I'll Be Gone in the Dark(30)
bedroom window a week earlier. The prowler would pester them for two months, visiting the residence one last time in October.
From 1973 through early 1976, numerous other teenaged and young adult women in the neighborhood had run-ins with a window peeper who fit the same description.
But once the composite sketch based on Bill McGowen’s run-in with the Ransacker was released to the local press in mid-December 1976, he never struck Visalia again.
*
AND YET THE RANSACKER INVESTIGATION BARRELED ON FULL TILT. For an unsolved serial case to advance, it needs to go back. Early reports are pored over, hindsight wielded like a magnifying glass. Victims and eyewitnesses are recontacted. Dulled memories sometimes sharpen. Occasionally an overlooked clue shakes loose. Someone will remember an incident that wasn’t necessarily officially reported. They’ll have a name but not a number. Calls are made.
Visalia detectives in contact with Sacramento authorities in 1977 noted at least a dozen similarities between the two offenders. Among them: Both offenders ransacked. Both stole trinkets and personalized jewelry while leaving items of greater value behind. Both employed a similar manner of approach, climbing astride their sleeping victims and placing a hand over their mouths. Both used household items to create a makeshift alarm system. Both used a similar breaking and entering method, using a pry tool to chip around a doorjamb and bypass the striker plate. Both hopped fences; both were about five nine; both removed purses from inside the residence and dumped the contents outside. It was a compelling list. Visalia investigators thought they were onto something.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s personnel compared the two
series and saw insurmountable differences. For starters, six of nine m.o. factors didn’t match. The shoe impressions differed. The shoe sizes even differed. The EAR didn’t steal Blue Chip stamps. And the physical descriptions were fundamentally different. After all, descriptions of the Ransacker pointed to a highly distinctive appearance: an outsize baby with stubby limbs and fingers and a smooth, pale complexion. The EAR was described as anywhere from medium to slight in build, with one victim going so far as to call him “puny.” In the summer months, he appeared tanned. Even if the Ransacker had lost weight, it seemed unlikely he was a shape-shifter.
Visalia disagreed and went to the press. In July 1978, the Sacramento Union published an article in which the possibility of a link was promoted and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department was criticized for its closed-mindedness. The following day, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department struck back in the press, denouncing the Union for irresponsible journalism and accusing the Visalia Police Department of publicity seeking and desperation.
The Sacramento city police department, however, remained open to the possibility of a connection. Richard Shelby occasionally mined the avenue too. The Sacramento Sheriff’s Department asked local utility companies for lists of employees who had transferred from the Visalia area between December 1975 and April 1976. They found two. Both were subsequently eliminated.
Forty years later, official opinion is still divided, though more amiably so. Ken Clark, Sacramento’s current lead investigator, believes the two series are the work of the same offender. The FBI agrees. Contra Costa’s lead investigator, Paul Holes, does not. An endomorph does not magically become an ectomorph, Holes is quick to observe.
Orange County, 1996
ROGER HARRINGTON DEVELOPED ONE BELIEF THAT HE MAINTAINED steadfastly, despite the uncomfortable implications. He was quoted in an October 1988 Orange Coast magazine story, eight years after the murder of his son and daughter-in-law, as saying he was sure the motive lay somewhere in Patty’s background, not Keith’s. They’d been married only a few months. Patty seemed unassailable, but how much did they really know about her past? One detail made him certain the couple must have known the killer: the bedspread. The killer had taken the time to pull the cover over their heads.
“Whoever did it knew them and was sorry they’d done it,” Roger told the magazine.
In the old days, unsolved cases were solved by the unexpected phone call—the shrill ring of a rotary phone that signaled a deathbed confession or a tipster with verifiable facts. But the phone never rang for Keith and Patty Harrington or Manuela Witthuhn. Instead, the break came in the form of three glass tubes stored in manila envelopes that hadn’t moved in fifteen years.
Few people could be expected to greet the news of a break with more enthusiasm than Roger Harrington. The blank face of his son’s killer dominated huge empty tracts of his mental map. The Orange Coast magazine profile about his search for Keith and Patty’s killer ends with a grim, plainspoken quote.
“That’s why I keep living: I don’t want to go till I find out.”
The three tubes that advanced the mystery closer to an answer
were opened and tested in October and November 1996. By December, results in hand, Orange County Sheriff’s investigators were ready to make phone calls to the families. But Roger Harrington never learned the news. He’d died a year and a half earlier, on March 8, 1995.
Had Roger lived, he would have learned more about the killer’s history; he would have discovered that he was wrong about why his son and daughter-in-law’s heads had been covered with the bedspread. It wasn’t remorse. The last time the killer bludgeoned a couple to death, it had been messy: he didn’t want Keith and Patty’s blood on him.