I'll Be Gone in the Dark Page 2

  I didn’t consider him a ghost. My faith was in human error. He made a mistake somewhere along the line, I reasoned.

  On the summer night I searched for the cuff links, I’d been obsessed with the case for nearly a year. I favor yellow legal pads, especially the first ten or so pages when everything looks smooth and hopeful. My daughter’s playroom was littered with partially used pads, a wasteful habit and one that reflected my state of mind. Each pad was a thread that started and stalled. For advice I turned to the retired detectives who’d worked on the case, many of whom I’d come to consider friends. The hubris had been drained from them, but that didn’t stop them from encouraging mine. The hunt to find the Golden State Killer, spanning nearly four decades, felt less like a relay race than a group of fanatics tethered together climbing an impossible mountain. The old guys had to stop, but they insisted I go on. I lamented to one of them that I felt I was grasping at straws.

  “My advice? Grasp a straw,” he said. “Work it to dust.”

  The stolen items were my latest straw. I wasn’t in an optimistic mood. My family and I were headed to Santa Monica for Fourth of July weekend. I hadn’t packed. The weather forecast was lousy. Then I saw it, a single image out of hundreds loading on my laptop screen, the same style of cuff links as sketched out in the police file, with the same initials. I checked and rechecked the cop’s crude drawing against the image on my computer. They were going for $8 at a vintage store in a small town in Oregon. I bought them immediately, paying $40 for overnight delivery. I walked down the hallway to my bedroom. My husband was on his side, sleeping. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at him until he opened his eyes.

  “I think I found him,” I said. My husband didn’t have to ask who “him” was.

  Part One

  Irvine, 1981

  AFTER PROCESSING THE HOUSE, THE POLICE SAID TO DREW WITTHUHN, “It’s yours.” The yellow tape came down; the front door closed. The impassive precision of badges at work had helped divert attention from the stain. There was no avoiding it now. His brother and sister-in-law’s bedroom was just inside the front door, directly across from the kitchen. Standing at the sink, Drew needed only to turn his head to the left to see the dark spray mottling the white wall above David and Manuela’s bed.

  Drew prided himself on not being squeamish. At the Police Academy they were being trained to handle stress and never blanch. Emotional steeliness was a graduation requirement. But until the evening of Friday, February 6, 1981, when his fiancée’s sister appeared tableside at the Rathskeller Pub in Huntington Beach and said breathlessly, “Drew, call your mom,” he didn’t think he’d be required to use those skills—the ability to keep his mouth shut and eyes forward when everyone else went bug-eyed and screamed—so soon or so close to home.

  David and Manuela lived at 35 Columbus, a single-story tract home in Northwood, a new development in Irvine. The neighborhood was one of the tendrils of suburbia creeping into what was left of the old Irvine ranch. Orange groves still dominated the outskirts, bordering the encroaching concrete and blacktop with immaculate rows of trees, a packinghouse, and a camp for pickers. The future of the changing landscape could be gauged in sound: the blast from trucks pouring cement was drowning out the dwindling tractors.

  An air of genteelness masked Northwood’s conveyor-belt transformation. Stands of towering eucalyptus, planted by farmers in the 1940s as protection against the punishing Santa Ana winds, weren’t torn down but repurposed. Developers used the trees to bisect main thoroughfares and shroud neighborhoods. David and Manuela’s subdivision, Shady Hollow, was a tract of 137 houses with four available floor plans. They chose Plan 6014, “The Willow,” three bedrooms, 1,523 square feet. In late 1979, when the house was finished, they moved in.

  The house seemed impressively grown-up to Drew, even though David and Manuela were only five years older than him. For one thing, it was brand-new. Kitchen cabinets gleamed from lack of use. The inside of the refrigerator smelled like plastic. And it was spacious. Drew and David had grown up in a house roughly the same size, but seven people had squeezed in there, had impatiently waited their turn for the shower and knocked elbows at the dinner table. David and Manuela stored bicycles in one of their home’s three bedrooms; in the other spare bedroom, David kept his guitar.

  Drew tried to ignore the jealousy prickling him, but the truth was, he envied his older brother. David and Manuela, married for five years, both had steady jobs. She was a loan officer at California First Bank; he worked in sales at House of Imports, a Mercedes-Benz dealership. Middle-class aspiration welded them. They spent a great deal of time discussing whether or not to get brickwork done in the front yard and where the best place was to find quality Oriental rugs. The house at 35 Columbus was an outline waiting to be filled in. Its blankness conferred promise. Drew felt callow and lacking by comparison.

  After the initial tour, Drew spent hardly any time at their house. The problem wasn’t to the level of rancor exactly, but more like displeasure. Manuela, the only child of German immigrants, was brusque, sometimes puzzlingly so. At California First Bank, she was known for telling people when they needed a haircut or pointing out when they had done something wrong. She kept a private list of co-workers’ mistakes that she wrote in German. She was slim and pretty, with prominent cheekbones and breast implants; she’d had the procedure done after her wedding because she was small and David, she told a co-worker with a kind of distasteful half shrug, seemed to prefer big chests. She didn’t flaunt her new figure. To the contrary, she favored turtlenecks and kept her arms folded in against her body, as if anticipating a fight.

  Drew could see that the relationship worked for his brother, who could be withdrawn and tentative and whose manner of speaking was more sideways than straight on. But too often Drew left their company feeling trodden, the power of Manuela’s rotating grievances short-circuiting every room she entered.

  In early February 1981, Drew heard through the family grapevine that David wasn’t feeling well and was in the hospital, but he hadn’t seen his brother in a while and didn’t make plans to visit him. On Monday, February 2, Manuela had taken David to Santa Ana–Tustin Community Hospital where he was admitted for a severe gastrointestinal virus. For the next several nights, she kept the same routine: her parents’ house for dinner, then to room 320 at the hospital to see David. They spoke every day and evening by phone. Late Friday morning, David called the bank looking for Manuela, but her co-workers told him she hadn’t come in to work. He tried her at home, but the phone kept ringing, which puzzled him. Their answering machine always picked up after the third ring; Manuela didn’t know how to operate the machine. Next he called her mother, Ruth, who agreed to drive over to the house and check on her daughter. After not getting an answer at the front door, she used her key to enter. A few minutes later, Ron Sharpe,* a close family friend, was summoned in a hysterical call from Ruth.

  “I just looked over on the left and saw her hands open like that and saw the blood all over the wall,” Sharpe told detectives. “I couldn’t figure out how it got on the wall from where she was lying.”

  He took one look in the room and never looked again.

  MANUELA WAS IN BED LYING FACE DOWN. SHE WAS WEARING A brown velour robe and was partially wrapped in a sleeping bag, which she sometimes slept in when she was cold. Red marks circled her wrists and ankles, evidence of ligatures that had been removed. A large screwdriver was lying on the concrete patio two feet from the rear sliding glass door. The locking mechanism on the door had been pried open.

  A nineteen-inch television from inside the house had been dragged to the southwest corner of the backyard, next to a high wooden fence. The corner of the fence was coming apart slightly, as if someone had fallen against it or jumped it too hard. Investigators observed shoe impressions of a small circle pattern in the front and back yards and on top of the gas meter on the east side of the house.

  One of the first peculiarities investigators observed was that
the only source of light in the bedroom came from the bathroom. They asked David about it. He was at Manuela’s parents’ house, where a group of family and friends had congregated after the news to grieve and console one another. Investigators noticed that David seemed shaken and dazed; grief was making his mind drift. His answers trailed off. He switched subjects abruptly. The question about the light confused him.

  “Where’s the lamp?” he asked.

  A lamp with a square stand and a chrome metal cannonball-shaped light was missing from atop the stereo speaker on the left side of the bed. Its absence gave police a good idea of the heavy object that was used to bludgeon Manuela to death.

  David was asked if he knew why the tape was missing from the answering machine. He was stunned. He shook his head. The only possible explanation, he told police, was that whoever killed Manuela had left his voice on the machine.

  The scene was deeply weird. It was deeply weird for Irvine, which had little crime. It was deeply weird for the Irvine Police Department; it smelled like a setup to a few of them. Some jewelry was missing and the television had been dragged into the backyard. But what burglar leaves his screwdriver behind? They wondered if the killer was someone Manuela knew. Her husband is staying overnight at the hospital. She invites a male acquaintance over. It gets violent and he grabs the answering machine tape, knowing his voice is on it, and goes about prying the sliding door and then, in a final touch of staging, leaves the screwdriver behind.

  But others doubted that Manuela knew her killer. Police interviewed David at the Irvine Police Department the day after the body was found. He was asked if they had had any problems with prowlers in the past. After thinking about it, he mentioned that three or four months earlier, in either October or November 1980, there had been footprints that he couldn’t explain. They looked to David like tennis shoes and went from one side of the house all the way to the other side and into the backyard. Investigators slid a piece of paper across the table and asked David to draw the footprint as best he remembered it. He sketched it quickly, preoccupied and exhausted. He didn’t know that police had a plaster-cast impression of Manuela’s killer’s footprint as he stalked the house the night of the murder. He pushed the paper back. He’d drawn a right tennis shoe sole with small circles.

  David was thanked and allowed to go home. Police slapped his sketch next to the plaster-cast impression. It was a match.

  Most violent criminals are impulsive, disorganized, and easily caught. The vast majority of homicides are committed by people known to the victim and, despite game attempts to throw off the police, these offenders are usually identified and arrested. It’s a tiny minority of criminals, maybe 5 percent, who present the biggest challenge—the ones whose crimes reveal preplanning and unremorseful rage. Manuela’s murder had all the hallmarks of this last type. There were the ligatures, and their removal. The ferocity of her head wounds. The several-month lapse between appearances of the sole with small circles suggested the slithering of someone rigidly watchful whose brutality and schedule only he knew.

  Midday on Saturday, February 7, having sifted through clues for twenty-four hours, the police did one more run-through and then authorized release of the house back to David. This was before the existence of professional crime-scene cleanup companies. Sooty fingerprint powder stained the doorknobs. David and Manuela’s queen mattress was gouged in places where criminalists had cut away sections to bag as evidence. The bed and wall above it were still splattered with blood. Drew knew that, as a cop-in-training, he was the natural choice for the cleanup job and volunteered to do it. He also felt he owed it to his brother.

  Ten years earlier, their father, Max Witthuhn, had locked himself in a room at the family’s home after a fight with his wife. Drew was in eighth grade and attending a school dance at the time. David was eighteen, the oldest in the family, and he was the one who beat down the door after the shotgun blast rocked the house. He shielded the family from the view and absorbed what he saw of his father’s splintered brain alone. Their father committed suicide two weeks before Christmas. The experience seemed to rob David of certainty. He was suspended in hesitation after that. His mouth smiled occasionally, but his eyes never did.

  Then he met Manuela. He was on solid ground again.

  Her bridal veil hung on the back of their bedroom door. The police, thinking it might be a clue, asked David about it. He explained that she always kept it there, a rare sentimental expression. The veil provided a glimpse of Manuela’s soft side, a side few had ever known—and now never would.

  Drew’s fiancée was studying to be a nurse practitioner. She offered to help him with the crime-scene cleanup. They would go on to have two sons and a twenty-eight-year marriage that ended in divorce. Even at the lowest points of their relationship, Drew could be stopped short by the memory of her helping him that day; it was an unflinching act of kindness that he never forgot.

  They hauled out bottles of bleach and buckets of water. They put on yellow rubber gloves. The job was messy, but Drew remained dry-eyed and expressionless. He tried to view the experience as a learning opportunity. Police work called for being coolly diagnostic. You had to be tough, even if you were scrubbing your sister-in-law’s blood from a brass bed frame. In a little under three hours, they rid the house of violence and tidied it up for David’s return.

  When they were finished, Drew placed the leftover cleaning supplies in his trunk and got behind the wheel of his car. He stuck the key in the ignition but then froze, seized up, as if on the brink of a sneeze. A strange, uncontainable sensation was winding its way through him. Maybe it was the exhaustion.

  He wasn’t going to cry. That wasn’t it. He couldn’t remember the last time he cried. Wasn’t him.

  He turned and stared at 35 Columbus. He flashed back to the first time he drove up to the house. He remembered what he’d thought as he sat in his car, preparing to go in.

  My brother really has it made.

  The tamped-down sob escaped, the fight to contain it over. Drew pressed his forehead against the steering wheel and wept. Not a lump-in-the-throat cry but a tumult of brutal grief. Unselfconscious. Purging. His car smelled like ammonia. The blood under his fingernails wouldn’t come out for days.

  Finally, he told himself he had to pull it together. He had in his possession a small object he had to give CSI. Something he’d found under the bed. Something they’d missed.

  A piece of Manuela’s skull.

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT, IRVINE PD INVESTIGATORS RON VEACH AND Paul Jessup, in search of further information from Manuela’s inner circle, rang the front door of her parents’ house on Loma Street, in the Greentree neighborhood. Horst Rohrbeck, her father, met them at the door. The day before, shortly after the house was cordoned off and declared a crime scene, Horst and his wife, Ruth, were taken to the station and interviewed separately by junior officers. This was the first time Jessup and Veach, who was the lead detective on the case, were meeting the Rohrbecks. Twenty years in the United States hadn’t softened Horst’s German comportment. He co-owned a local auto repair shop and, it was said, could take apart a Mercedes-Benz with a single wrench.

  Manuela was the Rohrbecks’ only child. She had dinner with them every night. Her personal calendar had only two notations for the month of January, reminders about her parents’ birthdays. Mama. Papa.

  “Somebody killed her,” Horst said in his first police interview. “I kill that guy.”

  Horst stood at the front door holding a snifter of brandy. Veach and Jessup stepped inside the house. A half-dozen stricken friends and family were gathered in the living room. When the investigators identified themselves, Horst’s stony expression unclenched and he erupted. He wasn’t a big man, but fury doubled his size. He shouted in accented English about how disgusted he was with the police department, how they needed to be doing more. About four minutes into the tirade, Veach and Jessup realized that their presence wasn’t necessary. Horst was heartbroken and conflict-starved. His rage
was a projectile splintering in real time. There was nothing to do but put a business card on the foyer table and get out of his way.

  Horst’s anguish was also tinged with a specific regret. The Rohrbecks were the owners of an enormous, military-grade trained German shepherd named Possum. Horst had suggested that Manuela keep Possum at her house for protection while David was in the hospital, but she declined. It was impossible not to hit rewind and imagine Possum’s gaping scissor bite, saliva dripping from his incisors, as he lunged at the intruder chipping at the lock, scaring him away.

  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.