolulu's By Susan Manuel Star-Bulletin Writer A SPECIAL REPORT r. t. i i. f. VICKI GAIL PURDY May 39, 1985 REGINA SAKAMOTO Jan.

15, 1986 "7 Those who are willing to talk about If' Leilebua High School senior Regina FV A Sakamoto remember her as shy but I friendly, and extremely close to her I J. mother and a high school girlfriend. The senior class adviser, Irene Rivera, I 4 recalled Regina as a sophomore who had fX painted a banner for homecoming and was active in her class council. "She was very careful, very kind, a I Turn to Page B-2 When she was 16, Vicki Gail Ezzell married Gary Purdy's cousin. She met Gary after that relationship broke up, according to her stepbrother James Foreman.

They'd finished high school in Marietta. and Gary was about to enter the Army. "She had lots of interests," said Gary Purdy, a helicopter pilot. Turn to Page B-2 feet and 165 pounds and his wife was "a very strong person." She was also "streetwise," knew who not to trust, and was so tough it would take two people to abduct her, he said. Vicki Purdy's body was found a year ago dumped off an embankment at the edge of Keehi Lagoon.

According to her husband, Vicki Gail Purdy was not a woman to be messed with. Early in their marriage when problems surfaced she had "knocked the outta me." Gary Purdy, now chief warrant officer in the 24th Aviation Battalion at Hunter Army Airfield near Savannah, said he's 6 LINDA PESCE May 3, 1986 LOUISE MEDEIROS March 26, 1986 riAfrmaiJL liaJlyi; ril DENISE HUGHES Jan. 30 1986 After only three months at work as a secretary at Long DistanceUSA 21-year-old Denise Renae hughes had made an impression and some new friends with whom she played racquetball and went shopping. "She always had a smile on her face, no matter what," said her superviser, Donna Peterka. "The day before this happened, everyone had the flu.

She was working the reception desk and I said 'I can't believe you're always The next day, that was it." Hughes didn't come to work on Jan. 30. The night before she had dined with her husband who was stationed on board a ship in Pearl Harbor. Her body was found two days later along Moanalua Stream, It wasn't uncommon for a young Marin County, woman in the early 1970s to leave college for adventure, which was just what Linda Mabel Pesce did. She hitchhiked across the country alone.

She traveled to Honolulu and worked as a dancer in a nightclub. She moved to Guam and danced in clubs, then moved back to Hawaii several years ago. She was carefree, streetwise, self-centered, opinionated and a knockout, according to friends and family members. But Pesce left the wild life seven years ago after giving birth to her daughter, Corinne Pesce-Gooman. "She's known quite a bit of people and whatever her past was, was her past," said one of her women friends.

"Everything changed with her daughter." The friend added: "She's a fighter. A very tough lady." Pesce was found dead May 3, her body dumped on Sand Island, the possible Louise J. Medeiros was a young woman who had lived much of life before she knew how to live it textbook-style anyway. She'd left her large family on Kauai as a teenager, opting for independence and uncertainty on her own on Oahu. In six years, she'd returned to Kauai once, for a bowling tournament, and then only called home.

She'd been on welfare, gotten in trouble with the law and lived with beach people at Makaha. Three months pregnant when she was killed, the 25-year-old had never married, had three children and a daughter in a foster home. But most of the family worries about their prodigal sister were soothed when Louise came home in March for a reading of her mother's will. The family found her centered and motivated, no longer the alienated rebel. Then the day after the reunion she was gone, abducted, police assume, from a bus stop near the airport on the evening of March 26.

The extended Medeiros family live mainly in the A photograph of her shows a round, beaming face, surrounded by soft brown curls and bangs. She was tall, five feet eight inches, and a hefty 154 pounds. Hughes had just passed probation at the telephone company and had earned a raise. She was so valued that the company didn't want to replace her. "She was just the ideal employee," said Peterka.

Hughes had lived in Hawaii for about five months. On a vacation here she met a young Pearl Harbor sailor, Charles Hughes. They married in-August in Seattle. Denise's Turn to Page B-3 fifth victim of a serial killer of voung Caucasian women. The 1960s divided people: One was either straight or not.

In Marin County, the divisions were particularly acute. Rock stars, hippies and Zen Buddhists shared the same environs with some of the stodgiest of San Francisco's wealthy barons. Pesce's family lived in a working class neighborhood in the Marin town of Turn to Page B-3 Omao area on Kauai with cousins spread around the island. They're open and talkative but know little about Louise's life on Oahu. "She was finally happy.

She had found peace within herself," recalled her eldest sister, Brenda Durant, of the March visit. "We were lying in my bedroom. She'd laugh and laugh. "She and my mother had had a misunderstanding. She Turn to Page B-3 ii i ft I i Cheering Section for 'Black Champions' rf tF iV A I 1 fr 43 .1: 1 i -i mi- an ii'Ti iininr iimr Tii'd "1 I I.

for figures such as Satchel Paige and Roy Campanella; football, on the college level featuring an exceptional Rutgers student named Paul Robeson; track, especially attractive because standards are clearly measurable and cannot be ignored; and, once again, boxing, with the emergence in the 1930s of a "Brown Bomber" named Joe Louis. An effort is clearly made to focus on names that might be less familiar to sports fans. Those being interviewed, for instance, include John Woodruff, one of the outstanding track medalists in the notorious 1936 Olympics mounted by Hitler's Turn to Page B-3 'Black Champions'! Bonita Fitzgerald Brown, 984 Olympic Cold medalist; Floyd Patterson, top right, former heavyweight champion; Peter Westbrook, Olympic bronze medal-winning fencer; Lakers basketball star 'Koreem Abdul-Jabbar. proceeds to serve as a cheering section for its heroes heralded in the opening credits as "men and women of extraordinary ability, icons of a race, producers of wealth and paragons of style," and so on. These figures command our attention, we are told, because "America's championship season is endless, and champions are worshipped." Written by Khephra Burns and Clayton Riley, this week's chapter begins, not surprisingly, with Jack Johnson, the extraordinary boxer who, from 1908 to 1915, used the heavyweight championship to outrage a good part of white America.

He. would go through exile in Paris and Russia and eventually 4 end up in vaudeville, shadow boxing to music. But he had given other black Americans a 'glimpse of the heights that, could be scaled purely through phvsical prowess and grace. The documentary then touches on other sports: baseball and the Colored Professional BasebaM Clubs, paving the way material has already become stock footage, used generously in everything from special features during sports events to background "filler" in television movies. The black baseball league, for instance, has been thoroughly covered and analyzed in previous documentaries.

And the stories of Jack Johnson and Jackie Robinson have even been transformed into Broadway plays. That leaves "Black Champions" looking for angles that might bring a degree of freshness to largely familiar material. The basic approach is hardly novel. Miles wants to illustrate how. in a racist society, black men and women used sports as a vehicle to reach areas of American life that might have remained closed to them.

At this point, surely; no one; can doubt the power that sports wielded as a tool for integration. The American drive to win at all costs invariably proves to be colorblind. Snugly wrapped in this insight "Black Champions" By John J. O'Connor Times THE three-part documentary series "Black Champions, which begins tonight at 9 on public television (KHET, Channel 11), has the distinction of being produced by William Miles. Among Miles' previous credits on public television are the widely acclaimed "I Remember Harlem" and "Men of Bronze." Both went back into invaluable film and photograph archives to catalogue neglected areas in the history of black Americans.

Miles and his partners, including the executive producer. David Loxton, are clearly caught up in a good and rewarding cause. There is a problem, however, with "Black Champions." The subject is sports, ana this is one Cortion of the American scene, lack and white, that is in no danger of being neglected. The sports past is constantly being celebrated and rehashed, the point wjiere archival It.