"Buttermilk Bluebeard"

To the lonely, well-heeled old women he met at church functions, the romantic charm of quiet, heavy-set Alfred Leonard Cline, 56, was considerably enhanced by a remote quality they could not identify.

Cline liked company; but his company usually died suddenly in a hotel room shortly after signing her estate over to him. He liked efficiency. He almost always took his company on pleasure trips, then asked her to drink a glass of buttermilk. When she died, he had her body cremated before police could' examine it.

Next to company and efficiency, he liked forgery. This had cost him two prison terms and an arrest last December. Digging into his secretive past, police found at least eight instances in which Forger Cline's buttermilk-drinking friends had died, leaving him legacies totaling $82,000. They also found that he left one of the coldest trails south of the Yukon.

But in San Francisco last week, Judge Herbert C. Kaufman made it reasonably sure that Alfred Cline would make no more close friends. Charged with nine counts of forgery, the judge ruled that the nine sentences should run consecutively. Maximum time: 126 years.

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