I'll Be Gone in the Dark(39)
The couple’s next-door neighbor was an FBI agent. Alerted by the woman’s scream, he came outside just in time to see a man furiously pedal past on a stolen silver Nishiki ten-speed. Pendleton shirt. Jeans. Knife holster. Tennis shoes. A blur of brown hair. The agent gave chase in his car; his headlights connected with the biker a few blocks later on San Patricio Drive. When the headlights hit him, the suspect dropped the bike and hopped the fence between two houses.
The couple could give only a general description. White male. Dark hair above the collar. Five ten or five eleven. Around twenty-five, they guessed.
After that, none of his victims ever lived to describe him again.
*
THE BODIES WERE IN THE BEDROOM.
On the morning of December 30, 1979, Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s deputies responded to a call at 767 Avenida Pequena, the condominium of osteopathic surgeon Dr. Robert Offerman. Offerman’s good friends Peter and Marlene Brady* had arrived
for a scheduled tennis game with him and his new girlfriend, Alexandria Manning, and found a sliding glass door open at the condo. They stepped inside and called out to Offerman but got no response. Peter crossed the living room and peered down the hallway toward the bedroom.
There’s a “girl lying on the bed naked,” he reported back to his wife.
“Let’s go,” Marlene said, not wanting to interrupt. They began to leave.
But after a few paces, Peter stopped. Something wasn’t right. Hadn’t he called out to Offerman loudly? He pivoted and returned to the bedroom to take a closer look.
When the deputies arrived, Marlene Brady was standing out front crying.
“There are two people dead inside,” she said.
Debra Alexandria Manning lay on the right side of the waterbed, her head turned to the left, her wrists bound behind her with white nylon twine. Offerman was on his knees at the foot of the bed; he clutched a length of the same twine in his hand. Pry marks indicated that the offender used a screwdriver to force his way inside the home, probably in the middle of the night when the couple was asleep. Flashing a gun, he may have suggested he was there to rob them: two rings belonging to Manning were found hidden between the mattress and bed frame.
The attacker most likely tossed the twine at Manning and demanded she tie up Offerman, which she did, but not tightly. Investigators believe at some point, perhaps after the offender was finished tying Manning’s wrists, Offerman broke free from his bindings in an attempt to fight back.
Neighbors reported that at around three a.m. they heard a burst of gunfire, which was followed by a pause and then another shot. Offerman was shot three times in the back and chest. Manning’s single wound was to the upper left back of her head.
The book on Offerman’s nightstand was Your Perfect Right: A Guide to Assertive Behavior, by Robert E. Alberti. It was the holidays. A green wreath with red flowers hung on the front door. There was a pine tree in a bucket in the entryway. As authorities processed the crime scene, they stepped around a turkey carcass wrapped in cellophane that had been discarded on the patio. They concluded that at some point the killer had opened the refrigerator and helped himself to Dr. Offerman’s leftover Christmas dinner.
Whoever the killer was, he’d been on a restless hunt that night. Investigators could track the star-shaped pattern from his Adidas running shoes as he circled Offerman’s condo. They noted the trampled flowerbed at 769 Avenida Pequena, the vacant condo next door. Inside was evidence of squatting, most notably in the bathroom, where a length of nylon twine was left behind.
Reports came in of ransackings and break-ins in the neighborhood in the hours before the murders. When a couple who lived on Windsor Court, a half mile from Offerman’s condo, pulled up to their house at around ten fifteen p.m., they spotted a man running through their living room toward the back door. As they came inside they heard him jump the rear fence. A white male in a dark fisherman’s hat and dark jacket was all they could say for sure. He’d brutally punched their poodle in the eye.
In the days after the murders, investigators continued to discover pieces of nylon twine dropped in various locations: on a dirt trail alongside San Jose Creek, on a lawn on Queen Ann Lane. They couldn’t be certain when the Queen Ann Lane twine had been left, though; a few doors down lived the couple who had narrowly escaped Offerman and Manning’s fate just two months before. It was all there in the police reports. Nylon twine. Pry marks. Adidas running-shoe impressions.
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.