I'll Be Gone in the Dark(7)
jurisdictions, but most of them used the Sheriff’s Department’s crime lab. Thus the Witthuhn investigators knew only Irvine cases, but White had worked crime scenes all across the county, from Santa Ana to San Clemente.
To Irvine police, Manuela Witthuhn’s murder was rare.
To Jim White, it was familiar.
Dana Point, 1980
ROGER HARRINGTON READ THE HANDWRITTEN NOTE THAT WAS stuck under the doorbell. It was dated 8/20/80, the day before.
Patty and Keith,
We came by at 7:00 and no one was home.
Call us if plans have changed-?
It was signed “Merideth and Jay,” names Roger recognized as friends of his daughter-in-law. He tried the front door and was surprised to find it locked. Keith and Patty rarely locked up when they were home, especially when they were expecting him for dinner. When Roger pulled into the driveway, he’d hit the garage door opener, and there were Keith’s and Patty’s cars, his MG and her VW. If they weren’t inside, they must be out jogging, Roger figured. He reached for a key hidden above the patio trellis and entered the house, taking the mail, which at a dozen pieces seemed unusually bulky, inside with him.
The house at 33381 Cockleshell Drive is one of roughly 950 in Niguel Shores, a gated community in Dana Point, a beach town in southern Orange County. Roger owned the home, though his main residence was a condo in nearby Lakewood, closer to his office in Long Beach. His twenty-four-year-old son, Keith, a third-year medical student at the University of California–Irvine, and Keith’s new wife, Patty, a registered nurse, were living in the house
for the time being, a fact that made Roger happy. He liked to have his family close by.
The house was decorated in late-seventies style. Swordfish on the wall. Tiffany chandelier. Ropy plant hangers. Roger mixed himself a drink in the kitchen. Even though it wasn’t yet dusk, the house was shadowed and still. The only thing moving was the ocean glinting blue through the south-facing windows and sliding glass doors. An Alpha Beta grocery bag with two cans of food sat in the kitchen sink. A loaf of sheepherder bread was out, three stale-looking pieces stacked beside it. Roger felt, by degrees, a creeping fear.
He walked down the ochre-colored carpeted hallway toward the bedrooms. The door to the guest bedroom, where Keith and Patty slept, was open. Closed shutters made it hard to see. The bed was made, the comforter pulled up to the dark wood headboard. An unusual bump under the bedspread caught Roger’s attention as he was about to close the door. He went over and pressed down, feeling something hard. He pulled back the comforter.
The contrast between the top of the undisturbed bedspread and what lay underneath was hard to compute. Keith and Patty were lying on their stomachs. Their arms were bent at strange angles, palms up. They seemed, in the strictest sense of the word, broken. Were it not for the ceiling, you might think they’d fallen from a great height, such was the spread of blood beneath them.
Keith was the youngest of Roger’s four sons. Excellent student. All-conference shortstop in high school. He’d had one long-term girlfriend before Patty, a fellow undergraduate premed student whom everyone assumed he’d marry until, inexplicably to Roger, she chose another med school to attend and the couple broke up. Keith met Patty shortly after that at UCI Medical Center, and they were married within a year. In the back of his mind, Roger worried that Keith was rebounding and moving too fast, but
Patty was warm and clean-cut like Keith—she’d broken up with a previous live-in boyfriend because he used marijuana—and they seemed devoted to each other. Roger had recently been spending a lot of time with “the kids,” as he referred to them. He’d helped install a new sprinkling system in the yard. The three of them had spent the previous Saturday clearing brush. Later that night they’d hosted a barbeque for Patty’s father’s birthday at the house.
In the movies, people who discover a dead body shake the corpse disbelievingly. Roger didn’t do that. Didn’t need to. Even in the dim light, he could see his fair-skinned son was purple.
There was no sign of a struggle, no evidence of forced entry, though one of the sliding doors had possibly been left unlocked. Patty bought groceries at 9:48 p.m. on Tuesday night, according to the Alpha Beta receipt. Her sister, Sue, called after that, at 11:00 p.m. Keith answered sleepily and handed the phone to Patty. She told Sue they were in bed; she was expecting an early morning call from the nurse registry. A metal fragment consistent with brass was found in Patty’s head wound. That suggested that sometime after Patty hung up with her sister and before she didn’t appear at work Wednesday morning, someone picked up one of the newly installed brass sprinkler heads from the yard and slipped inside the house. In a subdivision with a manned gate. And no one heard a thing.
REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE OF THE WITTHUHN CASE SIX MONTHS later, criminalist Jim White of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department felt in his gut that it was connected to the Harrington murders. The cases shared similarities big and small. They involved middle-class victims bludgeoned to death in bed with objects the killer picked up at the home. In both cases, the killer took the murder weapon with him when he left. In both, the female victims were raped. The bodies of Keith and Patty Harrington showed evidence of ligature marks; pieces of macramé cord were
found in and around their bed. In the Witthuhn case, six months later, ligature marks were also present on the body, but the binding material had been removed from the scene. The difference felt like evidence of learning.