I'll Be Gone in the Dark(33)
The victim was an eighteen-year-old named Janelle Cruz whose body had been discovered in her family’s Irvine home on May 5, 1986. No one had ever proposed that Cruz could be connected to Harrington or Witthuhn, even though Cruz lived in Northwood, the same subdivision as Witthuhn, and their houses were just two miles apart. It wasn’t just the five-year-plus time span. Or that Janelle was a decade younger than Patty Harrington and Manuela Witthuhn. She was different.
Irvine, 1986
[EDITOR’S NOTE: The following chapter was pieced together from Michelle’s notes.]
THE BRIEF LIFE OF JANELLE CRUZ WAS NO LESS TRAGIC THAN HER death. Her biological father was long out of the picture. She’d suffered a string of stepfathers and stand-ins, most of whom abused her in various ways. Her mother was more committed to partying and doing drugs than raising her—or at least that’s how Janelle saw it.
She moved around a lot: from New Jersey to Tustin to Lake Arrowhead to Newport Beach and finally to Irvine.
When she was fifteen, she was drugged and raped by the father of her best friend while at their house for a sleepover. Janelle told her family, and they confronted the man, who was a soldier at the nearby marine base. He denied it. When Janelle’s family pressed, he sicced some fellow soldiers on them to intimidate them into letting the matter drop. The crime went unreported.
In the years that followed, Janelle began rebelling. She dressed in black. She withdrew. She started cutting herself. She used cocaine— less for recreational purposes than for weight loss. Her mother sent her away to various places, ranging from YMCA camp to Job Corps in Utah to a short-term psychiatric hospital.
She earned her high school diploma from Job Corps and returned
to Irvine, where she enrolled in classes at the local college while cultivating a rotating menu of sex partners, mostly men a few years her senior. She began working as a hostess for Bullwinkle’s Restaurant, a Chuck E. Cheese–style family eatery named after the titular moose from Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.
Irvine’s motto, goes the joke, is “sixteen zip codes, six floor plans.” Or “Irvine: we have sixty-two words for beige.” Janelle roved in her monochrome tract in a kind of fitful, searching daze. The jolt she sought, the love, never came.
On May 3, 1986, her mother and stepfather left for a vacation to Cancún.
The following evening, a male co-worker from Bullwinkle’s hung out with Janelle after she told him she was lonely with her parents out of town. They sat on her bedroom floor; she read him some of her poems. His hopeful romantic interest kept him there as she played a forty-five-minute tape recording of a counseling session in which she railed against her messed-up family. A noise outside, like a gate or door closing, startled them. Janelle peeked out her window and closed the shutters. “I think it’s just the cats,” Janelle said while peering through the window. Sometime later, the noise recurred, this time from the direction of the garage.
Janelle again dismissed it. “It’s just the washing machine.”
The teenage workmate, recalling that it was a school night, left a short time later. Janelle gave him a friendly hug good-bye.
*
LINDA SHEEN* LEFT HER DESK AT TARBELL REALTY ON THE AFTERNOON of May 5 to visit a home in Irvine for a prospective buyer. The property, located at 13 Encina, was a three-bedroom, two-bath single-story house that had been on the market for several months.
It was still inhabited by its owner, along with her four children— including two grown daughters—and her husband. It was a house that looked virtually indistinguishable from so many others in the Northwood community, including the one at 35 Columbus, a mile away, where a twenty-nine-year-old housewife had been bludgeoned to death in her bed five years earlier in an unsolved crime that was quickly forgotten.
The house at 13 Encina backed up to a park and was the second-to-last house at the end of a cul-de-sac, sealed by a hedge wall with a break in the middle that led to undeveloped property that marked the end of civilization: miles of orange groves and open fields insulated Northwood from nearby Tustin and Santa Ana. Only ten years earlier, those same orange groves had tiled the land on which 13 Encina and its surrounding neighborhood now stood. Two decades later, the remaining groves gave way almost completely to urbanization, with a mammoth strip mall and uniform housing developments paving the entire distance to those other cities.
Sheen arrived at 13 Encina and rang the doorbell. Although there was a beige Chevette parked in the driveway, nothing inside the house stirred, so she rang again. Still silence, much like earlier in the afternoon when she’d phoned the home and received no answer. She proceeded to the lockbox and retrieved the key, letting herself in.
She looked around and noticed that the dining room light was on. In the kitchen, a carton of milk stood on the breakfast table. A newspaper was open to the Employment section. She put her business card on the dining table and walked to the family room, peering through the sliding glass door into the backyard. She saw several lawn chairs and a lounge chair with a towel draped over it. She went to the master bedroom and turned the doorknob, but it was locked. The second bedroom looked like that of a child, and as Sheen entered the last bedroom at the end of the hall, she saw
the body of a young woman lying motionless in the bed, with a blanket covering her head.