Robert Offerman

Robert Offerman was an osteopathic surgeon whose December 1979 murder, alongside that of his new girlfriend Debra Alexandria Manning, became one of the Goleta double homicides later linked by DNA to the East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker. The case began with an apparently ordinary plan for a game of tennis, but its unresolved questions persisted for decades while investigators pursued a local suspect who was eventually shown to be a red herring.

Identity and Last Morning

Offerman lived at 767 Avenida Pequena in Goleta. On the morning of December 30, 1979, his friends Peter and Marlene Brady arrived for a scheduled tennis game with him and Manning. They noticed that a sliding glass door stood open and entered the condominium, calling for Offerman without getting an answer. Peter looked down the hall toward the bedroom, saw Manning on the bed, and reported what he had seen to Marlene. She urged them to leave rather than intrude. When sheriff’s deputies arrived, Marlene was outside, crying and telling them that two people had died inside.

The circumstances establish Offerman’s relationship to Manning as his new girlfriend and place the couple together at his home. The account does not describe a wider family or personal history for him. Instead, it introduces him through the scene of their interrupted plans: friends arriving for tennis, an open door, and a home whose holiday signs remained in place even as it became a crime scene.

The Crime Scene

Deputies found Manning on the right side of a waterbed, with her wrists bound behind her. Offerman was at the foot of the bed, also bound, and held a length of white nylon twine. Investigators inferred that the intruder had forced entry with a screwdriver, probably during the night while the couple slept. The arrangement suggested that the attacker may have presented the intrusion as a robbery: two of Manning’s rings were found hidden between the mattress and bed frame.

Investigators believed Manning had been made to tie Offerman, but not tightly. They further suspected that Offerman broke free in an attempt to resist. Neighbors reported hearing gunfire at about three in the morning, with a pause before another shot. Offerman was shot and killed; Manning also died from a gunshot wound. These findings supplied a rough sequence without resolving who had entered the condominium or why.

Details of the home gave the scene its ordinary, unsettling specificity. A book about assertive behavior lay on Offerman’s nightstand. A holiday wreath hung on the front door, and a small pine tree stood in a bucket in the entryway. On the patio, investigators found a discarded turkey carcass wrapped in cellophane; they concluded that the killer had opened the refrigerator and eaten some of Offerman’s leftover Christmas dinner. Outside, star-shaped Adidas footprints traced a path around the condominium. A trampled flowerbed at the vacant neighboring unit and twine left in its bathroom suggested that the intruder had spent time there, possibly sheltering before the attack.

A Suspect and a False Lead

Santa Barbara County investigators considered Brett Glasby a possible suspect as early as 1980. Glasby was a local burglar with a violent reputation, lived in the area, and had access to a .38 Smith & Wesson, the type of weapon used in the Offerman and Manning murders. He was also tangentially connected to Offerman: Glasby and associates were prime suspects in the beating of a janitor who worked in Offerman’s office building. These circumstances made him a plausible focus of suspicion, but they did not establish that he had committed the murders.

Ballistics tests ruled out the gun associated with Glasby, and investigators found no physical evidence connecting him to the crimes. Glasby and his brother Brian were murdered in Mexico in 1982, in a robbery that proved to be a setup. Even after a cold-case unit linked the murders by their methods to the Original Night Stalker, Santa Barbara investigators continued to maintain that Glasby was likely responsible for the Offerman and Sanchez-Domingo killings. That theory could not account for the later forensic evidence. The book treats Glasby, like Joe Alsip in a separate line of suspicion, as another misleading lead rather than the person responsible.

DNA Link and Significance

For years, investigators could not conclusively connect the Goleta cases to the broader series. In 2011, after earlier attempts had failed, a usable DNA profile was developed from degraded genetic material recovered from a blanket at the Sanchez-Domingo crime scene. The result conclusively linked the Goleta murders to the East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker, overturning the long-standing theory that Glasby had committed them.

That identification gives Offerman’s case a significance beyond the events at his condominium: it became part of a series whose connections were not established until forensic methods could recover evidence from material that had remained inconclusive. The open sliding door, the leftover dinner, the footprints, and the twine offered investigators clues about the night, but none named the killer. The DNA result supplied the decisive link decades later, separating the evidence-supported identification from the local suspicions that had held the case in place.