Dead By Dawn (4 page)

“I have to tell you, it looks just like Tracy,” Lindsay said.

“Coincidence?” he asked.

“I think so. But, I think I’m going to take his case,” she said.

“Why?” Jeff asked. Like a lawyer, he already knew the answer. “Because you are bored?”

“Yes, and it’s kind of a cool old case,” she said.

“I don’t want this to be a conflict of interest with Tracy,” he said.

“I don’t think this has anything to do with Tracy. I think Jeremy will leave her alone, now that I’m taking the case,” she said. “Honestly, he had no idea he was scaring her. He was sincere about that. He seems like a decent guy.”

“Okay then, take it. It will do you good to get out of the house a little more,” he said.

“I will be going up to get the file in Paso Robles from Calhoun. He dug it out of the old case files for me,” Lindsay said.

“Who is going to watch Evan while you are gone?”

“That’s why I’m bringing it up. Do you want me to take him to your Mom’s for a few days or have my Mom come over here?” she asked.

“I guess I would prefer your mom here. That way Evan is in his own house and I can see him when I get home at night,” he said.

“Good. It’s settled then.” She leaned over and kissed him. “Thanks for under standing.”

“Just don’t get yourself into any trouble,” he said and hugged her.

Lindsay met Calhoun for lunch at the Paso Robles Inn, where she booked a room for the night. He brought the file with him. She looked at the manila folder and remarked, “That’s awfully thin.”

“Old cases are tough. Things get lost. I can’t guarantee everything is here. There is an evidence box from the trial that goes with that folder,” Dixon said.

“What do you remember about this?”

“Not a lot. I was just a kid. What I know is probably mostly rumor. Hippies broke into the farmhouse in the middle of the night. They shot the husband and wife. They took two little girls. One was found in an irrigation ditch in the San Joaquin Valley. The other one was never found. The baby was in the crib at the scene,” Dixon answered.

“Do you want to go out to the crime scene with me?” Lindsay asked.

“That sounds good. Let’s finish lunch and head out there,” he said.

The drive to Shandon was about twenty minutes from Paso Robles. Shandon was known mostly for the James Dean memorial. James Dean had crashed his Porsche out on Highway 46. The two lane highway passed farmland and ranches. The ranches that used to be alfalfa were now grapes. Paso Robles had become the heart of wine country on the central coast. They turned down the road that led into the town of Shandon. “Do you remember going to all those picnics at the city park here?” Dixon asked.

“Are you kidding? Every summer, my grandmother would drag us out here for the church picnic. I remember they had a great pool in the park,” Lindsay answered.

Calhoun slowed the car and pulled over to the shoulder of the road. “This is where it happened.” He pointed down a dirt road to a run down ranch house.

“Does anyone live there?” she asked.

“It doesn’t look like it. Let’s go down the driveway and see if anyone comes out.”

They drove down the quarter mile stretch of dirt road. The fields on either side of the road were now weeds. As they got closer to the home, Lindsay could see the paint was peeling on the eaves and the steps on the front porch looked rotted. “When was the last time anyone lived here?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I never really noticed the place before today,” Dixon said.

Lindsay wrote on the pad of paper. “I’ll need to see who owns this place.”

They got out of the car and carefully walked up the rotten steps, trying not to fall through the brittle wood. Dixon knocked on the door. No one answered. He tried the knob. It was locked. Lindsay peeked through the large plate glass window in the front of the home. It was dirty, but she could see inside. “No furniture,” she observed.

They walked around the side of the house and into the overgrown back yard. The fence in the backyard was wooden and falling apart. “There’s a barn.” She pointed further out toward the fields.

They started back to the barn. The door was unlocked. It creaked when Dixon opened it. Inside they saw stacks of hay and an old John Deere tractor. “The tractor looks like an antique,” he said. Next to the bales of hay, there were empty beer bottles lying around. “It looks like a place the kids use to party.”

“What did they used to grow here?” Lindsay asked.

“I don’t know. The rumor was that the Davenports’ graduated from Cal Poly and started their own grape-farming operation,” Dixon said.

“I didn’t know that was trendy back then,” Lindsay said.

“Rumor was they grew pot, too.”

Lindsay laughed. “Oh, that kind of farming. Any truth to that rumor?”

“I don’t know,” Dixon shrugged.

“Let’s get out of here. This barn is creeping me out.”

“Oh, what happened to Miss Big Time, Big City Homicide Detective?” Dixon teased.

“She’s a full time mommy now and this is creepy,” she quipped back. “I just wanted to take a look at the layout before I read the file.”

Dixon walked up to the back door and tried the knob. The door opened but scraped on the linoleum below it. “In here,” he said to Lindsay. They walked into an old kitchen. The cabinet doors were open and rats skidded across the floor. They walked through the kitchen into a living room that looked out over the front yard and the road leading into the property.

“They would have seen anyone coming up the road to the house,” Lindsay said.

“You would think.” Dixon walked down a hall. “There are three bedrooms back here.”

Lindsay walked down the hall to see what he was looking at. “So, one for the parents; the girls shared a room, and the baby boy had his own room.”

“I guess. Or the girls each had their own room and the baby was with Mom and Dad,” Dixon countered.

They went back out through the kitchen and Dixon pointed to a spot on the linoleum floor. “Is that blood?”

“It looks like it was cleaned up, but they couldn’t get it all the way out,” Lindsay said. “I don’t think anyone has lived here since they were killed.”

“Would you want to live in a creepy old house where a bunch of people were killed?” Dixon asked.

“No, not my idea of home sweet home,” she said.

They went out the back door and back to the car. “Well that concludes our tour of Camp Creepy,” Dixon said. “Would you like to go the Jack Ranch Café and have a milk shake and take a look at the James Dean Memorial?”

“No. I’ll pass. I’ve seen the bench and the oak tree a hundred times. You want to hear something funny?” she asked.

“What?” he retorted.

“This guy I used to work with thought the memorial was like a museum. He asked me how long he should plan to stop and take a look,” she laughed as she told him. “I think people are shocked that James Dean was such a big star and got a bench for a memorial.”

“City folks,” he said and shook his head in disbelief.

Lindsay got back to the hotel and spread the file out on the bed. Sometime between 9pm and midnight on September 2nd, 1977, someone had entered the home in Shandon. An adult male and an adult female were found shot to death. The female was found in the kitchen. She had been shot twice, once in the chest and once to the head. The male, found in the living room, had been shot in the chest and head. There were bloody footprints leading from the male victim’s body into the kitchen and down the hallway. Some of the footprints indicated a struggle between an adult and a child. The blood from one of the children was found in the hallway on a door-jamb from the first bedroom. The child’s feet had been bare. One of the killers was wearing tennis shoes of some sort. The investigators had determined the footprint was a men’s size six. At the time, the investigator noted that the size of the footprint may have indicated a teenager was involved. There were also other footprints found in the house.

One of the investigators, Paul Davis, no longer worked for the police department but Dixon had told her that he still lived in town. Lindsay would talk to him tomorrow. The man seemed to keep good notes. He’d thought that one of the killers had entered through the backdoor and shot Shelly Davenport first. Then, it appeared they went after David Davenport. He noted that there were bloody size six footprints leading into the master bedroom, which had been ransacked. The killers were looking for something. Nothing of value had been taken from the home. The killer had even missed $500 cash stashed in Shelly Davenport’s underwear drawer. Paul Davis also noted that the footprints of the adults seemed to head out to the road. He thought the killers may have parked in the road and walked the quarter mile to the house. He documented the layout of the home with Polaroid pictures. The parents had been in the master bedroom. The girls had shared a room. The blood that was found on the door-jamb was outside the girls’ bedroom. The third bedroom had belonged to the baby.

Davis noted that there was a bag of pot on the kitchen table. There was no drug paraphernalia and no evidence anywhere in the home that suggested the Davenports used or grew drugs. He hypothesized that the drugs were left behind to mislead the investigators.

The other investigator, Andy Small, was dead. His notes were not as comprehensive as Davis’. From the beginning, he’d thought that the man who had found the bodies, Barton Edmunds, had killed the Davenports and taken the children. He zeroed in on the size ten bloody footprints that matched Edmunds’ shoes.

The file contained notes about interviews with neighbors and family members. It seemed that the Davenports were not fond of Shelly’s family, the Dorans. The Davenports pointed the finger at the Dorans for the murder, claiming they never liked David Davenport.

The only physical evidence at the scene was a set of fingerprints on the bag of pot. At the time of the murders, there was no national fingerprint system, so investigators compared fingerprints to those on file cards. The fingerprints taken from the scene could be entered into the system and compared. That is, if the people who did this were in the system.

Lindsay went back through personal histories. David Davenport had grown up in San Luis Obispo. His parents were farmers. He had a sister, Carol Davenport Anders. His brother, Charles Davenport III, still lived in the area. David had graduated from San Luis Obispo High School and from there went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo to study Agricultural Business Management. That’s where he met Shelly. They dated for two years in college and got married after Shelly graduated. She was a year younger than David.

Shelly Doran grew up in Fresno. She attended San Joaquin Memorial High School. She graduated valedictorian of her class and went to Cal Poly to study Crop Science. She had two older sisters, Debbie and Terri Doran. Debbie married and moved to Los Angeles and Terri lived in Paso Robles. Their parents had also been farmers in the central valley.

Lindsay reached the end of the file. Dayna Davenport’s body had been found strangled in the California Aqueduct, just outside Kettlemen City. Once Dayna’s body was found, the search for Kelly concentrated in the San Joaquin Valley from the Highway 46 to San Francisco. The investigators figured the killers headed to the nearest big city.

Lindsay decided to call it a night. She called Jeff and said goodnight. He held Evan up to the phone. “Tell mommy goodnight,” he said.

“Goodnight Evan. I love you,” she said.

Paul Davis was in his 70s. He lived about three blocks from the Paso Robles Inn. Lindsay walked over to his house on 10th Street. It was a lovely Victorian home she had always loved as a kid.

He greeted her at the front door. He was tall and thin with a thick handlebar mustache and a bald head. He shook her hand and gazed at her with soft brown eyes. “I expected someone older,” he said.

“That was a compliment, I think,” she laughed.

They sat down in a small living room. “I used to play in this neighborhood when I was little. Did you restore this house yourself?” Lindsay asked.

“After I retired, it became my pet project,” he said. “I bought it back in the 80s and had renters here for many years.”

“Well, you did a wonderful job. It’s beautiful,” she offered.

“Calhoun said you are looking into the Davenport murders,” Davis said, getting to the point.

“Jeremy Davenport hired me to look into them.”

“The baby, Jeremy?” he said surprised.

“Yes, he’s looking for his missing sister,” she said.

“Waste of time, if you ask me. I’m fairly certain she’s dead after all these years,” Davis said.

“I looked through the files last night. There’s not much there.”