I'll Be Gone in the Dark(34)
A jolt of fear surged through Linda Sheen. She felt she might not be alone in the house. She might be in the wrong place at the wrong time, seeing something she shouldn’t be seeing. The woman appeared not to be sleeping but either unconscious— perhaps from a drug overdose—or dead. Sheen bolted from 13 Encina and returned to her office, where she told her boss, Norm Prato,* of her discovery. He told her to phone the residence again. She did—twice. No one answered.
Linda and Norm relayed the situation to colleagues Arthur Hogue* and Carol Nosler* at Century 21, which was handling the sale of the home. The pair skeptically swung by 13 Encina and entered to indeed find the body of a young woman, unquestionably dead. Hogue called the police and told them he found a young lady with her head caved in.
Irvine PD officer Barry Aninag was the first to respond to the scene. As he entered the home, he was immediately approached by Arthur Hogue, who emerged from the kitchen and urgently reported, “There’s a dead body in the bedroom. There’s a dead body in the bedroom.”
He repeated this a few more times as Aninag made his way to the last bedroom down the hall. On the bed was the nude body of a young woman who would later be identified as Janelle Cruz. She was cold to the touch and had no pulse. The body was lying face up, with the chest and face covered by a blanket that featured a large, dark stain over where the victim’s head would probably be. Aninag slowly peeled away the blanket that was stubbornly adhering to the victim’s face, revealing a massive wound to her forehead, bruising on her nose, and a veritable mask of blood.
Three of her teeth had been knocked out. Two of them were found in her hair.
Between her legs were flakes of dried fluid, which lab analysis would reveal to be semen. Tufts of blue fibers were found on her body, suggesting that a fabric had been ripped apart by someone as they stood over her.
Tennis shoe prints were found on the east side of the house. No ligatures or weapons were found at the scene.
A heavy red pipe wrench that had been in the backyard was missing, it was later determined.
Police canvassing the neighborhood gleaned little in the way of useful leads. A door-to-door solicitor from a window-washing company had been passing out yellow flyers the night before the murder. A neighborhood kid said he’d heard the girl at 13 Encina had been beaten to death and alerted the cops to a broken baseball bat he spotted in a nearby field. They followed him to the site. A snail oozed its way across the surface of the bat, which was mostly intact. Grass was growing on it. Clearly it had been languishing there for some time.
One neighbor heard Janelle’s Chevette, with its distinctively loud muffler, pulling in at around eleven fifteen p.m.—about half an hour after her co-worker would have left the residence. He heard the engine turn off and one of the doors slam shut.
At four a.m. and five thirty a.m. that morning, two different neighbors respectively observed “an inordinate amount of light” emanating from the residence.
Janelle’s sister, Michelle, was vacationing in Mammoth when she received the call: “Janelle has been murdered.”
The connection was not pristine. Michelle repeated what she thought she heard in utter disbelief: “Janelle got married?!”
The words were clearer the second time around.
Lead investigator Larry Montgomery and his colleagues began
scrutinizing Janelle’s activities, uncovering a litany of young men who wandered through her life in the days before her murder. There was Randy Gill,* from YMCA camp, who’d been having sex with Janelle and phoned her the night she was killed. He reputedly had a drinking problem. Janelle broke up with him two weeks before her murder. There was Martin Gomez,* an ex-convict who met Janelle at a previous workplace and eased into a sexual relationship with her that she eventually broke off after he became obsessive and controlling. And Philip Michaels,* a lifeguard Janelle had just begun dating, who hung out with her the day before she was murdered. He was also sleeping with Janelle— though he initially denied it.
And then, the Davids: David Decker,* who met Janelle at the YMCA camp when he was a counselor and she was a camper, and had last seen her two days before she died; David Thompson* (not to be confused with Ron Thomsen*—the last boy to see her alive), who also worked with her at Bullwinkle’s; and Dave Kowalski,* another boyfriend, who’d visited Janelle at her home the day of her death and told her he loved her. He gave her a Seiko wristwatch as a token of his feelings. It was found next to her body.
There were also the weirdos and outliers like Bruce Wendt,* an oddball who’d been to Janelle’s house shortly before the murder. His entry in Janelle’s address book was accompanied by a handwritten notation: “Fuckhead, jerk, asshole, faggot.”
And then there was the one who confessed.
*
TOM HICKEL* WAS IN HIS VAN, DRIVING HOME FROM THE MOVIES with his friend Mike Martinez* in the passenger seat. Midway through the drive, Martinez suddenly turned to him and said, “I
have to get something off of my chest.” Hickel didn’t brace himself hard enough for what followed.
“I killed her.” Martinez spoke as if unloading a burden. “I killed Janelle.”
He looked dead serious.
“You know that steel thing I have?”
“I don’t know what steel ‘thing’ you’re talking about,” Hickel replied.