Caitlin Rother's Blog, page 2

Serial killer Wayne Adam Ford’s first murder victim is identified by genetic genealogy 25 years later

 

By Caitlin Rother

 

       People often ask me how I cope with writing about such dark subjects in my true crime books. Usually, I laugh it off and say it comes with the job, but to be honest, it does take a toll, especially cumulatively. That’s why I go for walks and swim, sing and play music, and also write crime fiction.

I make it a point not to set out to write a book that I wouldn’t want to read, but I have to admit that BODY PARTS, which was first published in 2009, proved more challenging in that respect than I’d anticipated. To this day, I have difficulty reading parts of it aloud or even summarizing some of the horrific things that Wayne Adam Ford did to his victims.

The short version is that he picked them up in his truck, repeatedly choked them out during sex and revived them with CPR, and when four women didn’t make it back, he dumped their bodies in waterways up and down California. He also dismembered the first and cut the breast off the last, which was in his jacket pocket when he turned himself in.

That’s why I’m happy to announce that I’ve updated this book with 32 pages of new developments to give it a happy ending, if such a thing can exist for a book about a serial killer. The updated edition of BODY PARTS will be released Feb. 25, 2025.

       Fourteen years after the book was originally released, I learned from a source that Ford’s first victim had been identified through genetic genealogy—25 years after her torso and left arm were found in Humboldt County. Of course, I was immediately compelled to find out the details, and it was well worth the effort.

As a result, this updated edition not only brought my second-bestselling book back into print, but it brought me a sense of satisfaction that I didn’t get when the book first came out.

It was rewarding for me to explain how a troubled young woman, Kerry Anne Cummings, got her name back and to show that her family has gained closure by finally learning what had happened to her, partly, as it turns out, because her sister read the original edition of my book three times.

BODY PARTS was my third book, all three of which were nonfiction books about murders or attempted murders. I’d also written a crime novel, but it didn’t come out until after this one. Due to its gruesome, violent, and wrenching emotional content, this one had a powerful impact on my well-being.

After writing books back-to-back without a break, something I now know not to do, I was in the throes of chronic arm, neck, and back pain, with bouts of depression, for the nine months I was under deadline to finish this book. The pain continued for nine months after that, while some part of my upper body was constantly in spasm. My acupuncturist told me she thought it was the dark topic, that I should try to surround myself with images of positive light. I told her I could handle it, and said it was probably just the constant sitting at the laptop and typing. I think we were both right.

The couple of years I spent in Ford’s head, researching and then writing this book, grew increasingly dark. And it didn’t get any better, the way Hollywood movies do at the end. This story was tragic, not just for the victims and for their families, but also for Ford’s family. Everyone suffered because of what Ford did, partly because he never got the mental health treatment or help that he needed along the way that might have prevented him from killing these four women, who were among the 50 he picked up in his truck and put through this same ordeal. All the others lived, he said, and one of them testified at his trial.

I chose to write this story because I saw Wayne Adam Ford as a rare bird, a serial killer who felt remorseful and guilty enough after what he did to these four women—Kerry Anne Cummings, Tina Gibb, Patricia Tamez and Lanett White—to stop himself from killing again. He knew what he did was wrong. He was troubled, even disgusted, by it, so much so that he enlisted his brother’s help to turn himself in.

I thought that was a compelling story that needed telling, because it showed that people are not all good or all bad. I just didn’t realize until I got into the details just how gruesome that story was going to be.

Wayne Adam Ford is not your typical serial killer, if there is such a thing. He’s a complicated character, a deeply troubled and disturbed man who suffered a severe brain injury at nineteen. He was in the U.S. Marines at the El Toro base in Orange County, where he sang karaoke at a sushi bar, Taka-O in Laguna Niguel, and drove a school bus for disabled kids. He also spent nine days in the ICU with a head injury after being hit by a drunk driver while trying to save the life of a car accident victim at the side of the freeway.

The way Ford’s family described him, he seemed to have a split personality. He always seemed sweet and polite, they said, never cussing in front of women. He was so good-looking, a talented singer who did a mean Elvis tune. They just couldn’t reconcile these positive memories with the horribly violent murders he’d admitted to.

For these reasons, my proposed title for the book was KILLER WITH A CONSCIENCE. But my publisher didn’t like it. The marketing department knew better, they said, and titled it BODY PARTS.

       My goal in writing this book, and several others I’ve published about mentally ill killers, is to help all of us learn more about the human condition, to illustrate what makes a sexual predator, mass murderer, or a serial killer, and how and why these men (yes, they are almost always men), turn out this way. How mental illness can cause bad and even violent behavior, but to me, that does not equate to being evil.

I don’t write these books to rationalize killers’ behavior, but rather to educate people. To help readers, and especially women, who generally are the victims of these men, learn how to protect themselves. Perhaps would-be victims’ families might learn how to better help those vulnerable women before they became victims, when they are unwilling or unable to help themselves. I also believe it’s important to identify flaws and breakdowns in our government systems so we know where to fix them. Only then, in my view, can we hope to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

       My goal in adding the updated material to this book is also to show readers who Kerry Anne Cummings was before she became a victim, because I didn’t get a chance to do that in the first edition.  

I interviewed Kerry’s sister and cousin about her for the book, but I don’t want to print spoilers here. I’ll just say that she loved her sister, she loved to draw and paint, she liked to live on the road, and, unfortunately, she had some mental challenges that she chose to treat with street drugs rather than pharmaceuticals.

When Ford was interviewed by Humboldt County sheriff’s detective Juan Freeman about the young woman he'd dismembered, he said she was about twenty-five, weighed about 150 pounds, was about five-feet-six-inches tall, had a tattooed band of roses around her ankle, and seemed like she was on drugs.

“I really think her brain was fried,” he said, comparing her difficulty focusing to his. She was “like I am now, not mentally cohesive.”

Ford said she was different from the other women he picked up, he said, because she was not a prostitute. She asked which way he was heading, and when he said north to Arcata, she asked if he would take her to Clam Beach. Ironically, this was where the authorities found her left arm in late January 1998, three months after her torso had been found in Ryan’s Slough.

At least one of the detectives who interviewed him he said thought Ford seemed remorseful. He kept talking about how he wanted to try to help find and identify the young woman he’d cut up in his bathtub. He drew them a map, explaining where he'd buried her head under a cement slab in the river next to the Readimix cement plant in Arcata, where he’d worked and parked his trailer. He offered to go there with detectives and point them to the spot where he’d buried her parts. But when they took him there, the parts had washed away long ago. 

When Ford was asked the same questions for a documentary on the case a decade later, he added more details: she had brown eyes and short hair, just below the ears, and was “top-heavy,” with large breasts. She had a plump face with “big cheeks,” and wore a multicolored knit beanie. She told him she was “having trouble” with her parents, but that her sister loved her. He couldn’t remember exactly which state she was from, but thought it was California, Colorado or Arizona. He said she carried a backpack, and inside was a military-style can opener, a rosary-bead cross, a baggie possibly containing heroin, but no money, no jewelry, and no ID. She went by a nickname, and she seemed ill-equipped to be “out in the middle of nowhere. So, I don’t think she was out for very long.”

Most of this turned out to be accurate, but it took some DNA profiles to prove it. So, if you have a family member who has gone missing, perhaps uploading your DNA profile to GEDmatch could help find them too.

          Before I close, I also want to mention that I have a second true crime book coming out June 25, 2025. DOWN TO THE BONE is about the murder of the McStay family, a family of four from Fallbrook, California, who went mysteriously missing in 2010. After investigating their disappearance as a missing persons case, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department gave up three years later, deciding that the family had voluntarily gone to Mexico. This was proven wrong when their skeletal remains were found eight months later in the Mojave Desert near Victorville. From there, it became a homicide case, investigated by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

After a death penalty trial, one of Joseph McStay’s two business associates, Charles “Chase” Merritt, was sent to death row for the murders. Based on evidence presented at trial as well as witness interviews, discovery materials and investigative reports that have never been made public, my book gives the back story on the family and what was going on in their lives at the time of their disappearance. It also explores the two investigations and prosecution of the case, which Merritt and his defense team maintain were motivated by confirmation bias that resulted in his wrongful conviction.

Please contact me at caitlinrother@gmail.com if you want to interview me for your TV or radio show or podcast, write a news or feature story, or review one or both books for your print, digital, TV or radio media outlet, blog, or podcast. I am setting up interviews now and sending out ARCs for BODY PARTS. I’m also making an ARC list for DOWN TO THE BONE if you’d like a review copy when they become available in a couple of months.

          Due to circumstances beyond my control, the publication date of both books have been delayed several times, so I could really use some help with pre-orders if you are so inclined. The new pub dates are not going to change again. All pre-orders are counted in the first week of book sales, which is the best chance for me to hit the bestseller list. Here are the links for each book: BODY PARTS and DOWN TO THE BONE.         

 

 

San Diego County Medical Examiner denies petition by Rebecca Zahau’s family to amend her death certificate

By Caitlin Rother

Today, July 11, is the thirteenth anniversary of Max Shacknai’s death, and Saturday, July 13, will be the same anniversary of Rebecca Zahau’s death. I hope they are both resting in peace.

 

I’ve been a little lax in checking on this, but nothing has been reported in the media, so I’m still ahead of the working reporters who have been following this very high-profile case from the beginning, when Rebecca was found dead, hanging naked, bound and gagged in the rear courtyard of the historic Spreckels Mansion in Coronado, California. My book on the case, Death on Ocean Boulevard: Inside the Coronado Mansion Case, came out in 2021, and is in development for a TV limited series.

 

But my original prediction fourteen months ago was correct, that the Zahau’s petition to the ME—to amend Rebecca’s death certificate to reflect that her death was a “homicide,” or an “undetermined” cause, rather than “suicide”—was dead on arrival when it was submitted in October 2022.

 

The San Diego County ME’s office took nearly a year to respond to the Zahau family’s 204-page petition letter. In a brief letter dated September 11, 2023, Chief Medical Examiner Steven C. Campman said he considered the arguments set forth in the letter sent by attorney Keith Greer, but “after reviewing the totality of the evidence, the conclusion of this office has not changed.”

 

In other words, the ME is sticking to its position that Rebecca Zahau hung herself, regardless of the family’s argument that she was murdered by Adam Shacknai, the brother of her boyfriend, Jonah Shacknai.

 

A civil jury supported that argument in 2018, finding Adam responsible for Rebecca’s wrongful death. Adam Shacknai claims innocence, but his insurance company settled with the Zahaus for $600,000 against his wishes, to avoid the costs of appealing the jury verdict.

 

“I considered the arguments set forth in your letter and the information in the accompanying documents,” Campman wrote, referring to transcripts and other information from the civil trial. “I also discussed your arguments with other members of the Medical Examiner’s Office, including staff pathologists and Dr. Lucas, who originally worked on the determining the manner of death classification for Ms. Zahau.”

 

Adam Shacknai called 911 on the morning of July 13, 2011, to report that he’d found Zahau hanging naked, bound and gaged from a balcony in the mansion’s rear courtyard. Adam claimed he’d stayed the night in the guest house, while Rebecca was in the main house.

 

In my last blog on this topic last year, I reported that the ME’s office still had not issued a substantive response to the Zahaus because it considered the family’s request to be a second “courtesy review” of the case, the first being in 2018, after the jury verdict was announced.

 

At the time, Greer claimed to have handed over transcripts or findings that came out of the civil trial, but then-chief ME Glenn Wagner said he didn’t consider any such data because “no new information was forthcoming from the Zahau lawyers.” County officials have always maintained that the Zahaus never presented “new evidence” at trial, only new interpretations of existing evidence. With that disconnect, I always felt it was unlikely that the second “courtesy review” would go any differently.

 

Despite acknowledging “the public interest and complexities of the case” and promising a careful examination and consideration of the petition, the county’s lack of urgency and Campman’s four-paragraph form-like response to the Zahas speaks louder than words.

 

Sheriff Kelly Martinez told me before she was elected in November 2022 that she wouldn’t ask an outside agency to re-open the criminal case in Rebecca’s death unless the ME changed its “suicide” finding. This was only after two of her challengers in that election, Dave Myers and John Hemmerling, both said they would re-open the case if elected.

 

In 2022, Greer sent the same petition letter to Dr. Jonathan Lucas at the Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, because Lucas was the one who made the original “suicide” finding after conducting the autopsy on Rebecca’s body and signed the death certificate. Lucas, who was the chief deputy ME in San Diego, left to head the LA county’s medical examiner-coroner’s office in 2017.

 

Greer’s letter to Lucas stated, “The reason for this request is that the large body of evidence and expert analysis developed after you signed Rebecca’s death certificate, as discussed in detail below, shows that it is “more likely than not” that Rebecca did not commit suicide. “More likely than not” is the standard in civil court, vs. “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal court.

 

The letter outlined 13 points of forensic evidence the jury supported in its wrongful death verdict, establishing “Adam Shacknai as the killer.” Greer also cited findings from the Zahaus’ expert witnesses in the civil trial that differed from Lucas’s. For example, forensic kinesiologist James Kent testified that Rebecca’s injuries didn’t gibe with a suicide death caused by a nine-foot fall. He said her height, center of gravity and bound hands would have made it virtually impossible for her to propel herself over the balcony railing, and that she should have been partially or completely decapitated if she’d found some way of doing so.

 

Lucas left his ME job in Los Angeles several days after receiving Greer’s letter, to which he did not respond and did not plan to, according to a spokesman. In his letter, Campman was apparently speaking for Lucas as well.

 

Greer has said numerous times publicly that if this petition was ultimately rejected, he would go back to court to request a change to the death certificate in what would be a third round of court proceedings that he hoped would be more successful. However, he has yet to make any such statement or court filing since receiving Campman’s letter 10 months ago, and neither have the Zahaus.

 

After winning the civil trial against Adam Shacknai in 2018, the Zahaus filed a lawsuit against the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDSD) in 2020, trying to force the release of investigative documents that would show the department hid or ignored internal communications, notes or emails that pointed toward or discussed the homicide theory.

 

This was somewhat of a fishing expedition, because they had no proof such documents existed. The judge said he wouldn’t force then-Sheriff Bill Gore—or anyone else from the SDSD—to testify about the issue, because law enforcement is protected from having to release, or even discuss, investigative documents under California law.

 

It is legal to publish findings from such documents if they are released through a party who has access to the discovery process, which is how I obtained investigative reports and witness interviews in the case. However, Greer maintained that the documents he was looking for were never made part of that process due to corruption within the SDSD, which Gore always denied.

 

After a promising start in the lawsuit against the SDSD, the family ended up asking for a dismissal when the judge indicated he was about to rule in the SDSD’s favor, saying that a writ of mandate was not the proper legal vehicle to go about getting such documents.

 

The question is, are the Zahaus going to take this case back to court for round three? It’s been a long and costly road for them, but they have said they intend to keep fighting until they get justice for Rebecca. They often wait to make announcements on the anniversary of Rebecca’s death, so I guess we’ll see if that happens later this week.

McStay family book now available for pre-order!

Some books take longer to get out into the world than others, and this is one of them.

The McStay family went missing from their new home in Fallbrook, California, in February 2010 and their bodies were discovered in the desert, 100 miles from home, almost four years later.

I've been following this case from the very beginning, which means I was gathering research for 13 years, so I'm beyond thrilled to announce that you can finally pre-order DOWN TO THE BONE: A Missing Family's Murder and the Elusive Quest For Justice from your favorite local bookstore near you. Here are quick pre-order links to IndieBound, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. The book will be released on January 23, 2024.

Normally, I would do a cover reveal separately, but this time it's all happening at once. This is a preliminary look at the cover, which will have a short blurb added to it in one of the spaces.

Because aspects of this case, and the people involved, spanned multiple counties in Southern California, I'm planning to do a broader book tour than usual to meet more readers and talk to them about this very complicated and messy case. Once you read the book, you'll see what I mean.

My last book, DEATH ON OCEAN BOULEVARD: Inside the Coronado Mansion Case, came out during COVID so I am looking forward to getting back out there for in-person events! If you are interested in watching the virtual events I did for that book, listening to podcasts or reading stories about the book, I hope you'll explore the links on my virtual tour.

As usual, I'm not taking a position on guilt or innocence in this book, I'm just laying it all out for readers to make their own decisions. But I think that many of you who think you know this case will be surprised to learn the story behind the story, and change your perspective.

If you are a book blogger, Instagrammer, established reviewer, or book seller who is interested in getting an ARC or set up a signing, please contact me at caitlinrother@gmail.com. The book will be available on NetGalley once we are at that stage, and as soon as I get some signing dates scheduled, I will post them on the Events page of this website.

Zahau Family’s Petition to the ME’s Office Seems Dead on Arrival

By Caitlin Rother

It’s been six and a half months since the family of Rebecca Zahau filed a 204-page petition with the medical examiner’s offices in San Diego and Los Angeles counties, trying once again to get Rebecca’s death certificate amended to designate her death as a “homicide,” or with an “undetermined” cause, rather than a “suicide.”

In July 2011, Zahau was found hanging naked, gagged, with her ankles tied and her wrists bound behind her, in the rear courtyard of Spreckels Mansion in Coronado, California, which was owned by her then-boyfriend, Jonah Shacknai. My book on the case, Death on Ocean Boulevard: Inside the Coronado Mansion Case, came out in 2021. The photo above shows the recent makeover of the historic house, originally built in 1908.

Other than a phone call upon receipt of the petition—that came in the form of a letter from the Keith Greer, the Zahau family’s attorney—the San Diego County ME’s office has still not issued a substantive response. That’s because it considers this to be a second “courtesy review” of the case, the first being in 2018, after a civil jury found Adam Shacknai, Jonah’s tugboat captain brother, responsible for Zahau’s wrongful death. Adam Shacknai claims he is innocent, but his insurance company settled with the Zahaus for $600,000 against his wishes, to avoid the costs of an appeal.

Although Greer claimed to have handed over transcripts or findings that came out of the civil trial, then-chief ME Glenn Wagner said he didn’t consider any such data because “no new information was forthcoming from the Zahau lawyers.” County officials have always maintained that the Zahaus presented only new interpretations of existing evidence at the trial, which they didn’t consider “new information.” If that is the disconnect, it’s unlikely that the second “courtesy review” will go any differently.

Because “there is no required timeline” for performing a second such review, Chief Medical Examiner Steven Campman “has been examining the material presented in the letter as time permits” and has “no definitive completion date at this time,” according to county spokesman Chuck Westerheide.

Despite acknowledging “the public interest and complexities of the case” and promising a careful examination and consideration of the petition, the county’s lack of urgency speaks louder than words.

I’m doubtful that Chapman will voluntarily grant the Zahaus’ request, if he responds at all. The new sheriff, Kelly Martinez, told me before she was elected last November that she wouldn’t ask an outside agency to re-open the criminal case until or unless the ME changes its “suicide” finding. This was after two of her challengers in that election, Dave Myers and John Hemmerling, both said they would re-open the case if elected.

Greer also sent his recent letter, dated October 27, 2022, to Dr. Jonathan Lucas at the Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, because Lucas was the pathologist who conducted the autopsy, made the original “suicide” finding and signed the death certificate. Lucas, who was the chief deputy ME in San Diego at the time, left for a better job in Los Angeles in 2017, to head up the county’s medical examiner-coroner’s office.

Greer’s letter states, “The reason for this request is that the large body of evidence and expert analysis developed after you signed Rebecca’s death certificate, as discussed in detail below, shows that it is “more likely than not” that Rebecca did not commit suicide. “More likely than not” is the standard in civil court, vs. “beyond a reasonable doubt” in criminal court.

The letter outlines 13 points of forensic evidence the jury supported in its wrongful death verdict, establishing “Adam Shacknai as the killer.” Greer has said that if the petition is ultimately rejected, he will go back to court to request a change to the death certificate in what would be a third round of court proceedings.

After winning the civil trial against Adam Shacknai in 2018, the Zahaus filed a lawsuit against the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDSD) in 2020, trying to force the release of investigative documents that would show the department hid or ignored internal communications, notes or emails pointing toward or discussing the homicide theory.

This was somewhat of a fishing expedition, because they had no proof such documents existed, and the judge wouldn’t force then-Sheriff Bill Gore—or anyone else from the SDSD—to testify about the issue, because law enforcement is protected from having to release, and apparently to discuss, investigative documents under California law.

It is legal, however, to publish findings from such documents if they are released through a party who has access to the discovery process, which is how I obtained investigative reports and witness interviews in the case. Greer maintained that the documents he was looking for were never made part of that process due to corruption within the SDSD, which Gore always denied.

After a promising start in the lawsuit against the SDSD, the Zahaus ended up asking for a dismissal last year when the judge indicated he was about to rule in the SDSD’s favor, saying that a writ of mandate was not the proper legal vehicle to go about getting such documents.

Neither Lucas nor his office in LA responded to Greer’s recent letter and don’t plan to, because the agency “is not a party to the San Diego case, nor has jurisdiction to conduct a case review of another county’s case,” according to an agency spokesperson.

Lucas did receive the letter, the spokesperson said, but he left the office days later. “No additional information is publicly available” about why Lucas left the job or where he went. His position was immediately filled on an interim basis by the agency’s medical director, who was appointed permanently in March.

Greer’s letter and lengthy attachments cite findings by Lucas with which the Zahaus’ expert witnesses in the civil trial differed. For example, forensic kinesiologist James Kent testified that Rebecca’s injuries didn’t gibe with a suicide death caused by a nine-foot fall. He said her height, center of gravity and bound hands would have made it virtually impossible for her to propel herself over the balcony railing, and she should have been partially or completely decapitated if she’d found some way of doing so.

The question is, how long are the Zahaus willing to wait for an answer from the ME’s office before they take this case back to court for round three? It’s been such a long, and I’m sure, costly, road for them, but they have always said they intend to keep fighting. . . until they get justice for Rebecca.

Spreckels Mansion Makeover Update

By Caitlin Rother

BREAKING NEWS: I'll be signing DEATH ON OCEAN BOULEVARD, my book about this case, on Saturday, March 11 at 1 P.M. at the Barnes & Noble in Escondido, 810 W. Valley Parkway, 92025.

The historic beachfront home known as the Spreckels Mansion has been in the public eye for years, most recently as the site of Rebecca Zahau's controversial death by hanging in 2011.

When I first wrote about the mansion makeover in 2021, chronicling the dramatic changes to what some Coronado locals call "the murder house," it was one of my most popular blog posts.

I'm doing this update now, because the mansion has gone through yet another set of dramatic remodels, so much so that it doesn't even look like the same house, at least to me. You can see the transformation for yourself in the photos below.

In the years after Rebecca's death, I watched as the house went on and off the market, with a sale price between $16.9 million and $17.5 million. In 2020, it was taken off the sale market and was as a monthly rental for $80,000, then $60,000. I later learned that it had not just been taken off the market, but sold -- for $11 million -- right after the COVID shutdown hit back in March 2020.

As I interviewed people about the history of the house itself, I learned that modifications were made to the interior by the people who owned it after Rebecca's boyfriend, Jonah Shacknai, but I could see the changes in the front yard for myself. Six mature palm trees were planted in the front yard, and other landscaping was added behind a new stucco wall and iron gate, which lent it more of a secure feel.

The next set of owners removed and uprooted the recently planted palm trees, and filled the front yard with rocks. This was taken in the late afternoon, so it looks yellowish, but it's actually more cream-colored.

Here it is in 2022, undergoing renovations. Notice the striped awnings and the decorative iron gate are gone. This is a side view:

With a temporary mailbox at the center, which is now gone, and some new paint:

Here's how it looks today:

And here's a historic photo of the house, built originally in 1908, as featured on the cover of my book about the case, DEATH ON OCEAN BOULEVARD: Inside The Coronado Mansion Case. (Click on the title to order.) This is how it used to look, totally open, with no locked gate or wall and a big lawn:

Countdown: Six-ish weeks until we learn if the Rebecca Zahau Case will be re-opened

By Caitlin Rother

Note: Due to my past life as a political reporter, I am still registered to vote as “decline to state,” so I’m not taking sides or endorsing any candidate in this race, and I hope to have good relations with whomever is elected sheriff. But I do hope that the criminal case into Zahau’s death will be re-opened, because there are still so many unanswered questions, and I am “thirsty for answers” like everyone else.

I finally got a chance to talk to Undersheriff Kelly Martinez at a candidate’s forum this week and ask her directly if she would be willing to re-open the controversial Rebecca Zahau death case if she is elected on November 8.

Although Zahau was found hanging naked, bound, and gagged from a balcony in the rear courtyard of the Spreckels Mansion in Coronado, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDSD) has stuck to its ruling in September 2011 that her death was a suicide.

My primary goal in attending the forum was to ask Martinez and her opponent, John Hemmerling, to state their positions in public on this topic, which is obviously important to me and the Zahau family, but is also a nagging trust issue within the broader community.

Martinez’s answer was, essentially, not likely. First, she said she wouldn’t suggest the case be re-opened by any agency unless the Medical Examiner’s Office changes its suicide finding first. (The Zahau family has been pushing to change the cause of death from homicide or undetermined since 2011, filing two lawsuits in the process).

Second, she contended that other agencies have already been asked to re-investigate the case and have said no.

“Recently?” I asked.

“No,” she conceded.

Third, Martinez also stated, incorrectly, that the SDSD has already investigated this case twice and retested evidence in 2018, and she didn’t think the community would be satisfied even if it was investigated a third time. (Read below for more details, but, in short, the SDSD has done only one investigation that lasted less than two months, and it did not retest any evidence during a subsequent internal “review” of the case in 2018, which then-Sheriff Bill Gore said emphatically was not a full-blown re-investigation or re-opening of the criminal case.)

Hemmerling has already been pretty vocal about this subject recently, announcing that he has met with the Zahau family and, like retired sheriff’s Commander Dave Myers, who lost in the primary election, promised them that he would re-open the case if elected.

“The community is thirsty for answers,” he said, adding that he would close the case only after they got those answers. He noted, however, that “I’m not going to say there will be a different outcome.”

Still, re-opening this case is something that so far, the SDSD has refused to do, even in the wake of a civil verdict in 2018 that found Adam Shacknai responsible for Rebecca Zahau’s wrongful death. As a result, her family, who is convinced that she was murdered, has endorsed Hemmerling for sheriff.

The need for more transparency by the SDSD is one of Hemmerling’s major campaign talking points, and it was a major theme for Myers’ campaign as well. They both said they believe that the SDSD has been hiding behind its mistakes and has not been held accountable for far too long, while Martinez said the opposite.

“I’m a big believer in transparency,” she said, noting that they can’t always publicize certain details. “It looks like we’re hiding behind things, but . . . if we’ve made mistakes we need to be accountable and own up to them.”

Well, frankly, yes, it often does look like they’re “hiding behind things.” I’ve been wanting to write this blog post for quite some time, but I couldn’t get Martinez to return my calls, let alone respond to my request to sit down and talk. Not about the Zahau case, and not about the McStay family murder case, which is the topic of my next book, DOWN TO THE BONE, which will be released by Kensington/Citadel Press in 2024. Each time I’ve put a request in to her campaign manager or the SDSD spokeswoman, I’ve been told that Martinez declined to comment, or I got no response at all.

I was also told that no one else at the SDSD would comment for my McStay book either. Period. The agency investigated the family’s disappearance in February 2010 for several years as a missing person’s case, finally handing it off to the FBI, because the lead detective believed the family went voluntarily to Mexico. Seven months later, the remains of the family—Joseph and Summer McStay and their three- and four-year-old sons, Joey Jr. and Gianni—were found in two shallow graves in the High Desert in November 2013.

So last night, I showed up and introduced myself to Martinez before the forum, which was conveniently being held at a church in my neighborhood. When I asked if she knew who I was, she said no. (I should note that I was one of the few people in the room wearing a mask, and it’s not like I’m a famous person, even if I have been on TV numerous times locally and nationally.)

“I’m the author of the book on the Rebecca Zahau case,” I said, referring to DEATH ON OCEAN BOULEVARD: Inside The Coronado Mansion Case, which came out last year and, as I told Martinez last night, is in development for a dramatic TV series. (Update: All I’m allowed to tell you is that we are currently shopping the project to high-end studios and showrunners, and are getting “some serious interest.”)

“Oh,” she said in a less than enthusiastic tone. Kind of like, oh, she’s one of them, not a regular citizen, whom I’ve come to shake hands with tonight. And even worse, she’s going to hound me about the two cases that have caused widespread criticism of our department and its investigations for more than a decade now.

Of course, she didn’t say any of this out loud, but I covered politics for many years as an investigative reporter, most recently at The San Diego Union-Tribune, which I left in 2006 to write books full-time. I’ve done most of my interviews by phone over the years, so I’m pretty sensitive to someone’s tone. Maybe I’m wrong and she wasn’t thinking that at all. When I approached her again after the forum, she smiled and nodded, but asked if we could talk after the election, because she had more pressing matters to deal with. If you read on, you’ll see that is very true.

Martinez, who has spent all 37 years of her law enforcement career working her way up the chain of command at the SDSD, is the county’s first female undersheriff, and if elected, would be the first female sheriff. She is clearly not a seasoned politician, and the forced compression of words into two-minute answers, coupled with her often unemotional expression, made her responses sound almost robotic.

As a former prosecutor, Hemmerling seemed much more comfortable with the microphone, even when it didn’t work, as he repeated a set of rehearsed talking points throughout the evening. His constant refrain that the problems facing the SDSD stem from “a void of leadership” directly targeted Martinez. As the top prosecutor at the City Attorney’s Office, he served as legal counsel for two police chiefs, one of whom has endorsed him. He also was a police officer in San Diego for 10 years, and during his 30 years in the U.S. Marine Corps for 30 years, he ran detention facilities in Iraq.

But his aggressive calls to change the status quo at the SDSD and to criticize its new and existing policies and procedures, which Martinez said she is working to improve, were also aimed at her predecessor, Bill Gore.

“Whatever’s being done isn’t working,” Hemmerling said. “We can hope and wish all you want . . . [but] we can’t keep doing the same thing.”

Gore announced Martinez as his anointed successor just days before he retired months early, on the same day that a highly critical report on inmate deaths in his county jails was released.

In the past, this has been San Diego tradition: Gore was appointed to quietly lead the department as undersheriff before Sheriff Kolendar retired, and then acting sheriff when Kolendar actually retired, so that Gore was already in prime position when he ran in the next election. However, this time the Board of Supervisors responded to accusations of nepotism by appointing an interim sheriff, who was not running for the seat.

However, it still looked like a back-door deal. Even though Martinez had only just filed papers to declare her candidacy a couple of days earlier, she had already obtained a number of major endorsements by Democratic state and local lawmakers after a very recent party change from Republican to Democrat. Many political observers (including me) believe this was a strategic move to knock Dave Myers, who is an LGBTQ Democrat, out of the race in the primary.

That strategy worked: She won 37.5 percent of the vote in June 2022, Hemmerling garnered 20.4 percent and Myers lost with 19 percent. Still, a whopping 62.5 percent voted to change the status quo, i.e., someone other than Gore’s choice in Martinez.

Myers had also run against Gore in 2018, making a decent showing with nearly 44 percent against the incumbent’s 56 percent, after announcing that he would re-open the Zahau case if re-elected. Myers’ announcement came shortly after the civil jury ruled that Rebecca was murdered, and after Gore immediately stated that he would not re-open the criminal case regardless of what the jury decided. Myers’ announcement prompted Gore to appoint a new panel of SDSD detectives to “review” the case.

Nine months later, long after Gore had won the election, few people were surprised that the review simply restated the SDSD’s original findings of suicide. The detectives did not re-interview any people of interest, including Adam Shacknai, nor did they interview any new witnesses. They also did not retest any DNA evidence from the July 2011 case with more modern technology.

Martinez told me she thought one of the knives in the case had been retested, but if that was true, it was not announced to the public. We were told that no items were retested for DNA, and the only new item to be tested was a pair of panties found in the guest house, where Adam Shacknai said he’d spent the night. The panties, as it turned out, belonged to Adam’s niece, the daughter of his brother Jonah Shacknai, who was Rebecca’s boyfriend.

Martinez and Hemmerling spent most of the forum answering pre-scripted questions about pressing issues and possible solutions to change the culture within the SDSD. The agency has been embattled lately by an unprecedented number of inmate deaths and related lawsuits, a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by two female former deputies, an internal gun-sales corruption case, low staffing levels and mandatory overtime that have resulted in low morale, and claims that the agency lacks transparency and dodges accountability.

For those of you who don’t live in San Diego County, the SDSD has been subject to multiple studies and state recommendations to address the escalating problem in its local jails, which have had a higher number of inmate deaths than Riker’s Island in New York City. That number is still rising, and is now occurring at twice the rate since Gore retired.

Martinez contended that she has been implementing and developing new ways to deal with this and other internal issues plaguing the agency. But she blamed the inmate deaths largely on the county’s fentanyl problem, which is causing accidental overdoses in regular citizens as well as in the inmate population.

“The jails are a mirror of the community,” she said, offering anecdotes of a female inmate who tried to hide 28 grams of fentanyl in her bra, and a man who violated his probation four times so he could bring drugs into the jail.

Martinez noted that 82 percent of the male inmates and 67 percent of the female inmates tested positive for illicit drugs upon intake. However, what she didn’t mention is that those numbers haven’t changed much over time. In fact the female numbers have dropped since I covered these same jails as a Union-Tribune reporter. (I left in 2006 to write books.)

It’s the number of resulting fatalities that has changed. In the past, the problem was methamphetamine, which can be a killer over time, but today it’s fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine, and can be instantaneously fatal.

“We’re doing a lot and we need to do more, but a lot of that is going to depend on staff [levels],” she said, noting that she has instituted pay raises, but the jails are outdated, lack space for psychiatric care, and need to be upgraded, and “we’re all competing for the same work force.”

Thanks for reading. If you have any tips or information about the McStay or Zahau case, please email me at caitlinrother@gmail.com.

Zahau Family Lawsuit Against Sheriff's Department Dismissed

By Caitlin Rother

I wasn’t all that surprised when Rebecca Zahau’s family announced this week that they were dropping their lawsuit against the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

Nor was I surprised when they said they were taking a “new” direction to petition the medical examiner to change its finding that Rebecca died by hanging herself from a balcony of the Spreckels Mansion in Coronado in 2011.

The family, which believes that Rebecca was murdered (as do many other people across the nation), called a news conference on the tenth anniversary of Rebecca’s death in 2020 to announce they were going to file this very same petition.

They distributed a letter to reporters, saying they were going to submit it to the ME’s office by the end of the month. However, they never sent the letter, which asked for a change to the death certificate so the manner of death was homicide or undetermined. There was some question whether they should send the “petition” to Dr. Jonathan Lucas, the pathologist who made the original suicide finding and now now heads the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, or to the local ME’s office, but the Zahaus never actually submitted it to either agency.

Instead, they chose to file this lawsuit, demanding investigative files they claimed they had never received in their original public-records request, but which are traditionally protected and exempted from disclosure by California law. The family hoped that these requested documents existed, but no actual proof that they did. All they had were suspicions that documents were being hidden by now-retired Sheriff Bill Gore, whom they accused of being corrupt for hiding and withholding anything and everything that didn’t support the sheriff’s suicide findings.

For one, the Zahaus were looking for written instructions that Gore may have given to a three-person team of detectives he appointed to do a “review” of the case after a civil jury found Adam Shacknai, the brother of Rebecca’s former boyfriend Jonah Shacknai, responsible for Rebecca’s death. At the trial in 2018, the Zahaus argued that she was hogtied, hit over the head, sexually assaulted with the handle of a steak knife, then strangled and lowered over an exterior balcony in the mansion’s rear courtyard.

Adam Shacknai denied all such allegations, calling the Zahaus “posers” who “got lucky” with the verdict. Shacknai wanted to appeal the verdict, but his insurance company settled with the Zahaus for $600,000, against his explicit wishes.

Just hours after that verdict, Gore issued a statement that his department was standing by its suicide findings. He changed course two weeks later, however, after his opponent in the upcoming election, Dave Myers, made a campaign promise to re-open the criminal case if elected.

Gore’s review team waited nine months—conveniently after Gore won re-election—before announcing that the department was sticking to its original suicide findings. This week, Gore declared through an attorney: “I only provided my instructions [to the review team] orally/verbally, either in person or over the phone. Thus, my instructions do not exist in written form and have never existed in written form.”

As I said in my last blog, this is no surprise whatsoever, because officials know that putting anything in writing is discoverable in a lawsuit. However, Greer, who called the whole review process “a charade” carried out only for campaign purposes, said this only supported his corruption allegations.

"The only reason you don't put it in writing is you don't want people to know," Greer told KUSI this week.

Along with detectives’ notes, texts or emails that might support suspicions or evidence that Rebecca was murdered, the Zahaus were also hoping this lawsuit would result in the release of Adam Shacknai’s phone records. Doug Loehner, Rebecca’s brother-in-law, said the lead detective told him in 2011 that her team never collected Shacknai’s cell phone, but they did obtain his phone records.

The Zahaus’ attempts to determine exactly which documents might be hidden from public view came in a request earlier this year to depose Gore, who was named in the lawsuit along with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department (SDSD), but Judge Timothy Taylor would not allow that.

Greer had predicted as much. “[Gore]’s been evasive. He’s a very good politician and he’s been able to stay one step ahead of us the whole way. There is corruption of some kind,” he said in March, adding that “we’re not sure we’ll ever know what or why he’s doing it.”

For full disclosure, I, too, was hoping more documents would be released, because there are so many unanswered questions in this case that I couldn’t even take a position on whether Rebecca died by suicide or was murdered. I was somewhat optimistic, at least initially, because the judge didn’t immediately throw out the lawsuit and side with the SDSD, which traditionally doesn’t release investigative files. This became murky in this case, though, because the agency wrote a letter to the Zahaus’ first attorney, Anne Bremner, saying it was releasing the “entire” investigative file to her. However, the sheriff’s attorney Robert Faigin said in a declaration for this lawsuit that he didn’t mean that to be taken so literally.

“When I used the term ‘investigative file’ in the Bremner letter, I was referring to a collection of Sheriff’s records that pertained to the Zahau investigation and which the sheriff believed would satisfy Bremner’s request for the sheriff’s ‘investigative file,’” Faigin wrote. “The investigative file generally consists of the case, the recordings, the pictures, search warrants, and other investigative reports such as scene reports, evidence logs, lab reports, autopsy reports, and statements and recorded interviews, for example. I did not intend the term ‘investigative file’ to mean each and every record in the Sheriff’s Department’s possession that mentioned or related in some way to the Zahau investigation.”

I actually have copies of that “investigative file,” which was given to me by two independent sources, and it is true that nothing overtly supporting murder was included.

For the past two years, the Zahaus’ continuing legal battle has kept their fight to re-open the criminal case in the news while they hoped that a new sheriff, who would be more sympathetic to their cause, would ultimately be elected.

The Zahaus filed a request to dismiss their lawsuit without prejudice this week just two days before a long-awaited hearing on the merits of the lawsuit, which had been scheduled for yesterday (Friday, July 8). Although the spin was that they had decided to go in a new direction, it looked more like a pre-emptive move to avoid losing face when the judge rejected the lawsuit.

It was obvious how Judge Taylor was leaning at the last hearing in March when he stated that a public records lawsuit was not the appropriate legal avenue to accuse the sheriff of corruption.

“Whether [the review] was a charade or not is not a question that the CPRA [California Public Records Act] is designed to address,” Taylor told Greer, saying he was ready to decide the case back then. “Let’s just get it on and get the issue resolved for the well being of this family and so that the sheriff can leave office knowing what the rule is.”

Taylor then asked, almost rhetorically, if the Zahaus were stalling because they hoped that their chosen sheriff’s candidate would be elected later in the year.

“I have sensed that this is a stalking horse for waiting until the sheriff is out of office,” Judge Timothy Taylor said at a hearing in March, three months before the June primary. “Am I misreading the situation?”

The Zahaus’ attorney, Keith Greer, replied that he “was trying to put more meat on the bones” by deposing Gore and other experts so he could win his lawsuit and obtain more investigative files that might help bring justice to the Zahau family.

At that time, Greer had already made it publicly known that he was supporting Dave Myers, a retired sheriff’s commander, for sheriff. However, Myers, an LGBT candidate and a Democrat, lost the primary three months later to Undersheriff Kelly Martinez and John Hemmerling, a former head prosecutor for the San Diego City Attorney’s office and a former San Diego police officer.

Martinez was promoted to undersheriff just days before Gore retired, several months earlier than previously announced, and immediately won his endorsement.

Martinez had recently changed her political party affiliation from Republican to Democrat in what appeared to be a strategy to knock Myers out in the primary. That strategy worked. Although the sheriff’s race is nonpartisan, voters tend to vote along party lines. Hemmerling is a Republican.

NBC-7 reported this week that they asked the sheriff’s candidates where they stood on the issue of the Zahau case: “John Hemmerling said he was willing to reopen the case while Kelly Martinez, who has been with the department for 37 years and is currently acting sheriff, said she was open to an outside agency investigating Zahau's death.” Martinez is no longer acting sheriff.

When Greer still hadn’t answered any of the dozen questions Taylor had asked months ago so he could rule on the merits of the lawsuit, officially known as a petition for writ of mandamus, Taylor issued a tentative ruling on Wednesday rejecting the petition.

“By failing to file a merits brief and failing to address the questions the court ordered [the Zahau family] to address, petitioners have failed to carry their burden to establish a violation of the CPRA by the county,” Taylor wrote.

A court spokeswoman said that tentative ruling was vacated on Friday, after Greer had to file a second request for dismissal because the first was missing a signature and other information. The second request was subsequently granted, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Greer said the petition to change the death certificate will be filed with the ME by the end of the month, with the end goal of getting the criminal investigation re-opened “so that Adam Shacknai can be criminally prosecuted. We’re not going to quit until that happens.”

The petition, he said, will include evidence presented at trial and several main arguments:

One, that Lucas based his suicide findings in 2011 on the fact that the bindings around Rebecca’s wrists were loose. He apparently didn’t know that Shacknai had loosened the bindings around Rebecca’s wrists so he could feel her pulse, as he stated during his testimony at trial in 2018.

“Lucas said he ruled suicide because the knots were loose,” Loehner told KUSI.

Two, that the pattern of lividity or livor mortis on Rebecca’s body, which is where the blood settles after the heart stops pumping, bringing a purplish tint to the skin, showed that she had been hogtied with her knees bent, then strangled to death, and lowered from the balcony—not that she hung herself.

“The blood would have gone down from her torso, and her upper body and her legs and stopped when it hit those ropes and you would have black and blue around the tops of those ropes, because the blood couldn’t go any further,” Greer told KUSI. “It was restricted by the ropes. That’s livor mortis.”

According to Shacknai’s timeline, Greer said, Rebecca would have been hanging for three or four hours with her feet at the lowest point of her body. “The blood would have settled,” he said, but “there is zero livor mortis at the lashings on her ankles. There’s no blood pooling in her feet, there’s no blood pooling in her hands, there’s no livor mortis around her lashings on her wrists. So she was clearly tied up when she was alive, killed, and then allowed the livor mortis to set in with her knees bent, before the ropes were cut and the hanging was staged.”

And three, that they have caught Shacknai in a “bald-faced lie” by saying that he cut Rebecca down while standing on a table. Based on the measurements of the ropes binding her ankles together, her hands behind her, and around her neck as she hung from the balcony, Greer said Shacknai would have been cutting three feet above where he said he did.

“That’s powerful, powerful new evidence,” he said.

For more on these points and other exclusive information about this case, you can read my book, Death On Ocean Boulevard: Inside the Coronado Mansion Case, which details all the evidence and theories in this ongoing murder vs. suicide debate.

How I Came to Be a True Crime Author: With the "Strange Deaths" Beat

By Caitlin Rother

The memories came flooding back this past week, as I've been revisiting the days of being a reporter at The San Diego Union-Tribune, where I developed a niche I like to call the "strange deaths" beat some 25 years ago.

Getting into my own WayBack Machine, I wrote an essay this week about covering the Heaven's Gate cult mass suicide in March 1997, which you can read here. I continued to write about the estate battle with the county over the cult's intellectual property, which ended 2 1/2 years later in probate court.

I was also invited to discuss my Heaven's Gate coverage, as well as other stories on my "strange death" beat--and how I carved out that niche--in a 20-minute podcast with a Union-Tribune opinion editor, Kristy Totten, which you can listen to here.

As some of you may know, my late husband took his own life in April 1999 by hanging himself in a motel in San Quintin, Mexico. So, I have both personal and professional experience with suicide that has informed several of my books: HUNTING CHARLES MANSON, my latest title, DEATH ON OCEAN BOULEVARD, and also my mini memoir about my marriage and how I recovered from that trauma, SECRETS, LIES, AND SHOELACES. Please contact me if you'd like to buy a signed copy of any of these or my other books.

Some of the stories from my "strange deaths" beat include the one about Richie Newman, who lit himself on fire near a Walmart parking lot in East County and died 12 hours later. It all came as a complete shock to his family, who never even knew he was depressed. I'm still in touch with them. I was honored when the paper nominated my story for a Pulitzer.

I also wrote about Steven Hoover, who tried unsuccessfully to kill himself several times, until he finally tried starving himself. After failing with pills and shooting himself with a gun, he put foil on all of the windows of his condo, then stopped eating and drinking. He was found mummified in bed in his Clairemont condo 18 months later, after the condo had gone into foreclosure.

And finally, I wrote a long narrative, which won five journalism awards, about a little girl named Zondy Afflalo, who was hit and thrown 80 feet by a car crossing the street in Allied Gardens, which caused her to become brain dead. Her father initially didn't want her body "cut up" to donate her organs, but her aunt, who was a doctor at Kaiser, persuaded him otherwise. As a result, Zondy's organs and one of her corneas went to 5 different people, whose lives I followed for the next year. As part of my research, I watched a corneal surgery in San Francisco, a heart valve replacement surgery in San Diego, and I talked with one of the receipient's grieving mothers in her kitchen in Brooklyn, N.Y. after his body rejected two livers and died. At the time, no other newspaper had ever tracked that many organ recipients of one donor before.

I've tried to recreate that story with a different group of people for a book, but HIPPA and privacy laws have so far made that impossible. I'm still hoping to write that book some day, though, so please let me know if you are an organ recipient who is in touch with your donor's family, and if you might know other recipients of the same donor. It was such a healing story for me, and such a great educational tool for organ procurement, as they call it these days. I really think that an inspirational book about another organ donor and his/her recipients could save a lot of lives.

Lessons Learned From Covering the Heaven's Gate Mass Suicide 25 Years Ago

By Caitlin Rother

The night in 1997 before 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult ate phenobarbital-spiked applesauce to await death—with Nikes on their feet and plastic bags over their heads—my husband went into an unrelated alcohol-fueled rage.

Recently married, I was an energetic general assignment reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune at the time. But I was so exhausted and traumatized the next morning that I called in sick. I needed a mental health day to recover.

When I heard the news that evening that sheriff’s deputies were responding en masse to a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, I started feeling the adrenaline of a big story developing. Only I was stuck at home, unable to call in to offer to help or my editor would think I’d been malingering.

As more details of this mass suicide were released, I grew more and more angry that my husband’s tirade had caused me to miss one of the biggest stories of my career. So, primed and ready the next day, I sat in the morning news meeting, racking my brain to find a way into the story.

Thankfully, I found one: Drawing from my experience covering county government, I came up with an enterprising idea that made up for lost time and resulted in my covering this story for the rest of its natural life, which ran 2½ years.

By obtaining a long list of food items and other belongings that the county Public Administrator/Public Guardian’s Office had seized from the mansion, I was able to describe the highly regimented, celibate and sugar-happy lifestyle of these cult members. I also illustrated the tenets that they lived by, and offered a rationale to explain an act that none of us could understand—how they were shedding their earthly vessels to catch a ride on a spaceship in the Hale-Bopp comet’s tail and rise to the “next level” they called “Level Above Human.”

The county had to recover its costs of handling the cult’s estate, which it ultimately took over, and also find a way to cover the cult members’ families’ $130,000 in claims for funeral, burial and other expenses. But when the county tried to do that by auctioning off the cult’s belongings, that move was blocked by two former cult members who had left the group to get married, and who filed a lawsuit in probate court to take possession of the cult’s artwork and intellectual property. The county won the legal battle, and the cult’s surprisingly mundane items, such as bunk beds, were sold in November 1999 at one of the most globally newsworthy memorabilia auctions ever.

Along the way, I learned about the planning of an elaborate suicide and the inner workings and management strategies of cults in general, which have unique yet common philosophies for member recruitment and retention. This knowledge would help inform my future books about the Manson Family murders (Hunting Charles Manson), the Rebecca Zahau death case (Death On Ocean Boulevard), and even, ironically, my husband’s own suicide in April 1999 (Secrets, Lies, and Shoelaces).

Among the items I found most fascinating and telling were a diagram of where the cult members sat in a room to watch TV and a description of what programs or movies were allowed and prohibited. The seating arrangement correlated to the hierarchy within the cult. So science fiction shows were good, such as “The X-Files,” “Star Trek: Voyager,” and “Star Trek: Deep Space 9,” presumably because they saw themselves as spending their futures in space. But James Bond movies, or even “Multiplicity,” where Michael Keaton’s character cloned himself several times, were not.

The programming they were encouraged to watch was a vehicle for mind control. Only they called it discipline, organization, and self-improvement. Just like Charles Manson, who didn’t want his followers reading newspapers, Heaven’s Gate leader Marshall “Do” Applewhite didn’t want his members watching anything sexual. By diverting their energy elsewhere and keeping conflict among them to a minimum, they were told they could improve themselves without having their “vibration changed,” that this was to assist them, not restrict them.

By following their own religion of sorts— Applewhite’s was asexual, and Manson’s was sexual—both cults were striving to reach a common goal, as a family, that surely couldn’t have been a selling point to join at the start: to kill themselves or others.

Such cults provide a lesson that is still relevant today. Charismatic leaders can convince large groups of disillusioned people to harm themselves or others by using misinformation, delusions, or conspiracy theories, whether it be done by eating applesauce in a bunk bed, refusing to take a COVID-19 vaccine, or declaring war to take over a neighboring country.

This essay was originally published in The San Diego Union-Tribune

What's Next: I've Got a New Book Deal!

By Caitlin Rother

I am thrilled to announce that I have landed a deal with Citadel Press/Kensington to publish my 15th book and my first solo hardcover.

Tentatively titled, DOWN TO THE BONE, this one will be about the mysterious murder case of the McStay family, who disappeared from their home in Fallbrook, California, in February 2010, and whose skeletal remains were found in the desert almost four years later.

Some book projects take longer to simmer than others. Of all my projects, this one has probably been simmering the longest: It’s been 12 years and nine books since I started following this case, which gripped the nation and Southern California in particular. The book is due out in 2024. Once I have a more specific pub date I’ll let you all know.

Even though I’ve been gathering research that entire time, I had to do it in spurts in between my other book projects. That’s partly due to this being a death penalty case, which always take years to get to trial. Partly because the man convicted of murdering the family kept changing attorneys—in between representing himself. Partly due to the fact that I had another couple of books that I had to write before this one (on the Rebecca Zahau case, which went to trial first, and one that got cancelled halfway-through because of COVID). Partly due to the trial dragging on for five months. And then partly due to COVID restrictions and some other issues that caused delays in getting the proposal finished and out to market.

So, believe it or not, even after 12 years of gathering “string,” as we called it in the news biz—which includes collecting more than 300 pages of search warrant affidavits, attending the preliminary hearing, going through court records, doing interviews, reading a zillion news articles, watching documentaries, following the trial through live tweets, and watching the trial livestreamed and on YouTube—this is when my deep research really goes into high gear.

I’m writing this blog post today for two reasons. One, to share this exciting and great news with you. (I’ve published four hardcovers before this, but they were all co-author gigs.) And two, I also want to put the word out that I’m interested in hearing from anyone with helpful or interesting information for my book. That would include a neighbor, friend, or anyone, really, who knew the McStay family or the defendant, Charles “Chase” Merritt, who is now on death row at San Quentin, or Dan Kavanaugh, on whom the defense tried to blame these murders throughout the trial.

I often get emails from people who want to give me information after my books are already published, but that doesn’t really do me much good. The time is now.

I’d also be interested in hearing from anyone who sat through the trial, which was impractical for me to attend personally since it took me four to six hours to drive to and from San Bernarndino whenever I attended a hearing or did an interview. Also, anyone who was a witness or was involved in the investigation or in the case in any way.

This case grabbed my attention from the start because it is very rare for an entire family to go missing, especially with two little boys, ages 3 and 4, whose cherubic faces were plastered on “MISSING” posters in the U.S. and Mexico, along with their mother and father. Who would want to hurt these people and why?

By all accounts Joseph McStay was a kind, generous, and loving family man who enjoyed playing with his three boys, surfing, soccer, and building custom fountains. His wife Summer was a fiercely protective mom who loved organizing her sons’ birthday parties and making sure they had lots of forts and toys to play with. Gianni loved dinosaurs and books, and was almost never seen without a hat or beanie, while smiley little Joey Jr. ran around after his older brother, trying to keep up.

But I want to know more about them. Much more. Because I like to pay a tribute to people who are murdered, and I do that by finding out who they were and what they accomplished before they became victims. And I can’t do that without help from people who knew them.

This case held the public’s interest for years because the family’s disappearance couldn’t be explained. Detectives with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said they couldn’t find any blood or other evidence of foul play at the house, so they investigated it as missing person’s case.

The lead detective said he thought the family had gone to Mexico, so he gave up in early 2013 and handed the case over to the FBI. Later that year, motorcyclist John Bluth, who I’m trying to reach as we speak (anyone know him?), found what he thought was part of a human skull while off-roading in the Mohave Desert near Victorville and called 911.

It turned out that the McStay family had not gone to Mexico, just like Joseph’s parents and brother had always said. They were taken or lured from their house and fatally bludgeoned in the head—while still alive—with a sledgehammer that was found with their remains in one of the two shallow graves in the desert.

We are all still wondering how, when and where this family was killed, because investigators and prosecutors do not know and could not give us that information. But this is only one of the many unanswered questions I will spend the rest of this year trying to answer as I research and write this book. I’d be interested in hearing what yours are too.

You can reach me at crother@flash.net.

I generally don't write about a case before I get a book deal, but since this one dragged on for so long, I did write a blog post after attending the preliminary hearing in this case in 2015. You can find it here at the WildBlue Press website, where you can also buy two of my books, DEAD RECKONING and NAKED ADDICTION, my first and only mystery novel.

Thanks for reading!