Roger Harrington—Keith Harrington

Roger Harrington and his youngest son, Keith Harrington, shared a close family life that Roger actively helped sustain. Keith and his wife, Patty, lived in a house Roger owned in Dana Point, and Roger’s devotion to his son continued after the couple’s murders as a years-long effort to find answers. His death in 1995 came before investigators obtained DNA results that might have begun to resolve the case.

Family life in Dana Point

Roger owned a house in Niguel Shores, a gated community in Dana Point, while living mainly in a condominium in Lakewood near his Long Beach office. His twenty-four-year-old son Keith, a third-year medical student at the University of California, Irvine, and Keith’s new wife, Patty, lived in the house for the time being. Roger liked having his family close. The arrangement made that preference tangible: his son and daughter-in-law were nearby, and Roger spent time with them as part of their everyday household life.

Keith was the youngest of Roger’s four sons, an excellent student and a high-school all-conference shortstop. Before Patty, he had been in a long-term relationship with another undergraduate premedical student. Roger had assumed the couple would marry, but they broke up after she chose to attend a different medical school. Keith met Patty at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center, and they married within a year. Roger privately worried that his son might be rebounding and moving too quickly. At the same time, he saw Patty as warm and clean-cut, and understood the couple to be devoted to each other. His concern and his acceptance sat alongside one another: he wondered about the speed of the marriage, but remained part of the young couple’s life.

That involvement was practical as well as familial. Roger helped Keith and Patty install a new sprinkling system in the yard. The three spent the previous Saturday clearing brush, then hosted a barbecue at the house for Patty’s father’s birthday. These ordinary shared tasks and gatherings became part of the life Roger would later search in memory, looking for some detail that could explain the violence that ended it.

The discovery and its immediate meaning

On August 21, 1980, Roger arrived at the house expecting to have dinner with Keith and Patty. A handwritten note under the doorbell, dated the previous day, said that friends had stopped by and asked the couple to call if their plans had changed. Roger recognized the names as belonging to friends of his daughter-in-law. The front door was locked, which surprised him because Keith and Patty rarely locked up while home, especially when expecting him. Seeing their cars in the garage, he thought they might have gone jogging. He used a key hidden above the patio trellis and went inside, bringing in an unusually bulky stack of mail.

Inside, the house was still. Roger noticed groceries and bread left out in the kitchen, then walked down the hallway toward the bedroom where Keith and Patty slept. The bed appeared made, but an unusual shape beneath the comforter drew his attention. When he pulled it back, he found his son and daughter-in-law lying together. The discovery abruptly changed Roger’s place in the family: he had come as an expected dinner guest and father, but encountered a scene that would govern his life afterward. The fact that the bed had appeared undisturbed did not provide an explanation; it only sharpened the contrast between the familiar home and what he found there.

A search without an answer

The possible connection between Keith and Patty’s murders and other killings in Southern California remained unresolved as the cases went cold. For Roger, the absence of an answer did not make the loss recede. He repeatedly examined his memories of the couple and tried to make the details cohere. The account describes those memories as fragments that kept turning over without forming a complete explanation. His investigation became a sustained extension of his relationship with Keith: Roger could no longer share the young couple’s ordinary routines, but continued to seek an account of what had happened to them.

He hired a private investigator, offered a large reward, and had friends and coworkers reinterviewed. None of these efforts produced the necessary lead. Roger, a tough, self-made businessman, eventually consulted a clairvoyant in desperation, but that brought no clarity either. The accumulation of attempts shows how far his search extended beyond official case review. Each avenue promised a possible answer, yet none settled the central uncertainty about who had killed his son and daughter-in-law or why.

Years passed without the phone call he hoped might bring a verifiable tip. Roger’s determination persisted into the 1990s. A magazine profile of his search ended with his plain statement that he did not want to die before learning what had happened. The words make the unresolved investigation inseparable from his own future: finding out was not a matter he could simply set aside, but an aim he tied to continuing to live.

Death before the investigative break

Three glass tubes containing evidence were opened and tested in October and November 1996. By December, investigators were ready to contact the families with results. Roger had died on March 8, 1995, about a year and a half earlier, and never received that news. The timing establishes a painful divide between his search and the later investigative progress: the evidence that moved the case closer to an answer emerged after he was gone.

Roger had also misinterpreted one detail of the crime scene. He believed the covering over Keith and Patty’s heads indicated that the killer was sorry for what he had done. Later information showed a different explanation: after a previous killing had become messy, the offender had covered the couple to avoid getting their blood on himself. The correction does not diminish Roger’s devotion; it shows the limits imposed on a father trying to make meaning from a scene whose essential facts were unavailable to him. His relationship with Keith is therefore remembered both through their closeness before the murders and through Roger’s enduring, ultimately unfinished effort to understand them afterward.