فصل 12

12

Goleta, 1981

WHAT DEBBI DOMINGO REMEMBERS MOST ABOUT THE LAST TIME she talked with her mother, Cheri, is that they didn’t talk. They screamed. It was Sunday, July 26, 1981, high summer in Santa Barbara. The coastal fog, with its smell of damp eucalyptus, was gone. The Pacific Ocean was warming up, an inviting churn of whitecaps making its way toward soft sand and an endless line of hundred-foot palm trees. Golden teenage boys with lank hair and effortless muscles headed for the water with their boards in a gait the locals called the surfer bounce. This was Santa Barbara’s magic time, and when she wasn’t at her part-time job at the Granada Theater, Debbi wanted to bask in it. She loved the energy of East Beach, especially its volleyball scene. There was one hitch, which is why Debbi hit the brakes on her ten-speed in front of a pay phone on State Street that afternoon. She dug coins from the pocket of her denim cutoffs. Her mother picked up. Debbi got right to the point.

“I need to come get my swimsuit,” she said.

Her mother’s stony reply surprised her.

“No,” Cheri said.

A spike of rage torched Debbi behind the eyes. She gripped the phone and dug in. Mother and daughter were back where they’d left off.

That was four days earlier and around the corner at 1311 Anacapa Street, in an unassuming little house that was the headquarters of Klein Bottle Crisis Shelter, an organization for troubled teens. Debbi had shown up there in the middle of July, a runaway on a bike with one hastily packed bag and a well-honed detection system for rules and how to flout them. But Klein Bottle was hardly a stern lockdown facility. The abundance of ferns hanging in macramé planters told you that. This was the peak era of Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, a self-help bestseller that aimed to expose the subtle bad parenting that lurks in even the most functional-seeming families. Miller urged her readers to “find their own truth” about possible childhood abuse; in doing so, she helped ignite the talk therapy craze. Klein Bottle counselors drank tea from earthenware mugs and assured inarticulate adolescents that no feeling was too banal or shameful to share.

In addition to assigned chores, there was one house rule: the kids could come and go as they pleased, but they had to sign an agreement to participate in therapy sessions. The staff arranged for Cheri and Debbi to meet together with a counselor to help resolve their problems.

The Domingos must have seemed like an optimal case for mediation. Neither was a dull-eyed drug abuser exhibiting the ravages of stress and neglect. Far from it. Mother and daughter were both delicate-featured beauties. They sported matching beach-casual styles: easy on the makeup, huarache sandals, print tops, and jeans. Debbi adorned her hair with the occasional braid or side barrette. Cheri was thirty-five, a pin-thin Natalie Wood lookalike with a no-nonsense, pleasant demeanor, the result of working as an office manager. Debbi was more voluptuously built; her wide, blue eyes were attuned, as most teenagers are, to the short stretch rather than the long term. Both radiated good health and a core of self-assured calm.

The meeting time arrived. Cursory pleasantries were exchanged as everyone took a seat. As soon as Debbi and Cheri touched down on the couch, alighting like two birds on a wire, they erupted. Their battles were by then front-loaded with fury, a miserable lockstep in which the only changes in position were who was incredulous and who was aggrieved. They needed no coaxing. Boundaries. Rules. Boyfriends. Disrespect. Debbi can’t remember if the counselor was a man or a woman. She only remembers shouting and a vague third presence in the room; someone who’d presumably seen it all but who exuded dumbstruck ineffectualness. In the end, Debbi fled abruptly, as she had before, a dark-haired storm of a girl pedaling away with her belongings crammed into a bag. In two weeks she’d turn sixteen.

Cheri watched the city swallow her daughter and worried. Santa Barbara beguiled. It deceived. The promise of romance reigned, and the potential for danger was obscured. After a nineteen-second earthquake shattered much of downtown Santa Barbara in 1925, the city was rebuilt in a unified Spanish Colonial style—white plaster walls, low-pitched red tile roofs, wrought iron. Preservation-minded civic leaders continued to keep buildings low and billboards out. There was a gentle small-town feel to the place. Every day for thirty-two years, a Greek immigrant, “the popcorn man,” sold pinwheels and popcorn from his station wagon at the foot of Stearns Wharf. The smell of night-blossoming jasmine drifted in through open windows on hot evenings. The roar of the ocean rocked people to sleep.

But instability lurked. A raggedy undercurrent roiled. The recession had gutted a lot of downtown businesses. There was not yet an open-container law on lower State Street; at night weaving drunks shouted at each other between breaks to piss and puke. The music clubs were changing. Folk and disco were out, replaced by angrier punk. The local papers were reporting that an anonymous male caller was telling children ages eleven to fifteen who answered the phone that they were going to die. Another caller, maybe the same man, was telling women that he’d hurt their husbands if they didn’t comply with his demands. Local cops nicknamed the unidentified creep “our breather.”

There was a stoplight at State Street and Highway 101, one of the main north-south routes spanning California, and for more than a decade a colorful parade of hippies held up signs there asking for rides to places like San Diego or Eureka. It was such a Santa Barbara tradition that the Texaco gas station kept felt-tip markers for the hitchhikers to use on their cardboard signs.

But lately it was hard not to notice that, despite their Summer of Love robes and tambourines, the hippies weren’t young anymore. Up close, you could see they’d weathered not just wind and sun but gradations of defeat that had turned the light off in their eyes. There were fewer signs marked with destination requests. Some just paced in circles all day.

Santa Barbara’s magenta bougainvillea could distract you from its hairline cracks. Cheri hoped no harm would come to Debbi out there. Every mother’s brain cycles through the litany of terrible things that might befall her child. Rarely does the reverse occur. Why should it? Especially for teenagers, who between seeing their parents as God and then as human view them temporarily as an obstacle, a particularly cumbersome door that won’t quite budge.

No, it was Debbi who was, in the parlance of Klein Bottle, “at risk.” The story rarely ends well for the beautiful teenage runaway. This time it did.

Not being home saved Debbi Domingo’s life.

CHERI KNEW THAT HER DIFFICULTIES WITH DEBBI WERE JUST A rough spot, a bump in the road, and they would patch things up eventually. They’d laugh about it when Debbi had a teenager of her own. But in the meantime, she needed solutions. She was an office manager everyone described as a “mother hen,” who, it seemed, could neither mother nor manage her own daughter.

“How do you do it?” Cheri asked her best friend, Ellen, as they sat in Ellen’s Jacuzzi in the backyard drinking wine. Ellen had three foster girls, all teenagers, living with her and her husband. Girls born drug-addicted. Abandoned on doorsteps. Cheri marveled at how well behaved they were.

“Discipline,” Ellen said.

The way Ellen saw it, Cheri’s attempt at disciplining Debbi had come too late. She’d been too permissive. Ellen demanded to know where her girls were at all times. The girls knew that if they cut class, either Ellen or her husband, Hank, would show up at school wearing a placard identifying themselves as the truant’s babysitter. The risk of social mortification kept them in line.

Cheri, on the other hand, had given Debbi a long leash. She was patient when Debbi broke curfew or didn’t check in. Cheri was by nature an optimistic, level-headed person; she believed Debbi was engaging in typical teenage behavior and was reluctant to bring the hammer down. The phase would pass, she said. Cheri was just nineteen when Debbi was born, and in happier times, when mother and daughter tried on clothes together at the mall or had lunch at their favorite restaurant, Pancho Villa, they delighted when strangers took them for sisters. They’d giggle at the assumption. The strangers would realize their mistake. Of course these two weren’t sisters. They were friends.

Which is why, in the months of escalating tension when Debbi would scream, “I don’t care about your rules! You’re ruining my life!” Cheri’s reply, while true, had a meek, uncertain tenor to it: “But I’m the mom.”

The starting pistol that began the collision course was the divorce. Cheryl Grace Smith met Roger Dean Domingo, an electronics technician in the coast guard two years her senior, when she was in high school. They married shortly after Cheri turned eighteen, on September 19, 1964, in San Diego. Debbi was born the following August. Almost exactly a year later, a son, David, arrived. Roger left the coast guard and became a Methodist minister, then a middle-school teacher. In 1975 the family moved to Santa Barbara.

Debbi remembers the first twelve years of her life in a warm amber light. Cheri doling out home-baked sugar cookies. Picnic lunches at Nojoqui Falls Park. She loved having young parents, the kind who didn’t watch you from the park bench but hoisted you onto the monkey bars and scrambled up the rocks after you at the beach. Cheri and Roger were physically fit people raised in the sun, and their demeanor showed it. “I didn’t know what cynicism was until I hit junior high,” Debbi says.

A strain developed between Cheri and Roger somewhere along the line. There exists a 1,157-page Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department report, much of it dedicated to the details of Cheri’s life; on page 130, Roger is questioned about their marriage, in particular their social life in Santa Barbara. He recalls outdoor picnics. They liked to visit Solvang, he says, a quaint Danish-themed village nearby. Midinterview he switches pronouns from “we” to “she.” Cheri liked to dance. She liked to “party.” It’s unclear if the quotations are Roger’s or the interviewer’s. But they hang there accusingly. Cheri wasn’t a drug abuser or hard drinker; the word “party” likely reveals more about inclination. Roger was content with a wicker basket and a blanket on the grass; at some point Cheri wanted more. They separated in December 1976.

Roger moved back to San Diego, and Debbi and David split their time between the two cities. Debbi recognized an opportunity in the family splinter. She began playing her parents against each other. She tested limits. Ignored house rules. At the slightest hint of pushback she’d pack her bag and announce she was going to live with the other parent. She ping-ponged this way for several years, shuttling back and forth between San Diego and Santa Barbara, switching schools at least a half-dozen times, sometimes midyear. By July 1981, her once good grades had taken a dive. She was hung up on an older boyfriend in San Diego whom Cheri and Roger, who rarely were in accord on anything, agreed was bad news.

A defiant teenager in full rebellious bloom can rattle the most stable of families, so it didn’t help matters that Cheri’s life was in flux and under stress too. In June, with the economy tanking, she and Ellen were laid off from their jobs at Trimm Industries, a small firm that manufactured computer furniture. Cheri spearheaded their search for new employment by renting an IBM Selectric typewriter and polishing their résumés. Then, on top of everything else, she decided to move.

For several years, Cheri and the kids, when they weren’t in San Diego with their dad, lived in a rented guesthouse in Montecito. But in May Cheri’s father’s cousin, known to the family as Aunt Barbara, called to say she was putting her house in Goleta on the market and moving to Fresno. Aunt Barbara didn’t want the house to be empty while it was for sale. Would Cheri and the kids like to house-sit?

Aunt Barbara lived on Toltec Way, a cul-de-sac in a quiet, leafy pocket of northeast Goleta, adjacent to San Jose Creek. The wood-shingled Cape Cod–style house had a second-story addition over the garage and shuttered windows. To the neighbors, it was “the big red barn.” What sealed the deal for Cheri was that by sheer coincidence Ellen lived catercorner on Toltec Drive.

In early June, Cheri and the kids, with the help of a moving company, hauled their belongings into 449 Toltec Way. Eucalyptus draped heavily here. The quiet seemed not so much peaceful as mandated by nature, but the stillness didn’t still Debbi. The action was in the Mesa area of Santa Barbara or back with her friends in Montecito. Everything felt provisional. Temporary. A Realtor would be conducting open houses. A sign on their lawn read SANTANA PROPERTIES / FOR SALE. Debbi missed the bad-influence boyfriend in San Diego and racked up enormous phone bills calling him. A few weeks after moving in, after an explosive blowout with Cheri, she shoved what she could into a bag, hopped on her bike, and took off.

Most nights Cheri walked across the street to Ellen’s, and the friends opened a bottle of wine and hopped into the Jacuzzi. They talked about Cheri’s fight with Roger over child support. Job searches. Love. Cheri had started experimenting with personal ads and professional dating services. There’d been a few stilted dates at downtown restaurants. One man had called the office for Cheri and mysteriously left his name as “Marco Polo.” Cheri laughed when she took the message but revealed nothing. Ellen knew that Cheri wanted to marry again, that her friend, a little surprisingly for a divorcée, was an old-fashioned romantic who yearned for the gauzy postcard image of love—the radiant couple walking hand in hand on the beach at sunset.

Cheri was circumspect about the one man who’d come closest to winning her heart since the divorce. Ellen never met him because the relationship predated Ellen’s friendship with Cheri, but she spied him once slipping into Cheri’s office at work. He was much younger than Cheri, gorgeous, tall, and immaculately put together, with thick dark hair. All Ellen knew was that they’d had an on-and-off relationship for years, but Cheri had recently decided it was over. Time to move on.

Mostly the two women talked about Cheri’s problems with Debbi. Tough love, Ellen said. Consequences.

“Put your foot down,” she advised.

WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT CHERI DID WHEN DEBBI CALLED HER four days after their clash at Klein Bottle. Debbi had one thing on her mind, and it wasn’t an apology or an olive branch, but a swimsuit. She’d left it behind at the Toltec house.

“I need to come get my swimsuit,” she said.

“No,” Cheri said.

“What?”

“I said no,” Cheri said.

“It’s my swimsuit!”

“It’s my house!”

Debbi howled angrily into the phone. Cheri howled back. People on State Street slowed, sensing a scene. Debbi didn’t care what the gawkers thought. Her body quaked with rage. The worst thing she could think to say spouted forth from her mouth with wild force.

“Why don’t you just get the hell out of my life!” she screamed. She slammed down the phone.

The next day around two thirty p.m., Debbi got a call at the friend’s house where she was crashing. The caller was a co-worker of Debbi’s from the Granada Theater. Her mother’s friend Ellen had phoned the theater looking for Debbi and left word that Debbi should call her immediately. Debbi steeled herself for the inevitable guilt trip Ellen would unload on her about how she was treating her mother. Ellen’s first words didn’t surprise Debbi at all. She could imagine Ellen standing there, hand on hip, lips pursed in judgment.

“You need to come home,” Ellen said.

“I’m not coming home,” Debbi said. “No way.”

Ellen and Debbi have different memories of what exactly was said next, but both agree Debbi quickly understood she needed to come right away. That it was urgent. Debbi sat in the front seat of her friend’s Volkswagen bus on the ride there, her mind racing with possibilities. What she remembers most about pulling up to Toltec Way was the yellow crime-scene tape, how it cordoned off not only the street itself but also the second house on the west side of the street. The big red barn. Aunt Barbara’s house.

How strange it was to see dozens of people swarming the normally empty cul-de-sac. Uniformed officers. Detectives in suits. The media. The din had the pitch of stress and confusion. People moved quickly, coming together and then pivoting, seekers of information with strained expressions. Somehow Debbi was led under the tape. She walked in a daze through the clamor.

Why don’t you just get the hell out of my life!

Her heart leaped when she spotted her mother’s car, a brown Datsun 280ZX, parked in the driveway.

And then she recognized another car, a white Camaro with two black racing stripes, parked in front of the house.

“Where’s Greg?” Debbi asked no one in particular. She looked around for him, her voice rising. “I want to talk to Greg!”

The swarm in the cul-de-sac froze and turned toward her in unison, a mob of raised eyebrows. They repeated two words as they closed in on her—an odd, needling harmony that contributed to the dreamlike trance Debbi floated through as she made her way toward the place she hoped her mother would be.

“Greg who? Greg who? Greg who?”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following section has been reconstructed from Michelle’s notes and a “Writer’s Cut” piece she published in the digital edition of Los Angeles magazine as a follow-up to the “In the Footsteps of a Killer” article.]

GREG WAS GREGORY SANCHEZ, A TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD COMPUTER programmer who first met Cheri Domingo in the late 1970s while both were employed at the Burroughs Corporation. They dated on and off from 1977 through 1981, and they were on and off and on again so many times that, when they finally ended it, Debbi just assumed they were on another break.

Greg was eight years Cheri’s junior, and sometimes it showed. He was a man preoccupied with being a man. He rode a motorcycle. He drove a Camaro with racing stripes. He coached Little League and Pop Warner football, and he had the spare bedroom of his apartment outfitted with every high-end stereo component imaginable. Greg was in shape and always dressed well. Like Cheri, he took good care of himself. They shared a certain meticulousness. Neither had grown up with a lot and took great care of what they had. For four years, their relationship trajectory was a decidedly circular one. She waited for him to grow up. He waited for her to chill out. Finally, they’d had enough. Both began seeing other people.

In June of 1981, the Burroughs Corporation announced it was shutting down its Santa Barbara division. Sanchez planned a trip to the East Coast to explore job opportunities at their Florida branch. The following month, while Debbi was living at the Klein Bottle shelter, Greg got in touch and invited her out to lunch.

Greg and Debbi had been close. He was like family. Not quite a father figure, as his age fell somewhere in the middle between Cheri’s and Debbi’s, he was something in the realm of an older brother. He was fun and he treated her well. He liked to call her Debra D.

“Greg, my name’s not Debra,” she’d remind him.

“That’s alright, Debra D,” he’d tease. “Don’t worry about it.”

Over hamburgers that afternoon in mid-July, Greg broke the news to Debbi that he was moving to Florida. He explained that he wanted her to hear it from him, rather than learning about it after the fact—which he knew would shatter her. She was not much less crestfallen hearing it directly from the source.

“I’ve proposed to your mom so many times,” he said resignedly. “She’ll never marry me.” Cheri felt she was too old for Greg, a rationale Debbi thought was ridiculous.

What Debbi didn’t know was that Greg was already seeing someone else.

He had met Tabitha Silver in May. Both lived in the same apartment complex, and Greg had dated her close friend Cynthia. Cynthia remained friends with Greg and ultimately introduced him to Tabitha. They began going out, and their relationship deepened quickly. Not even three weeks in, Greg was marveling— with some degree of alarm—at the speed with which things had turned serious.

But the timing was off. Both their lives were in states of flux. Tabitha was starting dental school at UCLA in the fall, and in the interim, she’d left Santa Barbara and moved back home to San Diego for the summer. Greg’s job status was in limbo and he was considering relocating to Florida.

“This is not the time in my life to get involved,” Greg told her.

“When is the time going to be?” Tabitha retorted. “When you’re six feet under?”

Greg returned from Florida on July 23 and immediately phoned Tabitha. He was going to remain in California after all, he’d decided. Florida was too far away from his friends and family. With her birthday only days away, he invited her to Santa Barbara for the weekend.

She drove up that Saturday and they spent the day together. He hinted at a marriage proposal. The following night, she appeared at the door of his apartment. He surprised her with a last-minute change of plans: he was going to spend the evening with a friend instead.

That friend was Cheri Domingo.

A NEIGHBOR OF CHERI DOMINGO’S HEARD A GUNSHOT, FOLLOWED by a voice in the middle of the night—a woman speaking to someone in a controlled, unemotional way, something along the lines of “Take it easy.” That was probably the last thing Domingo ever said.

Investigators later theorized that the conspicuous scraping sound the bedroom door made against the shag rug had alerted Sanchez to an intruder. It appeared he’d fought with the killer.

One detective familiar with the case recalled the woman’s voice, steadying and deflective, overheard by the neighbor. “She pissed him off,” he said.

This time the killer took the ligatures with him. He was adapting, eliminating evidence.

ON MONDAY MORNING, A REALTOR ARRIVED AT 449 TOLTEC WAY to show the property to a prospective buyer and his family. He let himself into the house and, upon entering the master bedroom, discovered the bodies of a male and a female. He immediately whisked his clients out of the house and called the police.

Both victims were nude. Sanchez’s body was half inside the closet in a prone position. The killer had covered his head with a pile of clothing pulled down from the rack above. Near the body was a flashlight—the batteries had Sanchez’s fingerprints on them, indicating it came from the house.

Sanchez had been shot in the cheek, probably while struggling with or resisting the perpetrator. That wound was not fatal. The twenty-four blunt-force wounds, inflicted by an unknown instrument, were. Domingo was face down on the bed in a pool of blood. She had been bludgeoned to death with the same instrument. Draped over her was a bedspread that matched the wallpaper. Her hands were crossed behind her back as though they’d been bound. Ligature marks on her wrists supported this notion.

Investigators found a small window open in the downstairs guest bathroom. The window screen had been removed and hidden in the bushes behind a juniper tree. Though the window was too small for an adult male to enter, they deduced that the perpetrator had reached through the window and unlocked the outside bathroom door.

Officers processing the crime scene noticed outlines of two tools that had been recently removed from a dusty gardening shelf in the hallway. One clearly belonged to a pipe wrench. The missing tool responsible for the other outline was later identified by Cheri’s ex-husband as likely having been a gardening instrument called a turf plugger. Neither the turf plugger nor the pipe wrench was ever located.

The police went door to door, canvassing the neighborhood. The next-door neighbor reported having been awakened at approximately two fifteen a.m. by barking dogs. He and his wife looked out the window. They observed nothing of concern and returned to bed.

Two thirteen-year-old boys told police they had been walking in the neighborhood at about nine forty-five p.m. when they saw someone standing behind a large tree a block over from the crime scene. They thought the individual was male, but couldn’t be sure; in the shadows, it was merely a blank silhouette.

Len and Carol Goldschein reported that they’d gone out for a walk that night and had a strange encounter. At approximately ten thirty p.m., as they were heading westward on University Drive, they noticed that an unfamiliar man appeared to be following them, and was gaining on them. As they turned onto Berkeley Road, the subject crossed the street and continued walking parallel to them.

The man was white, in his late teens or maybe early twenties, about five eleven, with a slender build and very blond, straight hair that reached his neck. He was clean-shaven. He was wearing an Ocean Pacific–type shirt with light blue trousers, corduroy or maybe denim.

At around eleven p.m. that same night, Tammy Straub and her daughter Carla were jogging on Merida Way when they spotted a suspicious young male with a German shepherd gazing toward the garage of one of the houses. He stood completely still, his back to them, as though he were frozen. The man appeared to be in his twenties or early thirties, five ten and well built. His hair was blond, and he was wearing white or beige tennis shorts and a light-colored T-shirt. A composite sketch was later made.

Detectives learned that, on the afternoon before the murders, Realtor Cami Bardo had been conducting an open house at the big red barn. While she was engaged with another party, a white male between thirty-five and forty years old walked in and, without saying a word, began exploring the house. Before she was able to break free from her conversation, the man left.

When the viewing was over, Bardo inspected the house and noticed some metal fragments in the kitchen. In retrospect, she realized that they looked consistent with a locking device from the rear door of the house.

Bardo described the strange open-house visitor as having bright blue eyes and short, light-brown hair that was curly and sun-streaked. He was tan, stood about five nine, and was wearing a green alligator shirt and faded Levi’s. She met with the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s sketch artist and a composite was drawn.

Initially, police considered the possibility that drug dealers had broken into the home and killed the couple, but those close to the victims dismissed this idea as ludicrous. Neither one did drugs. Detectives then focused their crosshairs on Cheri’s ex-husband. After grilling him relentlessly, they vetted his alibi. It checked out.

Over the years, locals dubbed the phantom responsible for the thwarted attack and two double murders the Creek Killer. Because all three couples targeted were unmarried, some speculated that the killer was a religious zealot who sought to punish those he deemed to be living in sin. Meanwhile, Santa Barbara investigators remained convinced that their killer was a local punk named Brett Glasby.

First eyed by Santa Barbara investigators as a potential suspect in 1980, Glasby was a local hood well known for his nastiness and violent temper. No one had a kind word to say about him. He was a mean bastard. An accomplished burglar, Glasby was tangentially connected to victim Robert Offerman: he and some thugs he ran with were the prime suspects in the savage beating of a janitor who worked in Offerman’s office building. Glasby lived in the target area and also had access to a .38 Smith & Wesson—the same type of gun used in the Offerman/Manning homicides. But ballistics tests ruled the gun out, and no physical evidence ever connected Glasby to any of the crimes.

Brett Glasby himself was murdered, alongside his brother Brian, in 1982. The two were vacationing in Mexico when they headed to the beach in San Juan de Alima for what they thought was a drug deal. Once there, they were robbed and shot to death in what turned out to be a setup. The Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department maintained that Glasby was likely responsible for the Offerman/Manning and Sanchez/Domingo double homicides, and they stuck to this conclusion even after Orange County’s cold-case unit linked the crimes by m.o. to the Original Night Stalker—whose last known crime was committed in 1986, four years after Glasby’s death.

In 2011, years after previous failed attempts, a DNA profile was successfully developed from degraded genetic material recovered from a blanket at the Sanchez/Domingo crime scene. It conclusively linked the Goleta cases to the East Area Rapist/Original Night Stalker.

Like Joe Alsip, Brett Glasby turned out to be just another red herring.

NO ONE EVER TOLD DEBBI DOMINGO THAT HER MOTHER’S KILLER might have claimed other victims. She found out only in the early 2000s, when cable true-crime programs began profiling the Original Night Stalker cases. By that time, Debbi was working as a prison guard in Texas, seven years clean after nearly a decade of addiction to methamphetamines. Her life had been thoroughly derailed after her mother’s murder.

On that day in July, when fifteen-year-old Debbi had first learned of her mother’s death, she called her grandmother and told her that her mother was dead.

“Debbi,” her grandmother replied, “it’s not nice of you to joke like that.”

She moved to San Diego almost immediately after. Her mother’s side of the family gradually receded from her life. Shortly after her mother’s death, she’d overheard a family exchange that would haunt her. “Linda,” her grandmother told her aunt. “I’m so glad it wasn’t you. I don’t know what I would do if it had been you.”

Over the years, Debbi has reached out to her grandmother and to her aunt, hoping to rekindle a connection. They’ve never responded.