"tired of having him around". The body of 17-year-old Lawrence Sharp was discarded behind a Westminster gas station. His body was found on May 18, and his autopsy revealed that in addition to being bound and sodomized, Sharp had been extensively beaten about the face and body, then strangled with a ligature. One week after the murder of Sharp, on the afternoon of May 19, Bonin asked Butts to accompany him on a killing; on this occasion, however, Butts reportedly refused to accompany him. Operating alone, Bonin abducted 14-year-old South Gate youth Sean King from a bus stop in Downey. King was strangled to death before his body was discarded in Live Oak Canyon, Yucaipa. Bonin then visited Butts' residence and bragged of the killing to his accomplice. Surveillance By early 1980, the murders committed by Bonin and his accomplices were receiving considerable media attention, and a reward totaling $50,000 for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrator or perpetrators had been offered by leading gay rights activists. Bonin avidly followed news media reports pertaining to his crimes, and collected newspaper clippings documenting his own manhunt, often tuning in on radio and television coverage of the murders along with his accomplices. Having by this stage determined a definitive link between many of the murders committed within the previous year, investigators from the various jurisdictions where victims had been abducted or discovered had themselves begun sharing information in their collective hunt for the perpetrator. Six officers from three of the jurisdictions in which the "Freeway Killer" had most regularly either abducted or deposited the bodies of his victims formed a task force dedicated to the apprehension of the suspect or suspects who, as one of the officers upon this assembled task force later recalled, was striking at an average rate of once every two weeks in the spring of 1980. By May 1980, Pugh had been arrested for auto theft and was housed at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Courthouse. On May 28, he overheard the details of the ongoing murders on a local radio broadcast and confided to a counselor his recognition of the perpetrator's modus operandi as being that described to him by Bonin two months previous. This counselor reported Pugh's suspicions to the police, who in turn relayed the information to Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) homicide sergeant John St. John. Upon hearing the confidential tip from the