I'll Be Gone in the Dark(45)
Like Joe Alsip, Brett Glasby turned out to be just another red herring.
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NO ONE EVER TOLD DEBBI DOMINGO THAT HER MOTHER’S KILLER might have claimed other victims. She found out only in the early 2000s, when cable true-crime programs began profiling the Original Night Stalker cases. By that time, Debbi was working as a prison guard in Texas, seven years clean after nearly a decade of addiction to methamphetamines. Her life had been thoroughly derailed after her mother’s murder.
On that day in July, when fifteen-year-old Debbi had first learned of her mother’s death, she called her grandmother and told her that her mother was dead.
“Debbi,” her grandmother replied, “it’s not nice of you to joke like that.”
She moved to San Diego almost immediately after. Her mother’s side of the family gradually receded from her life. Shortly after her mother’s death, she’d overheard a family exchange that would haunt her. “Linda,” her grandmother told her aunt. “I’m so glad it wasn’t you. I don’t know what I would do if it had been you.”
Over the years, Debbi has reached out to her grandmother and to her aunt, hoping to rekindle a connection. They’ve never responded.
Orange County, 2000
OLD-TIMERS AT THE ORANGE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT WOULD see Larry Pool’s furrowed brow, the victims’ photos pinned to the board above his cubicle, the binders accumulating around him like a dreary fortress.
“Guy’s dead,” they’d tell Pool flatly, as if repeating a basketball score from last night’s game. “Or a lifer. Those guys never stop.”
“Those guys” were psychopaths, serial killers, monsters. Whatever you called them, the conventional wisdom was that extremely violent serial offenders didn’t stop killing until they were forced to by death, disability, or imprisonment. Pool’s target had last struck in 1986. It was 2000.
“So why do you care?” The old-timers would needle Pool. The attitude rankled him. It ignited his rectitude and made him double down on a belief he kept to himself: he was going to catch the guy.
Santa Barbara didn’t yet have DNA, but the m.o. was strong enough that Pool included it in the series of murders along with Cruz. October 1, 1979, to May 5, 1986. Ten bodies. Two survivors. The scope of the case gave investigators a lot to work with. They decided to hold off contacting the media until they’d exhausted leads. They didn’t want to tip the killer off. Pool agreed with the old-timers that a guy this prolifically violent might be doing time somewhere on a serious charge. He scoured arrest records. Peepers. Prowlers. Burglars. Rapists. They exhumed an ex-con’s body in Baltimore. Zip. Nothing.
Pool kept the search command roving in his brain. One day he flashed back on the first autopsy he ever witnessed, near the end of Police Academy training. The body was removed from the bag and laid onto the steel table. The deceased male was five eleven, with dark hair, brawny. And hog-tied. He was wearing women’s shoes, hosiery, panties, and a stuffed bra. The cause of death was toluene poisoning; he’d been sniffing glue out of a sock while indulging in some kind of autoerotic experience. Pool could see ejaculate on the panties. The sight made an impression on the straitlaced Pool. Looking back, he wondered if maybe their killer sometimes experimented with binding himself when he didn’t have a victim. He thought back and placed the autopsy in October 1986, five months after the last murder.
He dug up the hog-tied guy’s history. There was no criminal record; no link to the other crime locations. He’d been cremated. If he was their guy, Pool thought, we’re toast. Pool gathered coroners’ reports from May 5 through December 31, 1986, in every county in Southern California and began combing through them. Leads failed to develop. After a while, going to the media didn’t sound so bad.
The October 1, 2000, edition of the Orange County Register ran the first article about the DNA link: “DNA May Point to Serial Killer in the Area.” Pool was described as having ninety-three binders of material on the case in his office.
“Our killer is the original ‘Night Stalker,’” Pool said.
His intention was only to point out that their killer’s crimes predated those of Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, who terrorized Southern California from 1984 to 1985, but much to his chagrin the confusing nickname stuck. It was the Original Night Stalker from then on.
The article opened with speculation about where the killer could be. Dead. Behind bars. Plotting his next murder. There was no speculation about his past. Privately many of the Orange
County investigators suspected the killer came from Goleta, as that’s where the murders started. One of Pool’s colleagues, Larry Montgomery, even drove up there and spent a few days asking elementary-school teachers, active and retired, from the neighborhood around San Jose Creek if they recalled any troubled young boys they taught in the midsixties, boys who worried them in an abusing-small-animals sort of way. He returned with a few names, but they checked out and had grown up okay.
The October 1, 1979, attack did possess some juvenile elements that suggested maybe a local punk. The stolen ten-speed. The steak knife grabbed from inside the house. But other clues, passed over at the time, suggested experience honed somewhere else, not in the dope haze of cliquey surfers who were long on talk and short on misdemeanors, but in isolation, solitary but compulsive—alienation channeled into raw criminal skill. He didn’t just jimmy a lock at the couple’s house that night. He pulled the doorframe off and threw it over the fence.