فصل 03

3

Dana Point, 1980

ROGER HARRINGTON READ THE HANDWRITTEN NOTE THAT WAS stuck under the doorbell. It was dated 8/20/80, the day before.

Patty and Keith,

We came by at 7:00 and no one was home.

Call us if plans have changed-?

It was signed “Merideth and Jay,” names Roger recognized as friends of his daughter-in-law. He tried the front door and was surprised to find it locked. Keith and Patty rarely locked up when they were home, especially when they were expecting him for dinner. When Roger pulled into the driveway, he’d hit the garage door opener, and there were Keith’s and Patty’s cars, his MG and her VW. If they weren’t inside, they must be out jogging, Roger figured. He reached for a key hidden above the patio trellis and entered the house, taking the mail, which at a dozen pieces seemed unusually bulky, inside with him.

The house at 33381 Cockleshell Drive is one of roughly 950 in Niguel Shores, a gated community in Dana Point, a beach town in southern Orange County. Roger owned the home, though his main residence was a condo in nearby Lakewood, closer to his office in Long Beach. His twenty-four-year-old son, Keith, a third-year medical student at the University of California–Irvine, and Keith’s new wife, Patty, a registered nurse, were living in the house for the time being, a fact that made Roger happy. He liked to have his family close by.

The house was decorated in late-seventies style. Swordfish on the wall. Tiffany chandelier. Ropy plant hangers. Roger mixed himself a drink in the kitchen. Even though it wasn’t yet dusk, the house was shadowed and still. The only thing moving was the ocean glinting blue through the south-facing windows and sliding glass doors. An Alpha Beta grocery bag with two cans of food sat in the kitchen sink. A loaf of sheepherder bread was out, three stale-looking pieces stacked beside it. Roger felt, by degrees, a creeping fear.

He walked down the ochre-colored carpeted hallway toward the bedrooms. The door to the guest bedroom, where Keith and Patty slept, was open. Closed shutters made it hard to see. The bed was made, the comforter pulled up to the dark wood headboard. An unusual bump under the bedspread caught Roger’s attention as he was about to close the door. He went over and pressed down, feeling something hard. He pulled back the comforter.

The contrast between the top of the undisturbed bedspread and what lay underneath was hard to compute. Keith and Patty were lying on their stomachs. Their arms were bent at strange angles, palms up. They seemed, in the strictest sense of the word, broken. Were it not for the ceiling, you might think they’d fallen from a great height, such was the spread of blood beneath them.

Keith was the youngest of Roger’s four sons. Excellent student. All-conference shortstop in high school. He’d had one long-term girlfriend before Patty, a fellow undergraduate premed student whom everyone assumed he’d marry until, inexplicably to Roger, she chose another med school to attend and the couple broke up. Keith met Patty shortly after that at UCI Medical Center, and they were married within a year. In the back of his mind, Roger worried that Keith was rebounding and moving too fast, but Patty was warm and clean-cut like Keith—she’d broken up with a previous live-in boyfriend because he used marijuana—and they seemed devoted to each other. Roger had recently been spending a lot of time with “the kids,” as he referred to them. He’d helped install a new sprinkling system in the yard. The three of them had spent the previous Saturday clearing brush. Later that night they’d hosted a barbeque for Patty’s father’s birthday at the house.

In the movies, people who discover a dead body shake the corpse disbelievingly. Roger didn’t do that. Didn’t need to. Even in the dim light, he could see his fair-skinned son was purple.

There was no sign of a struggle, no evidence of forced entry, though one of the sliding doors had possibly been left unlocked. Patty bought groceries at 9:48 p.m. on Tuesday night, according to the Alpha Beta receipt. Her sister, Sue, called after that, at 11:00 p.m. Keith answered sleepily and handed the phone to Patty. She told Sue they were in bed; she was expecting an early morning call from the nurse registry. A metal fragment consistent with brass was found in Patty’s head wound. That suggested that sometime after Patty hung up with her sister and before she didn’t appear at work Wednesday morning, someone picked up one of the newly installed brass sprinkler heads from the yard and slipped inside the house. In a subdivision with a manned gate. And no one heard a thing.

REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE OF THE WITTHUHN CASE SIX MONTHS later, criminalist Jim White of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department felt in his gut that it was connected to the Harrington murders. The cases shared similarities big and small. They involved middle-class victims bludgeoned to death in bed with objects the killer picked up at the home. In both cases, the killer took the murder weapon with him when he left. In both, the female victims were raped. The bodies of Keith and Patty Harrington showed evidence of ligature marks; pieces of macramé cord were found in and around their bed. In the Witthuhn case, six months later, ligature marks were also present on the body, but the binding material had been removed from the scene. The difference felt like evidence of learning.

The cases also shared an intriguing medical link. Keith Harrington was a med student at UC-Irvine, and Patty was a nurse who sometimes worked shifts at Mercy Hospital in Santa Ana. David Witthuhn, Manuela’s husband, had been a patient at Santa Ana–Tustin Community Hospital when his wife was murdered.

A wooden match with a short burn was found on the Harrington’s kitchen floor. None of the Harringtons were smokers; investigators believe it belonged to the killer.

Four wooden matches were collected from the flowerbed alongside the Witthuhn house.

Witthuhn was an Irvine PD case; Harrington was Orange County Sheriff’s. Investigators on both teams debated the possible connection. Taking on two people, as the Harringtons’ killer had, was considered unusual. It was high risk. It suggested the killer’s pleasure was in part derived from raising the stakes. Would the same killer, six months later, target a single victim, as Witthuhn’s had? The counterargument was that David’s hospital stay had been a fluke. Was the killer surprised to find Manuela alone that night?

Theft (Manuela’s jewelry) versus no theft. Forced entry versus no forced entry. They didn’t have fingerprints to match; DNA was far in the future. The killer hadn’t left an ace of spades at both scenes to identify himself. But small details lingered. When Keith Harrington was fatally struck, the wood headboard above him was dented. Investigators concluded from the location of a wood chip found between Patty’s legs that Keith was killed first and then Patty was sexually assaulted. The chronology was planned for her maximum suffering. Manuela’s killer spent enough time with her that she was stressed to the point of nausea: her vomit was found on the bed.

“Overkill” is a popular but sometimes misused term in criminal investigations and crime stories. Even seasoned homicide investigators occasionally misinterpret an offender’s behavior when he uses a great deal of force. It’s common to assume that a murder involving overkill means there was a relationship between offender and victim, an unleashing of pent-up rage borne of familiarity. “This was personal,” goes the cliché.†

But that assumption fails to consider external causes of behavior. The level of force may depend on how much a victim resists. Tremendous injuries that look like a personal relationship gone horribly wrong might be the result of a protracted struggle between strangers.

Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They have fists for hands and can’t plan beyond their sightlines. They’re caught easily. They talk too much. They return to the scene of the crime, as conspicuous as tin cans on a bumper. But every so often a blue moon surfaces. A snow leopard slinks by.

Every so often investigators encounter a stranger murder involving the overkill of victims who didn’t resist.

Considering that Manuela and Patty were bound and therefore by definition compliant, the amount of force used to bludgeon them revealed an extreme amount of rage directed at the female. It was unusual to see such frenzied anger combined with calculated planning. A forensic match between the cases didn’t exist but a feeling did, a sense that a single mind was at work, someone who didn’t leave many clues or talk or show his face, someone who strolled undetected in the middle-class swarm, an ordinary man with a resting-pulse derangement.

The possible connection between Harrington and Witthuhn was never dismissed outright, just put aside as the cases went cold. In August 1981, several newspaper articles questioned whether or not the Harrington case was related to other recent double homicides in Southern California. “Is a psychopathic ‘Night Stalker’ murdering Southern California couples in their beds?” was the opening line of an article in the Los Angeles Times.

The Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department had been the first to raise the idea of a connection. They had two double homicides and a knife attack in which the couple escaped. But the other counties with proposed linked cases, Ventura and Orange, downplayed the idea. Ventura officials, still smarting from a highly publicized preliminary hearing where the case against their double homicide suspect fell apart, were quoted as saying they thought Santa Barbara had jumped the gun. Orange County was skeptical too. “We don’t feel that,” said investigator Darryl Coder.

And that was that. Five years passed. Ten years. The phone never rang with the right tip. The files, periodically reviewed, never divulged the necessary information. Roger Harrington obsessed over the details, trying to make sense of Keith and Patty’s murders. He hired a private investigator. He offered a large reward. Friends and co-workers were reinterviewed. Nothing sparked. In desperation, Roger, a tough, self-made businessman, broke down and consulted a clairvoyant. The psychic couldn’t lift the fog. Roger reexamined every moment he spent with Keith and Patty before their deaths. Their murders were a loop of fragmentary details that never cohered and never stopped rotating in his head.