I didn’t consider him a ghost. My faith was in human error. He made a mistake somewhere along the line, I reasoned.
On the summer night I searched for the cuff links, I’d been obsessed with the case for nearly a year. I favor yellow legal pads, especially the first ten or so pages when everything looks smooth and hopeful. My daughter’s playroom was littered with partially used pads, a wasteful habit and one that reflected my state of mind. Each pad was a thread that started and stalled. For advice I turned to the retired detectives who’d worked on the case, many of whom I’d come to consider friends. The hubris had been drained from them, but that didn’t stop them from encouraging mine. The hunt to find the Golden State Killer, spanning nearly four decades, felt less like a relay race than a group of fanatics tethered together climbing an impossible mountain. The old guys had to stop, but they insisted I go on. I lamented to one of them that I felt I was grasping at straws.
“My advice? Grasp a straw,” he said. “Work it to dust.”
The stolen items were my latest straw. I wasn’t in an optimistic mood. My family and I were headed to Santa Monica for Fourth of July weekend. I hadn’t packed. The weather forecast was lousy. Then I saw it, a single image out of hundreds loading on my laptop screen, the same style of cuff links as sketched out in the police file, with the same initials. I checked and rechecked the cop’s crude drawing against the image on my computer. They were going for $8 at a vintage store in a small town in Oregon. I bought them immediately, paying $40 for overnight delivery. I walked down the hallway to my bedroom. My husband was on his side, sleeping. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at him until he opened his eyes.
“I think I found him,” I said. My husband didn’t have to ask who “him” was.
OceanofPDF.com
Part One
OceanofPDF.com
Irvine, 1981
AFTER PROCESSING THE HOUSE, THE POLICE SAID TO DREW WITTHUHN, “It’s yours.” The yellow tape came down; the front door closed. The impassive precision of badges at work had helped divert attention from the stain. There was no avoiding it now. His brother and sister-in-law’s bedroom was just inside the front door, directly across from the kitchen. Standing at the sink, Drew needed only to turn his head to the left to see the dark spray mottling the white wall above David and Manuela’s bed.
Drew prided himself on not being squeamish. At the Police Academy they were being trained to handle stress and never blanch. Emotional steeliness was a graduation requirement. But until the evening of Friday, February 6, 1981, when his fiancée’s sister appeared tableside at the Rathskeller Pub in Huntington Beach and said breathlessly, “Drew, call your mom,” he didn’t think he’d be required to use those skills—the ability to keep his mouth shut and eyes forward when everyone else went bug-eyed and screamed—so soon or so close to home.
David and Manuela lived at 35 Columbus, a single-story tract home in Northwood, a new development in Irvine. The neighborhood was one of the tendrils of suburbia creeping into what was left of the old Irvine ranch. Orange groves still dominated the outskirts, bordering the encroaching concrete and blacktop with immaculate rows of trees, a packinghouse, and a camp for pickers. The future of the changing landscape could be gauged in sound: the blast from trucks pouring cement was drowning out the dwindling tractors.
An air of genteelness masked Northwood’s conveyor-belt transformation. Stands of towering eucalyptus, planted by farmers in the 1940s as protection against the punishing Santa Ana winds, weren’t torn down but repurposed. Developers used the trees to bisect main thoroughfares and shroud neighborhoods. David and Manuela’s subdivision, Shady Hollow, was a tract of 137 houses with four available floor plans. They chose Plan 6014, “The Willow,” three bedrooms, 1,523 square feet. In late 1979, when the house was finished, they moved in.
The house seemed impressively grown-up to Drew, even though David and Manuela were only five years older than him. For one thing, it was brand-new. Kitchen cabinets gleamed from lack of use. The inside of the refrigerator smelled like plastic. And it was spacious. Drew and David had grown up in a house roughly the same size, but seven people had squeezed in there, had impatiently waited their turn for the shower and knocked elbows at the dinner table. David and Manuela stored bicycles in one of their home’s three bedrooms; in the other spare bedroom, David kept his guitar.
Drew tried to ignore the jealousy prickling him, but the truth was, he envied his older brother. David and Manuela, married for five years, both had steady jobs. She was a loan officer at California First Bank; he worked in sales at House of Imports, a Mercedes-Benz dealership. Middle-class aspiration welded them. They spent a great deal of time discussing whether or not to get brickwork done in the front yard and where the best place was to find quality Oriental rugs. The house at 35 Columbus was an outline waiting to be filled in. Its blankness conferred promise. Drew felt callow and lacking by comparison.
After the initial tour, Drew spent hardly any time at their house. The problem wasn’t to the level of rancor exactly, but more like displeasure. Manuela, the only child of German immigrants, was brusque, sometimes puzzlingly so. At California First Bank, she was known for telling people when they needed a haircut or pointing out when they had done something wrong. She kept a private list of co-workers’ mistakes that she wrote in German. She was slim and pretty, with prominent cheekbones and breast implants; she’d had the procedure done after her wedding because she was small and David, she told a co-worker with a kind of distasteful half shrug, seemed to prefer big chests. She didn’t flaunt her new figure. To the contrary, she favored turtlenecks and kept her arms folded in against her body, as if anticipating a fight.
Drew could see that the relationship worked for his brother, who could be withdrawn and tentative and whose manner of speaking was more sideways than straight on. But too often Drew left their company feeling trodden, the power of Manuela’s rotating grievances short-circuiting every room she entered.
In early February 1981, Drew heard through the family grapevine that David wasn’t feeling well and was in the hospital, but he hadn’t seen his brother in a while and didn’t make plans to visit him. On Monday, February 2, Manuela had taken David to Santa Ana–Tustin Community Hospital where he was admitted for a severe gastrointestinal virus. For the next several nights, she kept the same routine: her parents’ house for dinner, then to room 320 at the hospital to see David. They spoke every day and evening by phone. Late Friday morning, David called the bank looking for Manuela, but her co-workers told him she hadn’t come in to work. He tried her at home, but the phone kept ringing, which puzzled him. Their answering machine always picked up after the third ring; Manuela didn’t know how to operate the machine. Next he called her mother, Ruth, who agreed to drive over to the house and check on her daughter. After not getting an answer at the front door, she used her key to enter. A few minutes later, Ron Sharpe,* a close family friend, was summoned in a hysterical call from Ruth.
“I just looked over on the left and saw her hands open like that and saw the blood all over the wall,” Sharpe told detectives. “I couldn’t figure out how it got on the wall from where she was lying.”
He took one look in the room and never looked again.