John Massingale was in the San Diego County Jail for the murders of Suzanne Jacobs and her three-year-old son when David Allen Lucas was arrested in December 1984. Massingale, a thirty-year-old drifter from Harlan, Kentucky, had been arrested that March and had confessed to killing them. Investigators went back over the evidence and became convinced, on the physical evidence, that Lucas had done it. The charges against Massingale were dropped and he walked out in January 1985 after ten months inside. He was later declared factually innocent, and sued for three million dollars, saying a Kentucky State Police investigator, Denny Pace, had threatened him with the death penalty unless he confessed. He could barely read or write and had left school after the fourth grade.
Between May 1979 and November 1984 six people in San Diego County were killed by having their throats cut. A seventh survived.
Lucas was born in 1956 on an American military installation in the Philippines, one of three children of a naval officer, Clarence Lucas, and his wife, Patricia Katzenmeier, and the family came back to the United States while he was small. He suffered from asthma and wet the bed. His father beat his wife and children with a belt, a telephone cord or his hands, abused them sexually, and smashed the furniture in his rages, and the children said much of it fell on David. His parents divorced in 1971. At eighteen he was arrested for raping a twenty-one-year-old maid who worked for a family friend. After his release he married a woman named Shannon, moved to Spring Valley, and started a carpet cleaning business with a friend, Frank William Clark, which took him inside other people's houses.
Suzanne Jacobs was thirty-one. On the morning of May 4, 1979 her husband, Michael, left their house in Normal Heights at six. A neighbor across the street, Margaret Harris, saw a dark maroon sports car with a black top pull up between eight and nine. Nobody answered her call around eleven, or Michael's. A deliveryman left a dinette set on the porch. At five Michael came home and found Colin, who was three, dead in the hallway; he had been cut in the bathroom and had made it that far. Suzanne was in the bedroom among broken furniture. She had been stabbed in the back and the abdomen before her throat was cut, and she had fought: there were strands of blond hair clenched in both her hands. The pathologist, David Katsuyama, said the throats had been cut so hard the wounds exposed the spine. Bloody prints from a Vibram-soled shoe, all one size, suggested one killer.
In the bathroom police found a torn, bloodstained scrap of paper with two things written on it: "Love Insurance" and "280-1700". It was the name and telephone number of a local insurance brokerage, and around the time of the murders Lucas had taken out a policy with it. Massingale told the court he was essentially illiterate.
Gayle Roberta Garcia, a twenty-nine-year-old real estate agent, was found with her throat cut in a vacant house in Spring Valley on December 8, 1981. She had gone there to show it to at least three prospective renters, one of whom was never identified.
Jodie Santiago Robertson was visiting friends in El Cajon from Seattle. On the night of June 8, 1984 she left a restaurant between half past ten and eleven and walked to her car, and a man came up behind her with a knife at her throat. He drove her in a dark maroon sports car to his house, tied her hands and raped her on a bed, and strangled her until she passed out. Then he put her back in the car, left her in bushes by a road about a kilometer away, and cut her throat. Two women found her the next morning. She survived with damage to her vocal cords, spine and left jugular vein, a fractured skull, part of her scalp torn away and the tendons of her right hand cut through. Eighteen days later she left the hospital and described a car like a Datsun 280ZX with a manual shift and a plate of three numbers and three letters, and a house with a semicircular driveway. Her age is given as thirty-four in one account and thirty-five in another.
On August 3, 1984, in Lakeside, Rhonda Strang, twenty-four (twenty-three by another account), and three-year-old Amber Fisher, whom she was babysitting, were killed in her home. Her husband, Robert, was dealing drugs out of the house, and she had been keeping a diary of his dealings and passing information to a detective, Dale Kitts, and had said in the weeks before that she was being watched and would be killed because she knew too much. Robert's foreman gave him an alibi. The diary was never found. Lucas knew the Strangs: his coworker Richard Adler was Rhonda's brother, and Lucas had been to the house to buy drugs.
Anne Catherine Swanke was twenty-two and a student at the University of San Diego. In the early hours of November 20, 1984 she left her boyfriend's apartment near San Diego State in her Dodge Colt, which was low on gas. It stalled; she walked to a gas station near La Mesa, bought fuel, walked back to the car and vanished. A police officer found the car with the door unlocked, her wallet on the seat and the gas cap off. Four days later she was found in rough country about two miles from Lucas's home in Spring Valley, naked below the waist, her throat cut, with a chain for tethering a dog around her neck.
Shown a photograph, Jodie Robertson identified Lucas as the man who had attacked her, and in late 1984 he was indicted for her attack and the Strang, Fisher and Swanke murders. Early in 1985 he was indicted for the Jacobs murders and Gayle Garcia's too. His business partner sued to dissolve their partnership.
The case against him was assembled from several directions: the insurance note, the shoe prints, the car, Robertson's identification, and hair. The hair is the part worth reading carefully. Two criminalists examined the strands from Suzanne Jacobs's hands. John Simms of the San Diego police laboratory excluded Massingale, calling the hairs very different from his, but could neither include nor exclude Lucas, saying only that some were very close to his. James Bailey of the Los Angeles County sheriff's laboratory went further and thought most of them were similar to Lucas's and might have come from him, while also saying that some had characteristics closer to Colin Jacobs's hair, and that he could not eliminate Lucas as the source of those either.
The six murders and the attempted murder were consolidated into a single trial, one of the longest San Diego had held. Preliminary hearings began in January 1986 and jury selection that August. The defense attacked Robertson's memory as damaged by trauma, attacked the blood evidence, and put the blame on Massingale, calling Denny Pace, who admitted he had mentioned the death penalty to Massingale, had shown him one photograph of the scene, and agreed that Massingale was a liar who would say anything to satisfy a police officer. Massingale himself was called to support the case that he had been wrongly charged.
On June 21, 1989, after eight days of deliberation, the jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of Suzanne Jacobs, Colin Jacobs and Anne Swanke, of the attempted murder of Robertson, and of kidnapping both Swanke and Robertson. It found that he had personally used a knife in each crime and inflicted great bodily injury on the two women, and found the multiple-murder special circumstance true. It acquitted him of the murder of Gayle Garcia, and deadlocked eleven to one for conviction on Rhonda Strang and Amber Fisher. His mother told him she loved him and ran from the courtroom in tears.
Gayle Garcia's death is often counted among his and it should not be; a jury heard the evidence and said he did not do it. A retrial was set on the Strang and Fisher murders and the charges were later dropped because he was already under sentence of death.
Judge Laura Palmer Hammes sentenced him to death on September 19, 1989. The prosecutor, Daniel Williams, called the killings the most vicious and cold-blooded murders San Diego had suffered. The court later noted that the wounds shared characteristics unlike anything the county coroner had observed in the more than twenty years before the trial, and that no motive was established.
The automatic appeal took twenty-five years. On August 21, 2014 the California Supreme Court, in a 231-page opinion, affirmed the judgment in full, finding that no error or assumed error had prejudiced him. He has maintained his innocence throughout, and the substance of the case remains argued over. Comparative hair analysis of the kind two criminalists disagreed about at his trial has since been substantially discredited in American courts, and the man who confessed to two of the killings walked free without the question of why he confessed ever being settled in public.
No court has disturbed the verdict. He is held on death row at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton.