MANUELA WAS IN BED LYING FACE DOWN. SHE WAS WEARING A brown velour robe and was partially wrapped in a sleeping bag, which she sometimes slept in when she was cold. Red marks circled her wrists and ankles, evidence of ligatures that had been removed. A large screwdriver was lying on the concrete patio two feet from the rear sliding glass door. The locking mechanism on the door had been pried open.
A nineteen-inch television from inside the house had been dragged to the southwest corner of the backyard, next to a high wooden fence. The corner of the fence was coming apart slightly, as if someone had fallen against it or jumped it too hard. Investigators observed shoe impressions of a small circle pattern in the front and back yards and on top of the gas meter on the east side of the house.
One of the first peculiarities investigators observed was that the only source of light in the bedroom came from the bathroom. They asked David about it. He was at Manuela’s parents’ house, where a group of family and friends had congregated after the news to grieve and console one another. Investigators noticed that David seemed shaken and dazed; grief was making his mind drift. His answers trailed off. He switched subjects abruptly. The question about the light confused him.
“Where’s the lamp?” he asked.
A lamp with a square stand and a chrome metal cannonball-shaped light was missing from atop the stereo speaker on the left side of the bed. Its absence gave police a good idea of the heavy object that was used to bludgeon Manuela to death.
David was asked if he knew why the tape was missing from the answering machine. He was stunned. He shook his head. The only possible explanation, he told police, was that whoever killed Manuela had left his voice on the machine.
The scene was deeply weird. It was deeply weird for Irvine, which had little crime. It was deeply weird for the Irvine Police Department; it smelled like a setup to a few of them. Some jewelry was missing and the television had been dragged into the backyard. But what burglar leaves his screwdriver behind? They wondered if the killer was someone Manuela knew. Her husband is staying overnight at the hospital. She invites a male acquaintance over. It gets violent and he grabs the answering machine tape, knowing his voice is on it, and goes about prying the sliding door and then, in a final touch of staging, leaves the screwdriver behind.
But others doubted that Manuela knew her killer. Police interviewed David at the Irvine Police Department the day after the body was found. He was asked if they had had any problems with prowlers in the past. After thinking about it, he mentioned that three or four months earlier, in either October or November 1980, there had been footprints that he couldn’t explain. They looked to David like tennis shoes and went from one side of the house all the way to the other side and into the backyard. Investigators slid a piece of paper across the table and asked David to draw the footprint as best he remembered it. He sketched it quickly, preoccupied and exhausted. He didn’t know that police had a plaster-cast impression of Manuela’s killer’s footprint as he stalked the house the night of the murder. He pushed the paper back. He’d drawn a right tennis shoe sole with small circles.
David was thanked and allowed to go home. Police slapped his sketch next to the plaster-cast impression. It was a match.
Most violent criminals are impulsive, disorganized, and easily caught. The vast majority of homicides are committed by people known to the victim and, despite game attempts to throw off the police, these offenders are usually identified and arrested. It’s a tiny minority of criminals, maybe 5 percent, who present the biggest challenge—the ones whose crimes reveal preplanning and unremorseful rage. Manuela’s murder had all the hallmarks of this last type. There were the ligatures, and their removal. The ferocity of her head wounds. The several-month lapse between appearances of the sole with small circles suggested the slithering of someone rigidly watchful whose brutality and schedule only he knew.
Midday on Saturday, February 7, having sifted through clues for twenty-four hours, the police did one more run-through and then authorized release of the house back to David. This was before the existence of professional crime-scene cleanup companies. Sooty fingerprint powder stained the doorknobs. David and Manuela’s queen mattress was gouged in places where criminalists had cut away sections to bag as evidence. The bed and wall above it were still splattered with blood. Drew knew that, as a cop-in-training, he was the natural choice for the cleanup job and volunteered to do it. He also felt he owed it to his brother.
Ten years earlier, their father, Max Witthuhn, had locked himself in a room at the family’s home after a fight with his wife. Drew was in eighth grade and attending a school dance at the time. David was eighteen, the oldest in the family, and he was the one who beat down the door after the shotgun blast rocked the house. He shielded the family from the view and absorbed what he saw of his father’s splintered brain alone. Their father committed suicide two weeks before Christmas. The experience seemed to rob David of certainty. He was suspended in hesitation after that. His mouth smiled occasionally, but his eyes never did.
Then he met Manuela. He was on solid ground again.
Her bridal veil hung on the back of their bedroom door. The police, thinking it might be a clue, asked David about it. He explained that she always kept it there, a rare sentimental expression. The veil provided a glimpse of Manuela’s soft side, a side few had ever known—and now never would.
Drew’s fiancée was studying to be a nurse practitioner. She offered to help him with the crime-scene cleanup. They would go on to have two sons and a twenty-eight-year marriage that ended in divorce. Even at the lowest points of their relationship, Drew could be stopped short by the memory of her helping him that day; it was an unflinching act of kindness that he never forgot.
They hauled out bottles of bleach and buckets of water. They put on yellow rubber gloves. The job was messy, but Drew remained dry-eyed and expressionless. He tried to view the experience as a learning opportunity. Police work called for being coolly diagnostic. You had to be tough, even if you were scrubbing your sister-in-law’s blood from a brass bed frame. In a little under three hours, they rid the house of violence and tidied it up for David’s return.
When they were finished, Drew placed the leftover cleaning supplies in his trunk and got behind the wheel of his car. He stuck the key in the ignition but then froze, seized up, as if on the brink of a sneeze. A strange, uncontainable sensation was winding its way through him. Maybe it was the exhaustion.
He wasn’t going to cry. That wasn’t it. He couldn’t remember the last time he cried. Wasn’t him.
He turned and stared at 35 Columbus. He flashed back to the first time he drove up to the house. He remembered what he’d thought as he sat in his car, preparing to go in.
My brother really has it made.
The tamped-down sob escaped, the fight to contain it over. Drew pressed his forehead against the steering wheel and wept. Not a lump-in-the-throat cry but a tumult of brutal grief. Unselfconscious. Purging. His car smelled like ammonia. The blood under his fingernails wouldn’t come out for days.
Finally, he told himself he had to pull it together. He had in his possession a small object he had to give CSI. Something he’d found under the bed. Something they’d missed.
A piece of Manuela’s skull.