In the years that followed, Janelle began rebelling. She dressed in black. She withdrew. She started cutting herself. She used cocaine— less for recreational purposes than for weight loss. Her mother sent her away to various places, ranging from YMCA camp to Job Corps in Utah to a short-term psychiatric hospital.
She earned her high school diploma from Job Corps and returned to Irvine, where she enrolled in classes at the local college while cultivating a rotating menu of sex partners, mostly men a few years her senior. She began working as a hostess for Bullwinkle’s Restaurant, a Chuck E. Cheese–style family eatery named after the titular moose from Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.
Irvine’s motto, goes the joke, is “sixteen zip codes, six floor plans.” Or “Irvine: we have sixty-two words for beige.” Janelle roved in her monochrome tract in a kind of fitful, searching daze. The jolt she sought, the love, never came.
On May 3, 1986, her mother and stepfather left for a vacation to Cancún.
The following evening, a male co-worker from Bullwinkle’s hung out with Janelle after she told him she was lonely with her parents out of town. They sat on her bedroom floor; she read him some of her poems. His hopeful romantic interest kept him there as she played a forty-five-minute tape recording of a counseling session in which she railed against her messed-up family. A noise outside, like a gate or door closing, startled them. Janelle peeked out her window and closed the shutters. “I think it’s just the cats,” Janelle said while peering through the window. Sometime later, the noise recurred, this time from the direction of the garage.
Janelle again dismissed it. “It’s just the washing machine.”
The teenage workmate, recalling that it was a school night, left a short time later. Janelle gave him a friendly hug good-bye.
*
LINDA SHEEN* LEFT HER DESK AT TARBELL REALTY ON THE AFTERNOON of May 5 to visit a home in Irvine for a prospective buyer. The property, located at 13 Encina, was a three-bedroom, two-bath single-story house that had been on the market for several months. It was still inhabited by its owner, along with her four children— including two grown daughters—and her husband. It was a house that looked virtually indistinguishable from so many others in the Northwood community, including the one at 35 Columbus, a mile away, where a twenty-nine-year-old housewife had been bludgeoned to death in her bed five years earlier in an unsolved crime that was quickly forgotten.
The house at 13 Encina backed up to a park and was the second-to-last house at the end of a cul-de-sac, sealed by a hedge wall with a break in the middle that led to undeveloped property that marked the end of civilization: miles of orange groves and open fields insulated Northwood from nearby Tustin and Santa Ana. Only ten years earlier, those same orange groves had tiled the land on which 13 Encina and its surrounding neighborhood now stood. Two decades later, the remaining groves gave way almost completely to urbanization, with a mammoth strip mall and uniform housing developments paving the entire distance to those other cities.
Sheen arrived at 13 Encina and rang the doorbell. Although there was a beige Chevette parked in the driveway, nothing inside the house stirred, so she rang again. Still silence, much like earlier in the afternoon when she’d phoned the home and received no answer. She proceeded to the lockbox and retrieved the key, letting herself in.
She looked around and noticed that the dining room light was on. In the kitchen, a carton of milk stood on the breakfast table. A newspaper was open to the Employment section. She put her business card on the dining table and walked to the family room, peering through the sliding glass door into the backyard. She saw several lawn chairs and a lounge chair with a towel draped over it. She went to the master bedroom and turned the doorknob, but it was locked. The second bedroom looked like that of a child, and as Sheen entered the last bedroom at the end of the hall, she saw the body of a young woman lying motionless in the bed, with a blanket covering her head.
A jolt of fear surged through Linda Sheen. She felt she might not be alone in the house. She might be in the wrong place at the wrong time, seeing something she shouldn’t be seeing. The woman appeared not to be sleeping but either unconscious— perhaps from a drug overdose—or dead. Sheen bolted from 13 Encina and returned to her office, where she told her boss, Norm Prato,* of her discovery. He told her to phone the residence again. She did—twice. No one answered.
Linda and Norm relayed the situation to colleagues Arthur Hogue* and Carol Nosler* at Century 21, which was handling the sale of the home. The pair skeptically swung by 13 Encina and entered to indeed find the body of a young woman, unquestionably dead. Hogue called the police and told them he found a young lady with her head caved in.
Irvine PD officer Barry Aninag was the first to respond to the scene. As he entered the home, he was immediately approached by Arthur Hogue, who emerged from the kitchen and urgently reported, “There’s a dead body in the bedroom. There’s a dead body in the bedroom.”
He repeated this a few more times as Aninag made his way to the last bedroom down the hall. On the bed was the nude body of a young woman who would later be identified as Janelle Cruz. She was cold to the touch and had no pulse. The body was lying face up, with the chest and face covered by a blanket that featured a large, dark stain over where the victim’s head would probably be. Aninag slowly peeled away the blanket that was stubbornly adhering to the victim’s face, revealing a massive wound to her forehead, bruising on her nose, and a veritable mask of blood. Three of her teeth had been knocked out. Two of them were found in her hair.
Between her legs were flakes of dried fluid, which lab analysis would reveal to be semen. Tufts of blue fibers were found on her body, suggesting that a fabric had been ripped apart by someone as they stood over her.
Tennis shoe prints were found on the east side of the house. No ligatures or weapons were found at the scene.
A heavy red pipe wrench that had been in the backyard was missing, it was later determined.
Police canvassing the neighborhood gleaned little in the way of useful leads. A door-to-door solicitor from a window-washing company had been passing out yellow flyers the night before the murder. A neighborhood kid said he’d heard the girl at 13 Encina had been beaten to death and alerted the cops to a broken baseball bat he spotted in a nearby field. They followed him to the site. A snail oozed its way across the surface of the bat, which was mostly intact. Grass was growing on it. Clearly it had been languishing there for some time.
One neighbor heard Janelle’s Chevette, with its distinctively loud muffler, pulling in at around eleven fifteen p.m.—about half an hour after her co-worker would have left the residence. He heard the engine turn off and one of the doors slam shut.
At four a.m. and five thirty a.m. that morning, two different neighbors respectively observed “an inordinate amount of light” emanating from the residence.
Janelle’s sister, Michelle, was vacationing in Mammoth when she received the call: “Janelle has been murdered.”
The connection was not pristine. Michelle repeated what she thought she heard in utter disbelief: “Janelle got married?!”
The words were clearer the second time around.