4 Bodies: Some Links, No Clues

Scott Michael Hughes was 18 when he died. He was a Marine, stationed at Camp Pendleton, where he did his basic training. In November of 1977, he was told he was being reassigned to Okinawa. Hughes took a 30-day leave and went home to Monroe. Washington. When he returned, he was supposed to take a plane to the island south of Japan, but instead he went back to Monroe. On April 1, he turned himself into police and was brought back to Camp Pendleton. Sgt Del Wade of the Anaheim Police Department said Hughes was assigned to a “casual company, where marines with disciplinary problems are placed. He was last seen April 14. The problem with the Hughes case, like some of the others, was that no one in Orange County really knew the young marine. “We couldn’t find anyone who knew him. Wade said. “We couldn’t find anybody who disliked him, nothing.” Wade said the only contact Hughes had with people in Orange County, as best as he could find out, was that he had met a woman from Garden Grove while he was hitchhiking. Her name and phone number were found in his wallet, but It’s virtually at a standstill because we have no place to turn, police could not connect her to the crime, Wade said. On Sunday, April 16, Hughes’ body was found at the Euclid Ave on-ramp of the Riverside Freeway. The cause of death was strangulation. No clues, nothing.

Almost two months passed before Roland Young was killed. He died just hours after he was released from the Orange County Jail, where he had been charged with public drunkenness. Young was 23, from Maywood, a silkscreen worker and carpet layer who had been released from the Mira Loma honor farm exactly one week before he was killed. Investigator Dennis McNealy of the Irvine Police Department said Young was in Mira Loma for a variety of minor offenses, but mostly to dry out. He drank heavily, just as he had been doing the night before he was killed. As McNeely told the story, Young and a friend had been barhopping in Santa Ana and finally ended up at a tavern on Main St in Santa Ana. He passed out and was carried to his car. Young’s friend, deciding it was better to sleep than get picked up for drunkenness, also went to sleep and Santa Ana police picked the two of them up. On Saturday, June 10, Young was released from jail and at 4 am the next morning he was found dead on Irvine Center Drive, stabbed four times in the heart and castrated. The guess is that Young was killed seven to eight hours after he was released from jail. “We’ve never been able to close that gap,” McNeely said. Apparently, Young left the jail after calling Maywood and being told no one would make the long drive to pick him up. McNeely said there are three theories as to what happened to Young after he left the jail. One is that he hitchhiked, but Young said no one stepped forward even after the publicity surrounding the case, to say that the man was seen on the highway. Another was that he waited around for someone he met in the jail. Young said that was almost impossible to check out because it would entail giving about 175 persons polygraph tests just to see whether they knew the man. The final theory is that Young went to see people he knew in Orange County. But all of them, like the friend who went on that fateful binge, were at another party.

Again, a dead end even less is known about the final two cases, both handled by Stansberry. Keith, like Hughes, was also a Marine from Camp Pendleton. He was 20 years old when he was kilted and dumped nude on Moulton Parkway in Laguna Hills. He had been at the base for a couple of months, knew few people, was in the infantry, lived in a barracks, was on weekend liberty and died of strangulation. Little else is known about the man or the case, except that Keith was from Indiana. The details in the final death, that of Keith A. Klingbeil, are even more sketchy. He was 23, a transient carnival worker, originally from the Chula Vista area. When he was found with his shirt was missing. Stansberry said Klingbeil, who was found near the La Paz Road exit of Interstate 5, died because he suffocated in his own vomit. Stansberry said the vomiting was caused by an overdose of a chemical similar to Tylenol, which is similar to aspirin. Even so, the cause of death is listed as undetermined by the coroner’s office and homicide is still a possibility. That is where the cases now stand, along with the uncertainty about who did the killing, one person or several. As Sgt Wade of the Anaheim police said: “We’re not convinced there is an association. It’s too preliminary right now to say they are (associated). We don’t have much to go on.” In fact nothing.