Dana Point is the setting of the Harrington murders and one of the Southern California locations used to place the crimes within a wider geographic pattern. The book’s account centers on a home in Niguel Shores, a gated residential community, where Keith Harrington and Patty Harrington were staying near the beginning of their marriage. Dana Point’s role extends beyond the crime scene: investigators later considered the case alongside another Orange County murder, and geographic analysis treated the area as one of the southern outliers in the offender’s changing series of attacks.

Setting and the Harrington Home

Niguel Shores is described as a gated community of roughly 950 homes in Dana Point, a beach town in southern Orange County, California. The Harringtons lived at 33381 Cockleshell Drive in a house owned by Keith’s father, Roger Harrington. Roger’s main residence was a condominium in nearby Lakewood, closer to his Long Beach office, but he was pleased that his family was living nearby. Keith, twenty-four and in his third year of medical school at the University of California, Irvine, shared the house with Patty, a registered nurse. They were newly married, and the arrangement brought the family together under a roof Roger owned.

The account makes the residential setting concrete through the ordinary details Roger encountered on arriving: a handwritten note tucked beneath the doorbell, the couple’s cars in the driveway, and a key hidden above the patio trellis. The note, dated August 20, said that friends had come by the previous evening and asked to be called if plans had changed. Finding the front door locked surprised Roger because Keith and Patty rarely locked up when they were home, particularly when expecting him for dinner. He used the hidden key and carried a dozen pieces of mail inside. These familiar signs of routine initially suggested that the couple might simply be out; in the quiet house, they instead became part of Roger’s growing realization that something was wrong.

The home is described as late-1970s in style, with a swordfish on the wall, a Tiffany chandelier, and plant hangers. Its south-facing windows and sliding glass doors looked toward the ocean. The domestic setting is important to the narrative because the first indications of danger are not dramatic signs of a break-in but details embedded in the couple’s everyday life: groceries, bread left out, the stillness of the rooms, and an open guest-bedroom door. Roger noticed an unusual rise beneath the bedspread and found his son there. Dana Point is thus introduced not as a distant map point but as the place where a parent’s expected family visit turns into the discovery of a murder.

Crime Scene and Investigation

The evidence places the attack within a narrow overnight interval. Patty bought groceries at an Alpha Beta store at 9:48 p.m. on Tuesday. At 11:00 p.m., her sister called; Keith answered and passed the phone to Patty, who said they were in bed and that she expected an early call from the nurse registry. Patty did not appear at work the next morning. Investigators found no clear sign of a struggle or forced entry, although one sliding door may have been left unlocked. A fragment consistent with brass in Patty’s head wound suggested that a newly installed brass sprinkler head from the yard had been used. The account emphasizes the unsettling contrast between a secured, staffed-gate subdivision and an intruder who could enter without anyone hearing.

Six months later, Orange County Sheriff’s Department criminalist Jim White reviewed the Harrington evidence and saw similarities to the murder of Manuela Witthuhn in Irvine. In both cases, middle-class victims were attacked in bed with an object taken from the home; the weapon was removed when the killer left, and the female victim was raped. Keith and Patty’s bodies showed ligature marks, and pieces of macramé cord were found around the bed. The later Irvine case also showed ligature marks, but the binding material had been taken away. To White, that difference suggested that the offender had learned from an earlier crime. A medical connection also drew his attention: Keith was a medical student, Patty sometimes worked at Mercy Hospital in Santa Ana, and Manuela’s husband had been a patient at Santa Ana–Tustin Community Hospital. The comparison linked Dana Point to another crime scene through both method and circumstance, without establishing by itself that the same person was responsible.

The Harrington kitchen yielded a small additional clue: a wooden match with a short burn. Neither Keith nor Patty smoked, and investigators believed the match belonged to the killer. Like the possible entry through an unlocked sliding door and the brass sprinkler fragment, it was an object whose significance depended on careful reconstruction rather than an obvious trail. Dana Point’s role in the investigation consequently rests on a collection of physical details and comparisons, not on a single decisive clue.

Place in the Wider Geographic Pattern

In a later discussion of the offender’s movements, investigator Paul Holes placed the attacks into broad phases: Sacramento first, then Modesto and Davis, the East Bay, and finally Southern California. He treated Ventura and the Dana Point case as outliers in the overall sequence, while noting that Irvine contained two cases not far apart. This framework gives Dana Point a particular analytical status: it lies within the southern reach of the series but does not fit as neatly into the geographic clusters Holes described. The book records the location as part of the pattern while leaving the reason for its place there unresolved.

Dana Point also reappears during the narrator’s examination of a possible person of interest, Doug Fiedler. The narrator found that Fiedler’s former wife had addresses across Orange County, including one in Dana Point only 1.7 miles from the Harrington home. That proximity was one element in a larger collection of apparent correspondences, not proof that Fiedler committed the murders. The account presents the lead as a moment of heightened suspicion that still had to be tested against the uncertain and incomplete evidence surrounding the case.

The book’s dating of the episode is not entirely consistent: an early section marker identifies the Dana Point material as 1980, while a later caption gives the Harrington murders as August 19, 1981. The discrepancy is part of the record as presented and should not be silently resolved. Across these different appearances, Dana Point remains both a specific residential setting, anchored by the Niguel Shores home, and a point on an investigative map whose connections to other crimes and suspects require qualification.