There were also the weirdos and outliers like Bruce Wendt,* an oddball who’d been to Janelle’s house shortly before the murder. His entry in Janelle’s address book was accompanied by a handwritten notation: “Fuckhead, jerk, asshole, faggot.”
And then there was the one who confessed.
* * *
TOM HICKEL* WAS IN HIS VAN, DRIVING HOME FROM THE MOVIES with his friend Mike Martinez* in the passenger seat. Midway through the drive, Martinez suddenly turned to him and said, “I have to get something off of my chest.” Hickel didn’t brace himself hard enough for what followed.
“I killed her.” Martinez spoke as if unloading a burden. “I killed Janelle.”
He looked dead serious.
“You know that steel thing I have?”
“I don’t know what steel ‘thing’ you’re talking about,” Hickel replied.
“Never mind,” Martinez continued. “I just wanted to see if I had the guts to kill. It started in the bathroom and I fought with her first. I hit her with this steel thing.”
Hickel asked him how it felt.
Martinez told him, “It feels like nothing. It feels normal.” Hickel tried to hide his goosebumps.
“I wanted to know if I had the guts to kill Jennifer,”* Martinez explained. Jennifer was his girlfriend. “I don’t care if I’m put in jail for twenty-five years. They don’t have the death penalty here. I killed Janelle, and I will pay for it.”
Martinez told Hickel that he’d been over at Janelle’s house the week before she died. He met her parents. He learned they were going to be out of town and Janelle would be home alone.
“I purchased a single-shot shotgun from Big Five,” Martinez confided. “I’m going to use it to blow Jenny away, because she needs to die.”
Hickel continued trying his damnedest to not react.
“I’ll turn myself in to the cops after I do it,” he promised. “I’m going to do it on Saturday.” He didn’t say which Saturday.
Before they parted ways, Martinez told Hickel that he was just kidding about killing Janelle.
“I just wanted to see what you’d do.”
What Hickel did was, he went to the police—to whom Mike Martinez was certainly no stranger. He had prior arrests for attempted marijuana possession, commercial burglary, residential burglary, assault and battery, and he had twice attempted suicide— once by drinking Drano. The residential burglary charge and one of the assault-and-battery charges stemmed from an incident with Jenny, the girlfriend Martinez intended to kill.
And it turned out, Martinez repeated this sequence of crimes— the very night before Janelle was murdered. At one a.m., Martinez drunkenly broke into Jennifer’s apartment through the sliding glass door and confronted her, demanding to know why she’d ignored him when they’d crossed paths at a Carl’s Jr. a week before. With glazed eyes and unsteady footing, Martinez professed his love for Jennifer and in the same breath attacked her religious beliefs. She pleaded with him to leave. He ignored her. His blank expression betrayed no evidence that he even heard her talking to him.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he kept asking.
He then left the room. Thinking he was gone, Jennifer cautiously proceeded downstairs, only to find Martinez in the kitchen. He had a kitchen knife and was cutting a towel into strips. Anticipating that he was about to tie her up, she began screaming. He grabbed her and muzzled her with his hand, dragging her into the bedroom and onto the bed. She screamed and fought, driving him out of the apartment. But only for a moment.
When he returned to look for his keys, Jennifer resumed screaming, ordering him to leave. He knocked her against the couch and punched her twice in the mouth and once in the head. Finally, he left for good.
On June 21, Mike Martinez was arrested near his home in Garden Grove.
In the police cruiser en route to the station, Martinez insisted: “I would have turned myself in. Tom set me up. I didn’t do it. It’s not fair! Why me?”
He began ranting. “Do you guys have enough evidence right now to put me away or what? I don’t think you do, because I didn’t . . . I have not seen Janelle in three years.”
“You probably have enough evidence anyways,” Martinez continued. “So I’m Mexican. I don’t have any money. I can’t afford an attorney. I’ll get a public defender. He’s going to tell me to settle for fifteen or twenty-five years. I’m probably going to get first-degree murder, premeditated. That’s going to be twenty-five years. What are you going to charge me with anyway? First degree or second degree? It’s not fair. Why did you pick me up?”
A tape recorder was running. The cops let him ramble. He’d dig his own grave.
“Okay, I’m in this situation, is it something that, it fully looks like first-degree premeditated, doesn’t it? A lot of people that are innocent, mostly niggers and Mexicans like myself, are going to take the fall. You should at least take blood. Find out I’m innocent, eventually catch the real guy. If I’m innocent, can I sue Tom? I don’t think I’m going to get out of it either. I think that Montgomery is just going to use what he has and that is going to be enough.”
Once at the station, a technician from Gold Coast Laboratories took Martinez’s blood. A CSI officer assisted in collecting hair samples.
EARLY IN JULY, THE LAB RESULTS FROM MICHAEL MARTINEZ’S blood sample were returned to Montgomery. Martinez was eliminated as a suspect.
The co-worker was eliminated too. DNA profiling was still a year away from its debut appearance on the forensic landscape, but advances in serology—the study of serum and other bodily fluids—provided investigators with some insights.
Janelle’s killer possessed a rare genetic makeup. He was a nonsecretor, an individual who doesn’t secrete blood-group antigens in other bodily fluids like saliva, semen, etc. Nonsecretors make up about 20 percent of the population. His PGM (phosphoglycerate mutase), a protein enzyme, was also an unusual type. An Orange County Crime Lab forensic scientist informed a Cruz investigator that the killer’s combination of nonsecretor and PGM type is seen in approximately 1 percent of the population.
It wouldn’t influence his physical appearance. His health and behavior wouldn’t be affected. He simply possessed rare markers.
Investigators appreciated the forensic results, but they needed a face and name. They felt certain the answer was in Janelle’s immediate orbit. The theory persisted that one of the young men in her life was responsible.
* * *
TEN YEARS LATER, MARTINEZ AND ALL THE OTHER BOYFRIENDS AND guy pals who drifted into Janelle’s circle were conclusively eliminated when the DNA profile of her killer was developed. It matched none of the original suspects. Instead, it matched an unidentified killer responsible for three other murders.
Mary Hong has a scientist’s dispassion and isn’t easily shocked. But the Harrington/Witthuhn/Cruz match dented her composure. She stared wide-eyed at the spreadsheet.
“That’s unbelievable,” she said to her computer screen.
Ventura, 1980
THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT FORMED A SPECIAL COLD-CASE UNIT TO deal with the sudden influx of new leads. Members of the Countywide Law Enforcement Unsolved Element, known as CLUE, began digging through old case files in January 1997. Meanwhile, Mary Hong faxed the Harrington/Witthuhn/Cruz DNA profile to hundreds of crime labs throughout the country. There was no response.