Town note
In the late 1800s Antelope was the only settlement worth anything in the area outside Sacramento, built by temporary railroad workers who stayed on.
about 0:04:55The story
Antelope sits in north central California, about twenty minutes east of Sacramento, on the line between Sacramento and Placer counties. It began as a railroad settlement and in 1880 held only about 400 people. On April 28th, 1973, a Southern Pacific train loaded with aircraft bombs exploded in the Roseville yard. The chain reaction began at 7.52 in the morning and went on for five hours, wrecking the general store, damaging every home and levelling most of the town. Fifty-two people went to hospital. Antelope was rebuilt in the 1980s as a planned community of single-family homes and apartments.
Alicia Ernst was born on May 26, 1983, and grew up in Carmichael, California. By 2008 she was twenty-four, living in Citrus Heights and working for two years as a nurse's aide at the Siena Care hospice in Auburn. She was thin, blond, outgoing and bubbly, and she had goals pinned to her bedroom wall; she was planning to go back to school and become a nurse. She had no children. She drank, partied and used drugs, including methamphetamine now and then.
They had known each other since they were thirteen and had grown up together in Roseville. A few months before, her boyfriend of a few months had broken up with her and told her she needed space, and she had been leaning on Alicia ever since. She also complained about her weight, and people around them noticed that she envied Alicia.
They went away and came back around half past one or two in the morning with meth, and smoked it in his garage. They drank and watched a pornographic film inside, and at some point Alicia and Hammond showered together and had sex. They left at about four in the morning.
Instead of going straight to her grandmother's house, where she was living, she turned onto an isolated stretch of Wallerga Road in north Antelope, close to the Roseville line. She said she wanted to wait until her grandmother left for work. There she challenged Alicia about how she had been treated on her birthday. Alicia laughed it off, which made it worse. She pressed it into Alicia. They fell out of the passenger door onto the ground, and Alicia put her hand to her throat.
Alicia died of multiple sharp force wounds to the neck, with further wounds to the head and face, all made with a single-edged blade consistent with the scraper. The ammonia and the covering had the opposite effect to the one she wanted: they kept insects and animals away and preserved the body.
At about five that morning a young woman covered in blood knocked on the door of Paul White's house. She said three men had attacked her after her car broke down, that she knew one of them, and that she did not want the police involved; she asked to telephone her grandmother. White could not reach the grandmother, so he drove her to the house himself. Neighbours confirmed she had knocked at about five doors before anyone answered.
At about eight that morning a Department of Public Works employee picking up rubbish along Wallerga Road saw debris at the roadside and, thinking it was a mannequin or a dumped pile, stopped to clear it. Underneath he found the fully clothed body of a young woman. Police initially withheld even the sex of the victim, because a woman named Christie Wilson had been missing for months and they wondered whether this was her. The body was fresh, with no insect activity, and the pathologist placed death in the early hours of March 8th. The victim was soon identified as Alicia Ernst. Her car was found run off the road into a barbed wire fence and bushes nearby, with blood on the driver's door, between the seat and console, and saturated into the lower left of the passenger seat, and with two bloody shoe prints on the inside of the windscreen.
On March 10th Detective Christina Woo interviewed her. Detectives had her walk them through the bars and then took her to her car.
In that first account she said she had bought the ammonia and the blade weeks earlier with the intention of killing Alicia, and that she had planned it because Alicia had poured pool acid down her throat about six months before. She also said she had gone into the back seat, saying she was going to change her trousers, where the knife was waiting, and had cut Alicia's throat there before pulling her from the car. She then changed her story.
She said she backhanded Alicia, that they fought, that she pressed the tool into her, that they fell out of the car, and that she remembered realising someone was going to be seriously hurt.
Her grandmother, Janet Cross, said the drugs did this and that it could have been the other way round; her mother said both families had lost their daughters, one dead and one still dying inside.
Alicia Ernst is buried at Sylvan Cemetery in Citrus Heights.