I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

by Michelle McNamara

  early days of DNA typing, only a few markers could be developed and analyzed. Today, there are thirteen standard CODIS markers. The likelihood of any two individuals (except identical twins) having the same human bar code is roughly one in a billion.

  In late 1996, when Mary Hong went to retrieve the Harrington and Witthuhn rape kits from the Property Room, DNA typing was experiencing exciting changes. The traditional process, RFLP, was still used by the state database, but it required ample DNA that couldn’t be degraded in any way. It wasn’t ideal for cold cases. But the Orange County Crime Lab had recently integrated a new technique, PCR-STR (polymerase chain reaction with short tandem repeat analysis), which was much faster than RFLP and is the backbone of forensic testing today. The difference between RFLP and PCR-STR is like copying down numbers in longhand versus using a high-speed Xerox machine. PCR-STR worked particularly well for cold cases, in which DNA samples might be minuscule or degraded by time.

  One of the first examples of forensic science solving a murder appears in a book called The Washing Away of Wrongs, published in 1247 by Song Ci, a Chinese coroner and detective. The author relates a story about a peasant found brutally hacked to death with a hand sickle. The local magistrate, unable to make headway in the investigation, calls for all the village men to assemble outside with their sickles; they’re instructed to place their sickles on the ground and then take a few steps back. The hot sun beats down. A buzz is heard. Metallic green flies descend in a chaotic swarm and then, as if collectively alerted, land on one sickle, crawling all over it as the other sickles lie undisturbed. The magistrate knew traces of blood and human tissue attract blowflies. The owner of the fly-covered sickle hung his head in shame. The case was solved.

  Methods are no longer so rudimentary. Centrifuge and microscope have replaced insects. The unidentified male DNA that

  was extracted from the Harrington and Witthuhn rape kits was subjected to the crime lab’s most sensitive tools: restriction enzymes, fluorescent dyes, thermal cyclers. But forensic science advancements are really just about finding the latest way to draw a blowfly to a bloody sickle. The goal is the same as it was in thirteenth-century rural China: cellular certainty establishing guilt.

  Hong appeared in Jim White’s doorway. He was at his desk.

  “Harrington,” she said. “Witthuhn.”

  He looked up expectantly. Criminalists like Hong and White are methodical people. They have to be. Their work is always being torn apart by defense attorneys in court. They often keep their conclusions broad (“blunt object”), which can cause tension with cops, who accuse them of being too self-defensively cautious. Cops and criminalists need each other but are temperamentally very different. Cops thrive on action. They are knee jigglers with paper-strewn desks they avoid. They want to be out there. Bad-guy behavior they know as muscle memory; if they approach a guy and he abruptly turns to the right, for instance, he’s probably concealing a gun. They know which drug leaves burn marks on fingerprints (crack) and about how long someone can survive without a pulse (four minutes.) They slog through chaos inured to bullshit and squalor. The job inflicts lacerations. In turn, the cop becomes lacerating. At his most lacerating, when the darkness has gone through him like dye through water, he’ll be called upon to comfort the parents of a dead girl. For some cops, the pivot from chaos to comfort becomes harder and harder to do, and they abandon the compassion part altogether.

  Criminalists orbit the chaos from a latex-sheathed remove. The crime lab is arid and rigorously maintained. There’s no hard-edged banter. Cops wrestle up close with life’s messiness; criminalists quantify it. But they’re also human beings. Details from cases they worked stay with them. Patty Harrington’s baby blanket, for

  example. Even as an adult she slept with the little white blanket every night, rubbing its silk edges for security. The baby blanket was found between her and Keith.

  “Same guy,” Hong said.

  Jim White allowed himself a smile before getting back to work.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, AS 1996 CAME TO A CLOSE, HONG WAS AT her desk scanning an Excel spreadsheet on her computer. The spreadsheet was a compilation of the twenty or so unsolved cases in which DNA profiles had been successfully developed. The chart cross-referenced case numbers and victims’ names with the profiles, which consisted of five PCR loci, or markers, that were then in use for typing. For example, under the marker “THO1” you might see the result “8, 7” and so forth. Hong knew the Harrington and Witthuhn profiles matched. But as her eyes swept over the spreadsheet, another profile stopped her cold. She read over the sequence several times and compared it to Harrington and Witthuhn to be certain. She wasn’t imagining it. It was the same.

  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 pr
operty, 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.

  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.

  “Never mind,” Martinez continued. “I just wanted to see if I had the guts to kill. It started in the bathroom and I fought with her first. I hit her with this steel thing.”

  Hickel asked him how it felt.

  Martinez told him, “It feels like nothing. It feels normal.” Hickel tried to hide his goosebumps.

  “I wanted to know if I had the guts to kill Jennifer,”* Martinez explained. Jennifer was his girlfriend. “I don’t care if I’m put in jail for twenty-five years. They don’t have the death penalty here. I killed Janelle, and I will pay for it.”

  Martinez told Hickel that he’d bee
n over at Janelle’s house the week before she died. He met her parents. He learned they were going to be out of town and Janelle would be home alone.

  “I purchased a single-shot shotgun from Big Five,” Martinez confided. “I’m going to use it to blow Jenny away, because she needs to die.”

  Hickel continued trying his damnedest to not react.

  “I’ll turn myself in to the cops after I do it,” he promised. “I’m going to do it on Saturday.” He didn’t say which Saturday.

  Before they parted ways, Martinez told Hickel that he was just kidding about killing Janelle.

  “I just wanted to see what you’d do.”

  What Hickel did was, he went to the police—to whom Mike

  Martinez was certainly no stranger. He had prior arrests for attempted marijuana possession, commercial burglary, residential burglary, assault and battery, and he had twice attempted suicide— once by drinking Drano. The residential burglary charge and one of the assault-and-battery charges stemmed from an incident with Jenny, the girlfriend Martinez intended to kill.

  And it turned out, Martinez repeated this sequence of crimes— the very night before Janelle was murdered. At one a.m., Martinez drunkenly broke into Jennifer’s apartment through the sliding glass door and confronted her, demanding to know why she’d ignored him when they’d crossed paths at a Carl’s Jr. a week before. With glazed eyes and unsteady footing, Martinez professed his love for Jennifer and in the same breath attacked her religious beliefs. She pleaded with him to leave. He ignored her. His blank expression betrayed no evidence that he even heard her talking to him.