فصل 11

11

Goleta, 1979

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Segments of the following chapter have been pieced together from various drafts of “In the Footsteps of a Killer.”]

THE MAN APPROACHED LINDA AS SHE WAS LEAVING FOR WORK IN the morning. “My dog was stabbed in your backyard last night,” he said. The man was young, in his early twenties, elfin-featured, and a little hyperactive. He pointed to the footbridge that crossed the creek about two hundred feet from where they stood on Berkeley Road in Goleta. He and his dog, Kimo, had come from there, he explained, Kimo off leash and the man lagging casually behind. The city of Goleta is a bedroom community with a safe reputation, boring even, but few people would brave San Jose Creek alone at night. The narrow gorge winds down from the chaparral-covered mountains through the east side of town and is shrouded in huge, draping trees—sycamore, alder, and eucalyptus, with its papery, cracked bark that looks clawed-at. There are no lights, and the only sounds are the clump and rustling of unseen animals seeking food.

But Kimo was a big, protective dog, a 120-pound German shepherd and Alaskan malamute mix. That something might happen to the dog never occurred to the man. When he exited the footbridge into the residential neighborhood, he saw Kimo dart between Linda’s house and her next-door neighbor’s. Something must have drawn his attention back there. Kimo was nosy. From the man’s vantage point, the 5400 block of Berkeley Road was still. Up until the 1960s, Goleta was a sea of walnut groves and lemon orchards, and in certain pockets, especially adjacent to the creek, you could experience what it must have been like back then, no engines revving, no electronics humming; there was just a blanketing, hushed darkness and a scattering of lights from single-story ranch houses. A surfboard atop a VW bus in someone’s driveway was the only reminder that this was Southern California suburbia in early fall 1979.

A sharp yelp broke the silence. Moments later Kimo reappeared. The dog made his way unsteadily to the sidewalk and collapsed at the man’s feet. The man turned him over. Blood oozed from a long cut to his belly.

Kimo survived. After frantically knocking at several houses, the man was finally able to find a phone and called for help. An urgent care veterinarian closed the wound with seventy stitches, leaving a scar that stretched from Kimo’s sternum to the end of his belly. But the man remained puzzled about the source of the injury. Linda understood. Work could wait. She enlisted the help of her next-door neighbor, and together the three of them carefully scoured the side and back yards for sharp objects, like a lawnmower blade or piece of torn fence, which might have cut the dog. They found nothing. It was strange. Also odd was Linda’s flooded front lawn. Around the same time Kimo was hurt, someone had apparently turned on her hose and left it running.

Linda never learned the dog owner’s name. He thanked her politely and left. She mostly forgot about the incident until another man approached her outside her house with a question in July 1981. A lot had changed in the year and a half since Kimo was injured. Yellow crime-scene tape had gone up three times in the neighborhood, unusual for an area so small—less than two square miles—and so homey that deputies affectionately nicknamed the teenagers they regularly ran out of the avocado groves for smoking weed the red-eye gang.

This was Santa Barbara County, home to President Reagan’s 688-acre vacation ranch and also a popular retreat for moneyed dilettantes with a hippie bent, where you could wear flip-flops all day or playact in a staged rodeo, where you could enjoy historically preserved Spanish architecture unsullied by garish billboards (a ban won after a multiyear campaign waged by aesthetically inclined civic leaders). From 1950 until 1991, the only stops on Highway 101 between an otherwise open 435 miles from Los Angeles to San Francisco were four traffic lights in Santa Barbara; depending on whom you believe, this was because locals feared that a freeway would block their ocean view, or because they wanted tourists to patronize local businesses, or because they felt people should be encouraged to pause and contemplate life, and what better place to do this than in Santa Barbara, America’s Riviera, ensconced between a rugged mountain range and the Pacific Ocean? Who didn’t want to idle at a stoplight in paradise? The answer, eventually, was no one. The accidents were legion, weekend traffic was a gridlock, and pollution from idling cars became immense.

INVESTIGATORS FELT THEY KNEW THE NIGHT HE LEARNED HE HAD to be careful. They knew the night that changed him. The first crime they could connect him to, where their rewinding stopped: October 1, 1979. Less than a week after Kimo was stabbed. That was the night a Goleta couple on Queen Ann Lane awakened to a blinding flashlight and a young man’s clenched-teeth whisper. The woman was ordered to tie up her boyfriend. Then the intruder tied her. He rummaged around, opening and slamming drawers. Cursing. Threatening. Asking for money but not focused on it. He led the woman into the living room and made her lie face down on the floor, throwing a pair of tennis shorts over her head as a blindfold. She heard him enter their kitchen. She heard him chanting to himself.

“I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em, I’ll kill ’em.”

A surge of adrenaline allowed the woman to escape her bindings and flee out the front door screaming. Her boyfriend, bound in the bedroom, was able to hop into the backyard. When he heard the intruder coming, he dropped and rolled behind an orange tree, narrowly eluding the searching beam of the flashlight.

The couple’s next-door neighbor was an FBI agent. Alerted by the woman’s scream, he came outside just in time to see a man furiously pedal past on a stolen silver Nishiki ten-speed. Pendleton shirt. Jeans. Knife holster. Tennis shoes. A blur of brown hair. The agent gave chase in his car; his headlights connected with the biker a few blocks later on San Patricio Drive. When the headlights hit him, the suspect dropped the bike and hopped the fence between two houses.

The couple could give only a general description. White male. Dark hair above the collar. Five ten or five eleven. Around twenty-five, they guessed.

After that, none of his victims ever lived to describe him again.

THE BODIES WERE IN THE BEDROOM.

On the morning of December 30, 1979, Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a call at 767 Avenida Pequena, the condominium of osteopathic surgeon Dr. Robert Offerman. Offerman’s good friends Peter and Marlene Brady had arrived for a scheduled tennis game with him and his new girlfriend, Alexandria Manning, and found a sliding glass door open at the condo. They stepped inside and called out to Offerman but got no response. Peter crossed the living room and peered down the hallway toward the bedroom.

There’s a “girl lying on the bed naked,” he reported back to his wife.

“Let’s go,” Marlene said, not wanting to interrupt. They began to leave.

But after a few paces, Peter stopped. Something wasn’t right. Hadn’t he called out to Offerman loudly? He pivoted and returned to the bedroom to take a closer look.

When the deputies arrived, Marlene Brady was standing out front crying.

“There are two people dead inside,” she said.

Debra Alexandria Manning lay on the right side of the waterbed, her head turned to the left, her wrists bound behind her with white nylon twine. Offerman was on his knees at the foot of the bed; he clutched a length of the same twine in his hand. Pry marks indicated that the offender used a screwdriver to force his way inside the home, probably in the middle of the night when the couple was asleep. Flashing a gun, he may have suggested he was there to rob them: two rings belonging to Manning were found hidden between the mattress and bed frame.

The attacker most likely tossed the twine at Manning and demanded she tie up Offerman, which she did, but not tightly. Investigators believe at some point, perhaps after the offender was finished tying Manning’s wrists, Offerman broke free from his bindings in an attempt to fight back.

Neighbors reported that at around three a.m. they heard a burst of gunfire, which was followed by a pause and then another shot. Offerman was shot three times in the back and chest. Manning’s single wound was to the upper left back of her head.

The book on Offerman’s nightstand was Your Perfect Right: A Guide to Assertive Behavior, by Robert E. Alberti. It was the holidays. A green wreath with red flowers hung on the front door. There was a pine tree in a bucket in the entryway. As authorities processed the crime scene, they stepped around a turkey carcass wrapped in cellophane that had been discarded on the patio. They concluded that at some point the killer had opened the refrigerator and helped himself to Dr. Offerman’s leftover Christmas dinner.

Whoever the killer was, he’d been on a restless hunt that night. Investigators could track the star-shaped pattern from his Adidas running shoes as he circled Offerman’s condo. They noted the trampled flowerbed at 769 Avenida Pequena, the vacant condo next door. Inside was evidence of squatting, most notably in the bathroom, where a length of nylon twine was left behind.

Reports came in of ransackings and break-ins in the neighborhood in the hours before the murders. When a couple who lived on Windsor Court, a half mile from Offerman’s condo, pulled up to their house at around ten fifteen p.m., they spotted a man running through their living room toward the back door. As they came inside they heard him jump the rear fence. A white male in a dark fisherman’s hat and dark jacket was all they could say for sure. He’d brutally punched their poodle in the eye.

In the days after the murders, investigators continued to discover pieces of nylon twine dropped in various locations: on a dirt trail alongside San Jose Creek, on a lawn on Queen Ann Lane. They couldn’t be certain when the Queen Ann Lane twine had been left, though; a few doors down lived the couple who had narrowly escaped Offerman and Manning’s fate just two months before. It was all there in the police reports. Nylon twine. Pry marks. Adidas running-shoe impressions.