Hunting Evil
PLEASANTON, CALIFORNIA DECEMBER 2, 1997
It was still dark when Vanessa Samson awoke on the last day of her life. The wet fog that seeped over the hills from the bay fell to the lowest places in the valley and hung on tight, an ice-cold blanket that muffled everything, even sound. A cold front had moved in a few days earlier, driving overnight temperatures to just above freezing. It wasn't the kind of weather for walking, but then, Vanessa didn't have a car.1
Vanessa pulled on her clothes: a gray sweatshirt with its red San Diego State University lettering across the chest, a pair of blue jeans, and white Nike tennis shoes. She went out into the kitchen, ate a bowl of Cream of Wheat cereal, packed a lunch in her red nylon Safeway Stores lunch box, and put her things into her JanSport backpack. She went to the doorway of her mother Christina's bedroom and said goodbye.
A simple goodbye. That was it, a last word from a beloved child. But that's the way it is with unexpected death. There are no warnings, no omens, no instinctive realization that someone you've cherished for all her life will never come home again. It's just goodbye, a word that will stretch into the silence of eternity.
At five feet three inches, 120 pounds, with long dark hair flowing down her back, 22-year-old Vanessa Lei Samson was an extraordinarily attractive young woman. After graduation from Amador High School in Pleasanton, Vanessa had taken a series of jobs as an office clerk while she saved money to pay for a higher education. She lived at home with her mother Christina, her father Daniel and her sister Nicole on a quiet Pleasanton cul-de-sac not far from Interstate 680, the multi-lane freeway that tied together the string of communities lying in the long valley east of the Oakland Hills. Vanessa had a regular boyfriend, Rob, who was attending college in the San Diego area, and a wide circle of friends in the Pleasanton area.
Because her old car had broken down irreparably the year before, Vanessa was accustomed to walking to work at SCJ Insurance Services, located in a Pleasanton business park perhaps a mile away. Her route, from her family home in the cul-de-sac to Singletree Way, then down Singletree past the Lucky Supermarket to West La Positas Drive and the insurance office, generally took about twenty to twenty-five minutes.
On this early morning as Vanessa walked, the fog was unusually thick. A schoolgirl neighbor of Vanessa was perhaps 200 feet ahead of her on the sidewalk. The 13-year-old noticed Vanessa walking her usual course behind her, dressed in her tennis shoes, with her black jacket and her backpack. Meanwhile, a host of others living in the homes along Singletree remained inside, preparing breakfast or getting ready to go to school as the fog clung to the ground.
Near the corner of Page Court and Singletree Way, two men were eyeing the roof of a house one of them had recently purchased on the north side of Singletree Way. The roof needed to be replaced. The two men, David Valentine and David Elola, had arrived at the house earlier that morning and had noticed that the roof surface was slick because of the just-above-freezing temperature and the fog. After spraying the roof with water from a hose to get rid of the slippery frost, Valentine and Elola climbed up on the roof and began removing the worn shingles.
Valentine and Elola started at the peak of the roof, ripping the shingles off and throwing them to the ground. Elola was on the side closest to the street. About 7:45 a.m., both men heard a piercing scream that was abruptly cut off, followed by the sound of a sliding car door being slammed shut. Both men looked up and saw a forest green minivan—they thought it might have been a Ford—roll slowly forward down the street, make a stop at the corner, and then turn right and disappear. Both men saw a woman with long dark hair behind the wheel of the minivan. The scream troubled both Valentine and Elola; but because the van was hardly speeding off, neither thought that anything terribly awful had occurred. Elola told Valentine not to worry: it was probably just a mother disciplining a child. They could not have been more wrong.
Copyright © 2000 by Carlton Smith.
