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

by Michelle McNamara

  Manuela’s funeral was Wednesday, February 11, at Saddleback Chapel in Tustin. Drew spotted officers across the street taking photographs. Afterward he returned to 35 Columbus with David. The brothers sat talking in the living room late into the night. David was drinking heavily.

  “They think I killed her,” David said abruptly about the police. His expression was unreadable. Drew readied himself to hear a confession. He didn’t believe David was physically capable of Manuela’s murder; the question was whether he could have hired someone to do it. Drew felt his police training kicking in. The image of his brother sitting across from him narrowed to a pinhole. He figured he had one chance.

  “Did you?” Drew asked.

  David’s personality, always a bit diffident, had acquired an understandable tremble. Survivor’s guilt weighed on him. He’d been born with a hole in his heart; if anyone was going to die, it should have been him. Manuela’s parents’ grief roved in search of someone to blame. Their gaze had the increasing effect of a glancing

  blow. But now, in response to Drew’s question, David bristled with certainty.

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t kill my wife, Drew.”

  Drew exhaled for what felt like the first time since news of Manuela’s murder. He’d needed to hear David say the words. Looking in his brother’s eyes, wounded but flashing with assurance, Drew knew he was telling the truth.

  He wasn’t the only one who felt David was innocent. Criminalist Jim White of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department helped process the crime scene. Good criminalists are human scanners; they enter messy, unfamiliar rooms, isolate important trace evidence, and block out everything else. They work under pressure. A crime scene is time-sensitive and always on the verge of collapse. Every person who enters represents the possibility for contamination. Criminalists come laden with tools for collection and preservation—paper evidence bags, seals, measuring tape, swabs, bindle paper, plaster of paris. At the Witthuhn scene, White worked in collaboration with Investigator Veach, who instructed him on what to seize. He collected flaky pieces of mud next to the bed. He swabbed a diluted bloodstain on the toilet. He stood with Veach as Manuela’s body was rolled. They noted the massive head injury, ligature marks, and some bruising on her right hand. There was a mark on her left buttock that the coroner would later conclude was likely from a punch.

  The second part of the criminalist’s job comes in the lab, analyzing the evidence that’s been collected. White tested the brown paint on the killer’s screwdriver against popular brands, concluding that the best match was a store-mixed Oxford Brown made by Behr. The lab is usually where the job ends. Criminalists aren’t investigators. They don’t conduct interviews or run down leads. But White was in a unique position. The individual police departments of Orange County investigated crimes in their own

  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 b
odies 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.

  The cases also shared an intriguing medical link. Keith Harrington was a med student at UC-Irvine, and Patty was a nurse who sometimes worked shifts at Mercy Hospital in Santa Ana. David Witthuhn, Manuela’s husband, had been a patient at Santa Ana–Tustin Community Hospital when his wife was murdered.

  A wooden match with a short burn was found on the Harrington’s kitchen floor. None of the Harringtons were smokers; investigators believe it belonged to the killer.

  Four wooden matches were collected from the flowerbed alongside the Witthuhn house.

  Witthuhn was an Irvine PD case; Harrington was Orange County Sheriff’s. Investigators on both teams debated the possible connection. Taking on two people, as the Harringtons’ killer had, was considered unusual. It was high risk. It suggested the killer’s pleasure was in part derived from raising the stakes. Would the same killer, six months later, target a single victim, as Witthuhn’s had? The counterargument was that David’s hospital stay had been a fluke. Was the killer surprised to find Manuela alone that night?

  Theft (Manuela’s jewelry) versus no theft. Forced entry versus no forced entry. They didn’t have fingerprints to match; DNA was far in the future. The killer hadn’t left an ace of spades at both scenes to identify himself. But small details lingered. When Keith Harrington was fatally struck, the wood headboard above him was dented. Investigators concluded from the location of a wood chip found between Patty’s legs that Keith was killed first and then Patty was sexually assaulted. The chronology was planned for her maximum suffering. Manuela’s killer spent enough time with her that she was stressed to the point of nausea: her vomit was found on the bed.

  “Overkill” is a popular but sometimes misused term in criminal investigations and crime stories. Even seasoned homicide investigators occasionally misinterpret an offender’s behavior when he uses a great deal of force. It’s common to assume that a murder involving overkill means there was a relationship between offender and victim, an unleashing of pent-up rage borne of familiarity. “This was personal,” goes the cliché.†

  But that assumption fails to consider external causes of behavior. The level of force may depend on how much a victim resists. Tremendous injuries that look like a personal relationship gone horribly wrong might be the result of a protracted struggle between strangers.

  Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They have fists for hands and can’t plan beyond their sightlines. They’re caught easily. They talk too much. They return to the scene of the crime, as conspicuous as tin cans on a bumper. But every so often a blue moon surfaces. A snow leopard slinks by.

  Every so often investigators encounter a stranger murder involving the overkill of victims who didn’t resist.

  Considering that Manuela and Patty were bound and therefore by definition compliant, the amount of force used to bludgeon them revealed an extreme amount of rage directed at the female. It was unusual to see such frenzied anger combined with calculated planning. A forensic match between the cases didn’t exist but a feeling did, a sense that a single mind was at work, someone who didn’t leave many clues or talk or show his face,

  someone who strolled undetected in the middle-class swarm, an ordinary man with a resting-pulse derangement.

  The possible connection between Harrington and Witthuhn was never dismissed outright, just put aside as the cases went cold. In August 1981, several newspaper articles questioned whether or not the Harrington case was related to other recent double homicides in Southern California. “Is a psychopathic ‘Night Stalker’ murdering Southern California couples in their beds?” was the opening line of an article in the Los Angeles Times.

  The Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department had been the first to raise the idea of a connection. They had two double homicides and a knife attack in which the couple escaped. But the other counties with proposed linked cases, Ventura and Orange, downplayed the idea. Ventura officials, still smarting from a highly publicized preliminary hearing where the case against their double homicide suspect fell apart, were quoted as saying they thought Santa Barbara had jumped the gun. Orange County was skeptical too. “We don’t feel that,” said investigator Darryl Coder.

  And that was that. Five years passed. Ten years. The phone never rang with the right tip. The files, periodically reviewed, never divulged the necessary information. Roger Harrington obsessed over the details, trying to make sense of Keith and Patty’s murders. He hired a private investigator. He offered a large reward. Friends and co-workers were reinterviewed. Nothing sparked. In desperation, Roger, a tough, self-made businessman, broke down and consulted a clairvoyant. The psychic couldn’t lift the fog. Roger reexamined every moment he spent with Keith and Patty before their deaths. Their murders were a loop of fragmentary details that never cohered and never stopped rotating in his head.

  Hollywood, 2009

  PAPARAZZI FOUR-DEEP ELBOWED EACH OTHER ALONG THE RED CARPET. My husband, Patton, mugged for the cameras in his smart blue pinstriped suit. Flashbulbs deluged. A dozen hands thrust microphones from behind the metal barricade. Adam Sandler appeared. Attention shifted. Clamor ratcheted. Then Judd Apatow. Jonah Hill. Chris Rock. It was Monday, July 20, 2009, a little after six p.m. We were at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood for the premiere of the movie Funny People. Somewhere there’s probably an unused photograph of a celebrity and in the background is a woman in a black shift dress and comfortable shoes. I look dazed and exhilarated and am staring at my iPhone, because at that moment, as some of the world’s biggest stars brush against me, I’ve just learned that a fugitive I’d been hunting for and obsessing over, a double murderer on the run in the West and Northwest for the past thirty-seven years, had been found.

  I dodged behind a concrete column and called the one person I knew would care about the news as much as I did, Pete King, a longtime reporter for the Los Angeles Times who now worked in media relations for the University of California. He picked up right away.

  “Pete, do you know?” I said. I could barely get the words out fast enough.

  “Know what?”

  “I just got an e-mail with a link to a news story. There’s been a

  shootout in some remote mountains in New Mexico. Two people are dead. A sheriff’s deputy. And the guy they were after. A kind of mysterious mountain man stealing from cabins.”

  “No,” Pete said.

  “Yes,” I said. “They fingerprinted the mountain man.”

  I admit I paused here for maximum dramatic effect.

  “Joseph Henry Burgess,” I said. “Pete, we were right. He was out there all this time.”

  Our stunned silence lasted only a moment. I knew Pete wanted to get to a computer. The premiere organizers were herding people inside. I could see Patton scanning for me.

  “Find out more,” I told Pete. “I can’t. I’m at a thing.”

  This thing was not my thing. I realize confiding unease with movie premieres isn’t the most relatable hang-up and falls under the exasperated “must be nice” category. I get it. Bear with me. I’m not being falsely humble when I say that I haven’t yet attended a Hollywood event where someone hasn’t tucked in a tag, adjusted a button, or told me I had lipstick on my teeth. I once had an events coordinator bat my fingers from my mouth when I was biting my nails. My red carpet pose can best be described as “ducked head, half crouch.” But my husband’s an actor. I love him and admire his work, and that of our friends, and occasionally attending these events is part of the deal. So you get fancily dressed and sometimes professionally made up. A driver in a town car picks you up, which makes you feel weird and apologetic. An upbeat public relations person you don’t know leads you onto a red carpet where yo
u’re shouted at to “look here!” and “here” at a hundred strangers with flashbulbs for faces. And then, after those brief moments of manufactured glamour, you find yourself in a regular old creaky movie theater seat, sipping Diet Coke from a sweaty plastic cup and salting your fingers with warm popcorn. Lights dim. Mandated enthusiasm begins.

  Walking into the afterparty, Patton was introduced to the directors

  of Crank, an action movie he loves starring Jason Statham. He began regaling them with his favorite bits from the movie. “I’m gay-tham for Statham,” he confessed. After we parted ways with the directors, we paused and surveyed the crowd cramming into the ballroom at the Hollywood & Highland Center. Drinks, gourmet mini-cheeseburgers, and maybe even Garry Shandling, an idol of Patton’s, awaited us. Patton read my mind.

  “No problem,” he said.

  A friend intercepted us on our way out.

  “Getting back to baby?” she said with a warm smile. Our daughter, Alice, was three months old.

  “You know how it is,” I said.

  The truth, of course, was much weirder: I was foregoing a fancy Hollywood party to return not to my sleeping infant but my laptop, to excavate through the night in search of information about a man I’d never met, who’d murdered people I didn’t know.