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.
“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.
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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.