A Deadly Silence: The Cold-Blooded Massacre of Three Vibrant Young Girls and the Devastating Effects on Their Survivors

Copyright © 2013 by Adele Sweetman.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-6727-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6728-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6729-6 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 03/27/2013

Contents

Preface

Part One Triple Homicide

Part Two Investigation

Part Three Confessions/Autopsies

Part Four Survivors

Part Five Trial

Part Six Sentencing

Epilogue Motive/Hebrock Interview

A Note About The Book

Acknowledgements

For

Parents of murdered children

and

other survivors of homicide victims

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.

—William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Preface

The impetus for writing A Deadly Silence, the story of Heather Goodwin, Kathy Macaulay and Danae Palermo, as my Master’s graduate writing thesis was to honor their memory. This I believed in my heart to be the crowning homage to these young homicide victims and their survivors.

My manuscript submission to the English department at California State University Northridge was the first non-fiction thesis to be considered. Still, I believed that A Deadly Silence reflected my unique expertise. I was the author of two published legal investigative textbooks, Investigating A Homicide and Chain of Evidence. Both sold domestically and internationally, primarily to the Administration of Criminal Justice curriculum at colleges and universities. In addition, I had completed the Litigation Legal Assistant program and interned with the Los Angeles Municipal Court.

When A Deadly Silence was accepted, I pushed forward with the project and in its final polished form achieved what I set out to do. What follows is a factual true-crime story about the triple homicide, the two perpetrators, the three victims and their survivors written from the investigating detectives’ and survivors’ perspectives.

Part One

Triple Homicide

March 21, 1991

1

Mimi Goodwin heaved Lenox cups and saucers at the concrete wall bordering her English garden. Tall, blond and model thin, tears spilled down her cheeks as the china crashed and crumbled before her. It was the fifth day of the week and the sun had settled in for the night.

Her neighbor, Lucia, quieted her barking Chihuahua, Is that you, Mimi?

Yes, it’s me, Lulu, the voice hollered back.

There’s a pot of minestrone on the stove, would you like some?

I’m not hungry.

Are you O.K., dear?

No, I’m not O.K., she said, and hurled a few more saucers. Today, the guy at the morgue insisted there wasn’t anyone there named Heather, and I’m still really pissed off.

Clearly, the grieving mother’s anger was justified. She had been advised the previous evening that the autopsy of her murdered teenage daughter was completed. The body was ready to be released to the funeral home. Her personal effects were also ready to be picked up. Retrieving them at the Los Angeles County Morgue should have been a straightforward enough task. It wasn’t. She had called ahead in the morning and given her daughter’s name to the clerk on the telephone.

I’m sorry, you must be mistaken. There’s no one here by that name, he said. Did she go by another name?

We used to call her Tinker, Mimi explained.

How do you spell that?

Tinker. T I N K E R.

Mimi waited while the gentlemen checked. I’m sorry, I can’t find that name.

It’s HEATHER ‘TINKER’ GOODWIN. TINKER LIKE TINKERBELL.

Yes, that’s what I have.

Well, would you check again?

I’m sorry. She’s not here.

Not there! Well that’s a fuckin’ relief. I thought she had been murdered! Maybe I just imagined it!

Let me double check.

An hour later, having cleared up the misunderstanding, Mimi Goodwin stood in front of the clerk. He inventoried Heather’s property: a gold Guess watch, several tiny silver rings and a cross on a gold chain that had been stretched from its original length during an altercation prior to her murder.

The items, soaked with blood, brain matter, pieces of Heather’s hair and flesh, were verified as belonging to Heather Goodwin. They were signed for by her mother.

Once inside her black sedan, Mimi placed the plastic bag of possessions behind the driver’s seat and floored the gas pedal.

At home, in the solitude of her bathroom, she vomited. Behind the closed door, she removed her daughter’s jewelry from the baggie and for a very long time let the water from the faucet flush them clean.

If ever Mimi needed a guardian angel, it was now. One came as a stout, second generation Italian neighbor. Lucia typically dressed in long, colorful pastel skirts and white eyelet blouses. A wrap-around apron finished off her wardrobe since most days she busied herself in the kitchen. She cooked for family. She cooked for neighbors. And mostly she cooked for the teenager who was skinny—like a spaghetti noodle.

Mimi knew that Lucia would miss pampering her beloved God-child, but now it was she who needed Lucia. Her neighbor swept up the broken dishes and took a pot of soup into their kitchen. She also popped open a can of Friskies for Heather’s kitties, Samantha and Flash, who eagerly rubbed against her ankles and scooped up some dry kibble for Hero, their German Shepherd.

She found Mimi standing like a stone statue beneath the arched hallway with her eyes fixed on the portraits that hung along the wall. Mimi had painted them to represent the growing stages of her daughter’s life. Lucia wrapped her soft, fleshy arms around the child’s mother, but Mimi was inconsolable.

If I could just rewind—rewind and bring my Tinker back, she sighed long after Lucia had tip-toed out.

In the tub, Mimi soaked her exhausted, grief-stricken self. Her head throbbed, blue eyes were scarlet from crying. She asked herself how one minute she had been hugging her Tinker, laughing, waving good-bye and within five hours, Tink and her friends, Kathy and Danae, were gone—murdered. The reality was staggering.

2

David Adkins had traveled many times across San Rafael Avenue to visit his girlfriend, Kathy Macaulay. Whether or not his girlfriend was home, Adkins and his friends Vinny and Cayle hung out inside her comfy apartment. In a sense, the three were like many teenagers, generally in a hurry. They drove too fast to and from the apartment to notice much of anything. Still, on occasion, at least one was struck by the sense of affluence that surrounded them when they drove through Annandale, a wealth to which each was so unaccustomed.

On March 21, 1991, sometime before midnight, they drove out of the area even faster than usual. David Russell Adkins struggled with the power steering of a 1986 maroon Mercedes Benz. Burton Vinny Hebrock and Cayle Matthew Fiedler were passengers in the stolen $50,000 automobile. They had no idea where they were going. They just knew they had to get out of Annandale fast.

I just killed my girlfriend, one of them said.

Yeah dude, another said, we smoked them all.

A few seconds later the three bolted past the large brick pillars situated on both sides of the road—the boundaries of this peaceful community—and must have known they would never pass through them again.

David couldn’t have cared less if he ever again set foot in that ritzy area. What did eat at him was that he left practically empty-handed. Just the thought caused the skin on his neck to itch. He had planned to return to the main house after he took out the girls and empty the bedroom safe of its contents, but Cayle rushed him. He convinced him to get the hell out of there because somebody had probably called the cops.

David had already taken over ten thousand dollars worth of jewelry. It was just a matter of time until Kathy’s mother discovered that more than half of the jewelry in the safe was gone. It had been easy to slip into the bedroom and sift through the contents of the unlocked safe while Kathy was at school. These past few weeks, he hung around the apartment more than usual. He had dropped out of school and good old dependable Kathy helped him out. He ate her food, spent her money and used her small red moped for transportation. He was almost sure that she didn’t have a clue about what was going on.

Still, he couldn’t be sure. Maybe the networking among their friends passed the word that he and Vinny had stolen some stuff—not just from her house but also houses around the area. Heather, Kathy’s best friend, often insinuated that she knew he was up to no good. Since there were no secrets between the two friends, maybe Vinny hadn’t imagined that Kathy seemed uptight about something.

Well anyway, I showed her, David chuckled to himself.

He felt no loyalty for the one who always looked after him. Kathy had trusted him when he told her he had been trying to find a job. She allowed him to use her as a reference when no one else stuck their necks out to speak for his character. Even Linda Koss, Kathy’s mother, helped him put together a makeshift resume. Kathy told David that her mom had been reluctant at first but eventually listed herself as a reference and gave him not one but two references. Kathy had told her mom that if David got a job, maybe he would allow her to concentrate on herself for a change.

Their puppy love began four years before. Even then, those close to Kathy warned that the impetuous teenager with a blond curly mane, piercing blue eyes and copious mouth was nothing but trouble. But she was not convinced. The two became a steady twosome until time diffused the infatuation, at least for Kathy. She was ready to move on. Not Adkins. He wasn’t about to cede the gratuitous hand to someone else.

Seeing that she had slipped away drove him to follow her obsessively. He showed up uninvited whenever she visited friends and attempted to break down her resolve with empty promises. David knew she was corresponding with a young man, a friend of the family who attended college in another state. Nevertheless, nothing could persuade him to stay away. This forced Kathy to appease him now and then in order to avert a quarrel.

Yet no one knew that this teenager who was received with much the same hospitality as other guests would so shamelessly violate the very ones—probably the only people—who had ever befriended him unconditionally. It didn’t matter to him. He stole a solid gold bangle bracelet and other family heirlooms that could never be replaced. It didn’t even matter to him that Kathy was dead. On top of everything else, he stripped her of the right to die with a little dignity. He left her lifeless body sprawled out on the carpet in a blood and brain spattered room.

The Rolex watch belonging to Dr. Koss, Kathy’s stepfather, had sold for a decent sum on the streets and brought David enough cash to buy a good supply of cocaine. He pursed his lips and squinted to see beyond the darkness of the headlights. We should have ripped off the house when we got the gun, he mumbled to the teenager beside him.

Vinny ignored him. He was lost in his own thoughts and still hadn’t figured out how everything had gone down. It happened so fast, but one thing he knew for sure was that Heather would never again call him the ugliest fuckbrain she had ever seen. "Now she’s ugly," he whispered. He dared not look at his face to see how many times she had dug her nails into the side of his cheek and neck. He didn’t have to. That whole side of his face stung, especially when he used his fingertips, wet with salty perspiration, and stroked the scratch marks. They were still raw despite the dried blood that covered them.

He had tried to change Heather’s opinion of him. He couldn’t. She reminded him that he was a good-for-nothing—he didn’t go to school, didn’t work and just tagged along after David wherever he went. Get a life, she told him.

Vinny didn’t know what made him think she wouldn’t react like she did when he tried to make out with her. She’d had a few beers but even if she had drunk the whole case, he knew she would never have let him touch her. After he watched her sleep on the edge of the bed, he couldn’t help himself. Maybe it was the booze. It was all a blur now. Heather woke up with a shriek. Before he knew what happened, Danae was behind him. She yanked him off her. Everyone was hitting and scratching. He punched Danae in the face but was no match for two enraged girls and they put him in his place.

Physically battered and having lost face, he staggered to the couch and sulked. On the edge of the bed the two girls consoled each other and stopped from time-to-time to glare at him. He felt so humiliated. He had liked Heather from the start. She was everything he wasn’t. She was smart and made friends easily. Besides, she was right: he was a loser. He couldn’t do anything right.

That’s what his dad always told him when he fouled up their burglary attempts. Go inside, he said and pushed him through the small doggie door of a stranger’s house. Unlock the door and let me in. The youngster was not coordinated enough to quickly manipulate all the different door knobs and often took too long. When dogs barked, he panicked and crawled out the same way he entered. His disgruntled father stood over him. Can’t you do anything right? He lashed out and brought the back of his hand hard against the side of Vinny’s head. But even then Vinny liked treading on the heels of his father. One day his father left and never returned.

That was a long time ago. Until David came along, no one ever seemed to want Vinny around. Out of the corner of his eye, Vinny checked out his only friend and admired David’s cool. David didn’t like Heather. Vinny heard him badmouth her all the time because David was sure that she talked behind his back to Kathy. It was no secret that Heather encouraged Kathy to break up with David. Heather won’t fuck with us any more, Vinny thought. Heather had been so scared when she saw Kathy’s brains fly all over the room. But David caught her before she ran out the door. She wasn’t strong enough to fight him off. Vinny heard as she pleaded, Please don’t shoot me. Please. David shoved her back on the bed and pulled the trigger.

The silence in the front of the car unnerved Cayle. His fast-talking had just saved him from having his own head blown off. He wondered what would happen if David changed his mind? The guy is fucking insane, he thought to himself. David had taken out Danae—put the barrel of the shotgun against the back of her head and pulled the trigger. Cayle couldn’t be sure of anything. Earlier, he had seen the crazed look in David’s eyes and it still dominated the facial silhouette he silently observed. Only the smirk when he pulled the trigger was missing. Jesus, Danae had fallen sound asleep. She couldn’t hurt nobody, Cayle remembered as he shifted his weight uneasily from one side of his thick behind to the other. Cayle agonized at the possibility that if he hadn’t passed out maybe none of this would have happened. That caused his head to ache but even he realized he couldn’t undo it now. He had to think of himself and get as far away from both David and Vinny as soon as he could. Meanwhile, he wouldn’t let them dick him around. Coming face-to-face with the barrel of a shotgun had sobered him up plenty. Besides, he was bigger than either of them.

Where to go was the big question on David’s mind. While he searched through Kathy’s purse for the car keys to the Mercedes, he and Vinny talked of going to Mexico. Now, he had a few significant pieces of her 14K gold jewelry. They would be easy to pawn. Maybe Mexico was still a good idea. But Cayle wasn’t buying it. He wanted to go home.

Dude, are you going to come with us to Mexico? David asked Cayle as he drove onto the freeway overpass.

Fuck no. You guys take me home, Cayle said. His eyes took in the road ahead of him. I’ll cover for you guys the best I can, but fucking get me home now.

David adjusted the rearview mirror so he could see into the backseat. He glanced at Cayle several times, then at Vinny in the passenger seat who cradled the shotgun between his legs with twenty-two extra 12-gauge rounds in his pockets. Once beyond the overpass, David slowed down. Instead of turning right onto the freeway to Cayle’s home, he turned left at the dark, deserted road under the Colorado Street Bridge. He followed it north toward the Rose Bowl a mile or so in silence. Suddenly he made a sharp U-turn just beyond the underpass. All right, he said. We’ll go to your house first. You cover for us and we’ll cover for you.

Not much else was said as they made their way through the residential areas between Pasadena and Cayle’s house in Alhambra. The distance was not more than ten miles but stop lights or stop signs on nearly every corner made it a slow ride. Any other day at that hour, David would have run most of them. That night, however, he knew better than to risk getting stopped.

The car had barely come to a stop in front of apartment #2 on 25 Westmont Drive in Alhambra when Cayle hurried out of the back seat.

Don’t say nothing. You better shut up or we’re gonna come back and we’re gonna smoke you, David yelled after him.

Yeah, keep your mouth shut or we’ll kill you, Vinny added as Cayle ran toward the apartment.

Cayle had heard Vinny talk like a fool many times. The only time Vinny followed through with much of anything was when David was there to back him. David always called the shots. That night was no exception. David was calling the shots, so Cayle wasted no time getting out of the car and away from the two.

Cayle’s father, Michael Fiedler, had been home all evening watching the movie Ghost. Around 9:30 p.m., he turned on Cheers. When it was over, he flipped channels until Johnny Carson came on at 11:30 p.m. Carson’s monologue had just begun when Fiedler heard the sound of a car outside. A few seconds later, his son burst in flinging the front door hard against a living room wall.

What the fuck’s going on! Michael yelled.

Dad, this is no shit, he said as he hurried up to the couch where Fiedler was lying. Cayle’s face was wet with perspiration. When he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, it shook. Everybody’s been killed. All my friends are dead. Everybody’s dead, he said in a panic. They blew everyone away at the party. We gotta get out of here.

Michael Fiedler grabbed Cayle by the shoulders. Slow down, he said. Tell me what happened?

David did it. They did it. David and Vinny did it. There was no reason for any of this. Dad, they killed the girls.

What girls? Michael said impatiently.

Heather. Kathy. Danae. I don’t know why they did it. I was drunk. I passed out on the bed by Danae. I guess the shots woke me up. Danae was right next to me. I saw David blow her head off. Then he pointed the gun at me. He kept saying, ‘Are you down with us? Are you down with us?’ I was afraid, so I told them I was. Dad, we need to get a gun to protect ourselves.

Jesus, Fiedler said and turned off the television.

Michael was a nervous man. He was prone to pacing around his modest apartment when he had to make a decision. Like Cayle, he was average height, maybe five feet ten inches but without the bulky physique. If the two young punks with a gun returned at midnight or any other time for that matter, he didn’t want to be home.

True to form, Michael reacted according to his nature. Get some clothes, he told Cayle. I’m taking you to your grandmother’s. We need to regroup. Let me get our stuff, he said and collected the drug paraphernalia that was in the apartment. When this thing goes down, the cops will be swarming all over this place.

The small bungalow on Glendon Court in South Pasadena, where the older Fiedler had grown up, first came to mind because it was less than five miles away. Besides, he didn’t think David and Vinny would think to look there. Father and son left quickly, taking Michael’s car.

Marilyn Davies, Cayle’s grandmother, was accustomed to rising with the chickens, as she liked to say. She had retired early that night. A small woman widowed many years before, she had lived nearly seven decades. She was satisfied to look as old as her years. She let her grey hair go as it may and wore her teeth only on rare occasions. These things were no more important to her than all the wrinkles she had accumulated over the years.

Her son had occupied her days during much of her lifetime, then her grandson. Now with the time she had left, she believed that being motherly or grandmotherly was her calling. This self-appointed role did not often sit well with Michael. Though forty-four and unemployed, he was nonetheless resolved to be his own man. Still, when Mrs. Davies suggested he call his ex in Washington state to tell her what had happened, that sounded like a reasonable option for the problem at hand.

Michael Fiedler and the former Mrs. Fiedler agreed on little except where their son was concerned. Neither doubted Cayle’s side of the story. How unthinkable that their son could have murdered anyone. He only saw what happened. He had nothing to do with it. They were sure of it. It seemed to both that getting him out of the state for his own safety was the only viable solution.

It was easy for Fiedler to book an early morning flight to Washington on Alaska Airlines. The six hour wait for the plane to take off from the Burbank Airport was not.

As for Cayle, he paced back and forth in the scant living room area. Each time a car drove past, he peered out the window. Were the cops coming to arrest him? Were the killers coming to smoke him?

Cayle’s grandmother was beside herself as well. She checked and rechecked the front and back doors to make sure they were locked. When she wasn’t inspecting the doors or a screen that a sudden breeze caused to rattle, she sat in the kitchen and worried that one of her boys might be hungry. She had long since decided that food was a remedy for every problem. The day before, she had put together a ham and potato casserole for her men. For what seemed to Cayle like the hundredth time the grandmother asked him if she could fix up a plate for him.

Cayle was too uptight to even acknowledge what she asked. Instead, he took a couple of swigs from a whiskey bottle that was on the coffee table to calm him.

After a bit, he grabbed his jacket off the couch and opened the front door. I gotta do something, he told his dad. I gotta tell. I gotta tell Peggy. She’s my friend. She’ll know what to do.

Mr. Fiedler was no less distressed. He needed some time alone. He nodded but instructed his son not to stay too long.

3

Peggy Shurtleff lived on Bank Street, a few blocks from Cayle’s grandmother. Medium height, her ash blonde hair worn loosely around her shoulders, Peggy was easily recognized by the tiny gold earring looped into the side of one nostril. Dressed in Levis and a white pullover sweater, Peggy was still awake at 1:00 a.m. That morning she had planned to go to the party in Annandale but then about noon made plans with another friend.

When Cayle knocked on the screened back door of her house, she wasn’t surprised to see him. Earlier that afternoon she had dropped by his house looking for him. He wasn’t home, but she asked Mr. Fiedler to have Cayle call her.

They’re all dead, he told her the moment she opened the door. David and Vinny killed Heather, Kathy and Danae. I was there. I had nothing to do with it. David and Vinny did it.

Shurtleff could see that Cayle had been drinking;