“What were you doing looking in my girlfriend’s window?” Carl asked.
The man looked away.
“Well, Ben, it looks like the guy’s got us here!” he said loudly, excitedly, as if calling to an accomplice off to the side.
There was no one there.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Carl asked.
Getting no answer, Carl moved closer.
“Leave me alone,” the man said. “Go away.”
His speech was slow and dull now, with a hint of an Okie accent.
Carl took another step forward. The man responded by sticking his hand in his pocket. He was wearing a brown cotton jacket with woven cuffs; it was a style that had been popular years earlier but had since gone out of fashion.
“Leave me alone,” he repeated flatly. “Go away.”
Carl noticed a bulge in the pocket where the man’s hand was. The detail took a split second to compute; when it did, Carl’s instincts ordered him to stand back. It was the strangest, most unsettling sense, glimpsing for a moment the dark circuitry at work behind the dull-eyed mask. The round-faced simpleton in unfashionable clothes with the flat voice of an Okie bumpkin was, as evidenced by the move for what was most certainly a concealed gun, someone else altogether. Carl stepped aside. He noticed when the man passed him that his face was pale and unusually smooth; Carl felt certain that he was at least twenty-five years old, but oddly for someone who had, as they might say in Visalia, “reached his majority,” it didn’t appear he could even shave.
Carl watched the man walk north up Sowell Street. He kept swiveling around every few seconds to make certain Carl wasn’t following him. Even then, with jittery body language of suspicion and fear, the man’s pale round face remained inert, smooth, and blank as an egg.
Even further back, in September of 1973, Fran Cleary* had a strange encounter in front of her West Kaweah Avenue home. As she was getting into her car, she heard a noise and looked up, spotting a man with light blond hair and a smooth round face emerging from her backyard. As he jogged into the street, he noticed Cleary and did an about-face, yelling out, “Catch you later, Sandy!” before jogging northbound onto a perpendicular road and disappearing from view. Fran told her fifteen-year-old daughter, Shari,* about the incident, and Shari revealed that she’d seen someone matching the same description peeping into her bedroom window a week earlier. The prowler would pester them for two months, visiting the residence one last time in October.
From 1973 through early 1976, numerous other teenaged and young adult women in the neighborhood had run-ins with a window peeper who fit the same description.
But once the composite sketch based on Bill McGowen’s run-in with the Ransacker was released to the local press in mid-December 1976, he never struck Visalia again.
* * *
AND YET THE RANSACKER INVESTIGATION BARRELED ON FULL TILT. For an unsolved serial case to advance, it needs to go back. Early reports are pored over, hindsight wielded like a magnifying glass. Victims and eyewitnesses are recontacted. Dulled memories sometimes sharpen. Occasionally an overlooked clue shakes loose. Someone will remember an incident that wasn’t necessarily officially reported. They’ll have a name but not a number. Calls are made.
Visalia detectives in contact with Sacramento authorities in 1977 noted at least a dozen similarities between the two offenders. Among them: Both offenders ransacked. Both stole trinkets and personalized jewelry while leaving items of greater value behind. Both employed a similar manner of approach, climbing astride their sleeping victims and placing a hand over their mouths. Both used household items to create a makeshift alarm system. Both used a similar breaking and entering method, using a pry tool to chip around a doorjamb and bypass the striker plate. Both hopped fences; both were about five nine; both removed purses from inside the residence and dumped the contents outside. It was a compelling list. Visalia investigators thought they were onto something.
Sacramento County Sheriff’s personnel compared the two series and saw insurmountable differences. For starters, six of nine m.o. factors didn’t match. The shoe impressions differed. The shoe sizes even differed. The EAR didn’t steal Blue Chip stamps. And the physical descriptions were fundamentally different. After all, descriptions of the Ransacker pointed to a highly distinctive appearance: an outsize baby with stubby limbs and fingers and a smooth, pale complexion. The EAR was described as anywhere from medium to slight in build, with one victim going so far as to call him “puny.” In the summer months, he appeared tanned. Even if the Ransacker had lost weight, it seemed unlikely he was a shape-shifter.
Visalia disagreed and went to the press. In July 1978, the Sacramento Union published an article in which the possibility of a link was promoted and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department was criticized for its closed-mindedness. The following day, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department struck back in the press, denouncing the Union for irresponsible journalism and accusing the Visalia Police Department of publicity seeking and desperation.
The Sacramento city police department, however, remained open to the possibility of a connection. Richard Shelby occasionally mined the avenue too. The Sacramento Sheriff’s Department asked local utility companies for lists of employees who had transferred from the Visalia area between December 1975 and April 1976. They found two. Both were subsequently eliminated.
Forty years later, official opinion is still divided, though more amiably so. Ken Clark, Sacramento’s current lead investigator, believes the two series are the work of the same offender. The FBI agrees. Contra Costa’s lead investigator, Paul Holes, does not. An endomorph does not magically become an ectomorph, Holes is quick to observe.
Orange County, 1996
ROGER HARRINGTON DEVELOPED ONE BELIEF THAT HE MAINTAINED steadfastly, despite the uncomfortable implications. He was quoted in an October 1988 Orange Coast magazine story, eight years after the murder of his son and daughter-in-law, as saying he was sure the motive lay somewhere in Patty’s background, not Keith’s. They’d been married only a few months. Patty seemed unassailable, but how much did they really know about her past? One detail made him certain the couple must have known the killer: the bedspread. The killer had taken the time to pull the cover over their heads.
“Whoever did it knew them and was sorry they’d done it,” Roger told the magazine.
In the old days, unsolved cases were solved by the unexpected phone call—the shrill ring of a rotary phone that signaled a deathbed confession or a tipster with verifiable facts. But the phone never rang for Keith and Patty Harrington or Manuela Witthuhn. Instead, the break came in the form of three glass tubes stored in manila envelopes that hadn’t moved in fifteen years.
Few people could be expected to greet the news of a break with more enthusiasm than Roger Harrington. The blank face of his son’s killer dominated huge empty tracts of his mental map. The Orange Coast magazine profile about his search for Keith and Patty’s killer ends with a grim, plainspoken quote.
“That’s why I keep living: I don’t want to go till I find out.”
The three tubes that advanced the mystery closer to an answer were opened and tested in October and November 1996. By December, results in hand, Orange County Sheriff’s investigators were ready to make phone calls to the families. But Roger Harrington never learned the news. He’d died a year and a half earlier, on March 8, 1995.
Had Roger lived, he would have learned more about the killer’s history; he would have discovered that he was wrong about why his son and daughter-in-law’s heads had been covered with the bedspread. It wasn’t remorse. The last time the killer bludgeoned a couple to death, it had been messy: he didn’t want Keith and Patty’s blood on him.
One Sunday morning in 1962, a British paperboy found a dead cat on the side of the road. The twelve-year-old put the cat in his bag and brought it home with him. This was in Luton, a town thirty miles north of London. With some time to kill before lunch, the boy placed the cat on th
e dining room table and began to dissect it with a homemade kit, which included a scalpel fashioned from a flattened pin. A foul odor spread through the house, displeasing the boy’s family. Had the cat been alive when it was eviscerated, this anecdote might belong to Ted Bundy’s life story. As it happens, the boy in question, a budding scientist, would become serial killers’ biggest adversary, the creator of their kryptonite. His name is Alec Jeffreys. In September 1984, Jeffreys discovered DNA fingerprinting; in doing so, he changed forensic science and criminal justice forever.
The first generation of DNA technology compared to current technique is like the difference between a Commodore 64 computer and a smartphone. When the Orange County Crime Lab began incorporating DNA testing in the early 1990s, it would take up to four weeks for a criminalist to work one case. The biological sample being tested needed to be sizable—a bloodstain the size of a quarter, for example—and in good shape. Now a smattering of skin cells can reveal someone’s genetic fingerprint in a matter of hours.
The DNA Identification Act of 1994 established the FBI’s authority to maintain a national database, and CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) was born. The best way to explain how CODIS operates today is to imagine it as the top of a vast forensic science pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are hundreds of local crime labs throughout the country. The labs take unknown DNA samples from crime scenes, along with certain suspect samples that have been collected, and input them into their state databases; in California, the inputted samples are automatically uploaded every Tuesday. The state is also responsible for DNA collection from jails and courthouses. State databases then take all the collected samples and run them through a verification process and an intrastate comparison. After that, the samples are bumped up the national ladder to CODIS.
Speedy. Efficient. Thorough. Not so in the mid-1990s, when the databases were first being developed. Crime labs relied then on RFLP (pronounced “rif-lip,” short for restriction fragment length polymorphism) analysis for DNA profiling, a laborious process that eventually went the way of the beeper. But the Orange County lab always had a reputation for being ahead of the pack. A December 20, 1995, article in the Orange County Register, “DA’s Target: Ghosts of Murders Past,” explained that local prosecutors, in coordination with detectives and criminalists, were for the first time submitting DNA evidence from old unsolved cases to the California Department of Justice’s new lab in Berkeley, where four thousand DNA profiles of known violent criminals, many of them sex offenders, were filed. California’s DNA database was in its infancy, and Orange County was helping it grow.
Six months later, in June 1996, Orange County got its first “cold hit,” a match between crime-scene DNA evidence and the DNA of a known felon in the database. The first cold hit was an extraordinary one; it identified a prison inmate named Gerald Parker as the serial killer of five women. A sixth victim of Parker’s was pregnant and survived her attack, but her full-term fetus did not. The husband of the pregnant victim, whose injuries resulted in severe memory loss, had spent sixteen years in prison for her attack. He was immediately exonerated. Parker was a month away from being released when the cold hit was made.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department and Crime Lab staff was stunned. The first time they submit DNA to the fledgling state database, they solve six murders! It seemed that the weather in the Property Room, always an oppressive gray, had lifted and light beamed down on the monotony of cardboard boxes. Old evidence had languished there for decades undisturbed. Each box was a time capsule. Fringed purse. Embroidered tunic. Items from lives defined by violent death. The unsolved section of a Property Room is tainted with disappointment. It’s the to-do list that’s never done.
Now everyone basked in the possibilities. It was a heady feeling, the idea that one could conjure a man from a stain on a calico patchwork quilt from 1978, that one could reverse the flow of power. If you commit murder and then vanish, what you leave behind isn’t just pain but absence, a supreme blankness that triumphs over everything else. The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. But his power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets. We watch as he’s led, shackled and sweaty, into a brightly lit courtroom as someone seated several feet higher peers down unsmiling, raps a gavel, and speaks, at long last, every syllable of his birth name.
Names. The Sheriff’s Department needed names. The abandoned boxes in the Property Room were packed tight with stuff. Q-tip swabs preserved in tubes. Underwear. Cheap white sheets. Every inch of fabric and millimeter of cotton tip held promise. There were other possibilities besides making immediate arrests. DNA profiles that were developed from evidence might not match a known felon in the database, but profiles from different cases might match each other, uncovering a serial killer. That information could focus an investigation. Energize it. They had to get going.
The crime lab staff crunched the numbers. Between 1972 and 1994, Orange County investigated 2,479 homicides and cleared 1,591, leaving nearly 900 unsolved cases. A strategy was developed for reexamining cold cases. Homicides involving sexual assaults would be prioritized, as those killers tend to be repeat offenders and leave behind the kind of biological material that lends itself to DNA typing.
Mary Hong was one of the criminalists tasked with concentrating on cold cases. Jim White took her aside. Fifteen years later, he hadn’t forgotten his old suspicion.
“Harrington,” he said. “Witthuhn.”
The names didn’t mean anything to Hong, who hadn’t worked at the lab at the time of the murders. White encouraged her to prioritize those two cases. “I always thought it was the same guy,” he told her.
A BRIEF, NONTECHNICAL EXPLANATION OF DNA TYPING MIGHT BE helpful. DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is the molecular sequence that defines each human being as unique. Every cell in your body (except red blood cells) has a nucleus that contains your DNA. A forensic scientist working to develop a genetic profile will first extract available DNA from a biological sample—semen, blood, hair—then isolate, amplify, and analyze it. DNA consists of four repeating units, and it’s the precise sequence of the units that differentiates us from one another. Think of it as a human bar code. The numbers on the bar code represent genetic markers. In the 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.
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.
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