1880
The California Southern Railroad, the Santa Fe line, began work through the canyon on July 10th, 1880.
about 0:09:18The story
Canyon Lake sits in Riverside County in southern California, roughly an hour and a quarter from both Los Angeles and San Diego, built around a lake in Railroad Canyon. The town covers 4.66 square miles, a little under four of them land and the rest water. The railroad came first: the California Southern Railroad began work through the canyon on July 10th, 1880, hoping for a line from San Diego to Chicago, but the track only reached Barstow, about 150 miles away. Native people warned that the canyon flooded every six months, and the line was washed out in 1884, in 1916 and again in 1927, when the company gave up after about 50 years. A dam was built instead. The lake was filled in 1964. In 1968 the Corona Land Company started the City of Canyon Lake on 4,801 lots, and the whole town was gated, with no downtown beyond a nail shop and a couple of restaurants. The population was about 2,000 until around 1980 and is now 11,080, up 40 per cent since 1990, with a median age of 43.4. About 85 per cent of residents are white, 12.88 per cent Hispanic, 1.01 per cent black and 0.95 per cent Asian; about 46 per cent are religious, 2.47 per cent LDS and 0.09 per cent Jewish. Median household income is $74,682 against a national figure of about $54,000; the cost of living index is 142 and housing 223 against a par of 100; the median home costs $414,200 against a normal $185. Violent crime and property crime each run about 20 per cent below average.
Norma Davis was 87 and lived alone in Canyon Lake, where she had been for about five years. On February 14th, 1994, her friend and neighbour Alice Williams, 86, called for her at 9.15 that morning, as the two women went to the salon and shopping together. Davis had passed her driving test the week before and had been out the previous night having two keys cut. Williams found the front door open, the television off, Davis's purse by the refrigerator, her pills untouched and $148 in cash from a cashed Medicare cheque on the counter. Upstairs, in the den, Davis was in her chair with two knives in her, one in the chest and one in the throat, and her head almost cut off. The autopsy found she had been manually strangled first and then stabbed eleven times. Nothing was taken and a diamond ring was still on her finger. Detectives found a small Nike footprint in the parquet entry and a cut telephone cord. Davis's former daughter-in-law, Jeri Ambrose, who cared for her, arrived while police were there with her companion Russell Ambrose; Jeri was wearing Nikes, but nothing came of it then.
Two weeks later, on February 28th, 1994, her 66th birthday, June Roberts did not answer her telephone. Three friends went to her house and found her golf cart outside with her keys on it. Inside, in the den, she was tied to a chair and strangled with a telephone cord, and she had been beaten about the face with a heavy crystal wine decanter. Two telephone cords had been removed from the house, and her diamond ring was still on her finger. Investigators thought she had died the day before. A psychic had told police two weeks earlier that there would be another murder and that they would solve it. The town held an emergency council meeting; residents changed their locks and bought guns.
On March 10th, 1994, a blonde woman in her mid-thirties, about five foot two, came into the Main Street Trading Post, an antiques and framing shop in Lake Elsinore, where Dorinda Hawkins, 57, worked part time. The woman asked whether Hawkins was alone, then asked to see frames in the back room. As Hawkins turned away, the woman looped a yellow nylon rope around her throat. Hawkins fought, was pulled to her knees, crawled on the floor and passed out; the woman told her in a calm, soothing voice to relax and be quiet and said she was not there to rob the store. Hawkins woke about forty minutes later to a ringing telephone, went to hospital for head and neck injuries, and found $25 in petty cash and the money from her purse gone. A six-foot rope was recovered and a composite sketch was made. Hawkins said afterwards that the woman had done this before.
On March 16th, 1994, the anniversary of her husband Ernest's death from cancer, Dora Beeby, who was over seventy, missed an appointment. Her daughter Julia called and got no answer, and a male friend with an appointment reached the condo first, found the door unlocked and found her in the bathroom, curled on her side in a foetal position and covered in blood, with a dented and bloodstained clothes iron on the sink. A telephone was underneath her.
By then police had a name. She spent heavily, took loans from her father, ran up credit card debt and a second mortgage, and was fired three months before the murders from Inland Valley Regional Medical Center after failing to account for 21 doses of painkillers. By then she was living with her boyfriend Lane, a musician, and his five-year-old son.
Her hair had been dyed red. In the home they found jewellery, food, liquor, a ski mask, nearly $2,000 in a purse in a washing machine, a key to Roberts's mobile home, Roberts's bankbook and credit cards, keys matching those taken from the antique shop, new clothes with the tags on, boxes of Nike Airs, a purple boogie board, a $1,000 Trek mountain bike and unopened bottles of perfume. In the police car she talked about her new boogie board.
She also said she had killed Roberts after being annoyed by her, and Hawkins after reading a look on her face as a put-down.