Cherry Domingo and Gregory Sanchez Murders

The murders of Cheri Domingo and Gregory Sanchez were a double homicide in Goleta, discovered during a real-estate showing at the house where Domingo was temporarily living with her children. The case’s significance extends beyond the crime scene: investigators initially held to a local suspect theory, even after the killings were linked by method to a wider series, until DNA evidence in 2011 connected them to the East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker.

The house and its temporary occupants

For several years, Domingo and her children had lived in a rented guesthouse in Montecito when they were not with their father in San Diego. In May, her father’s cousin, known in the family as Aunt Barbara, offered them the chance to house-sit her Goleta home while it was on the market. The house stood on Toltec Way, a quiet cul-de-sac near San Jose Creek. Neighbors called the wood-shingled, Cape Cod–style property, with its second-story addition above the garage, the big red barn.

Domingo and the children moved into 449 Toltec Way in early June. The move did not make the household feel settled: the property was for sale, open houses were expected, and a sign on the lawn identified it as belonging to Santana Properties. Her daughter Debbi was restless, missed a boyfriend in San Diego, and ran up large telephone bills calling him. A few weeks after the move, following a serious argument with her mother, Debbi packed a bag, got on her bicycle, and left. The house’s provisional status would become a grim circumstance of the killings: it remained a property being shown to prospective buyers.

Domingo’s friend Ellen lived across the street. They spent many evenings together, talking over wine in Ellen’s Jacuzzi about child support, work, and Domingo’s efforts to date again after her divorce. This friendship placed a familiar neighbor close by, but it did not prevent the attack. A neighbor later recalled hearing a gunshot in the night and then a woman’s controlled voice addressing someone. The account suggested a final attempt to calm or deflect the person in the house, though the precise words were uncertain.

Discovery and crime-scene findings

On Monday morning, a realtor arrived at 449 Toltec Way with a prospective buyer and the buyer’s family. After letting himself in, he found the bodies of a man and a woman in the master bedroom. He immediately took his clients out and called the police. The victims were identified as Sanchez and Domingo.

Sanchez had been found partly inside the closet, with clothing pulled down from the rack covering his head. A flashlight nearby had batteries bearing his fingerprints, indicating that it came from the house. Investigators believed the scraping of the bedroom door against the shag rug may have alerted him to an intruder and that he had fought back. He had been shot, but that wound was not fatal; blunt-force injuries were the cause of death. Domingo was found on the bed, covered by a bedspread that matched the wallpaper. Marks on her wrists were consistent with her hands having been bound. Both victims had been killed with the same blunt instrument.

The scene also preserved indications of how the intruder may have entered and what he may have taken. A small window in the downstairs guest bathroom was open; its screen had been removed and concealed in bushes behind a juniper. Because the window was too small for an adult man to climb through, investigators reasoned that someone had reached inside to unlock the bathroom’s exterior door. On a dusty gardening shelf in the hallway, officers saw the outlines of two recently removed tools. One was a pipe wrench; Domingo’s former husband later thought the other had been a turf plugger. Neither tool was recovered. The ligatures, unlike the suspected tools, were taken away by the killer, a change investigators interpreted as evidence that he was adapting to reduce the evidence left behind.

A suspect theory and its reversal

Santa Barbara investigators considered Brett Glasby a potential suspect in 1980. He was a local burglar with a reputation for violence and had a tangential connection to Robert Offerman, another homicide victim: Glasby and associates had been prime suspects in the beating of a janitor who worked in Offerman’s office building. Glasby lived in the target area and had access to a .38 Smith & Wesson, the type of gun used in the Offerman and Manning killings. Ballistics testing excluded that gun, however, and investigators never found physical evidence tying Glasby to the crimes.

In 1982, Glasby and his brother Brian were killed in Mexico. They had gone to San Juan de Alima believing they were meeting people for a drug deal; it proved to be a setup, and both brothers were robbed and shot. Despite Glasby’s death and the absence of physical evidence, the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department continued to regard him as likely responsible for both the Offerman and Manning killings and the Sanchez and Domingo murders. That position persisted even after Orange County investigators linked the double homicides by their methods to the Original Night Stalker, whose last known crime occurred in 1986, four years after Glasby had died.

DNA identification and the family’s aftermath

The decisive change came in 2011. After earlier efforts had failed, investigators developed a DNA profile from degraded genetic material recovered from a blanket at the Sanchez and Domingo crime scene. The profile conclusively linked the Goleta killings to the East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker. Glasby, once treated as the likely explanation, was exposed as a red herring; the forensic result connected the case to a serial offender whose crimes had crossed jurisdictions and had not been recognized as one series at the time.

No one told Debbi Domingo that her mother’s killer might have claimed other victims. She learned of the broader case only in the early 2000s, when cable true-crime programs began featuring the Original Night Stalker. By then she was working as a prison guard in Texas and had been clean for seven years after nearly a decade of methamphetamine addiction. The account describes her life as having been thoroughly derailed after her mother’s murder. The later DNA link therefore changed more than the classification of the crime: it recast the killing within a larger series, while arriving too late to spare Domingo’s daughter years of not knowing that the person who killed her mother might also have harmed others.