Irvine is the setting for two murders separated by five years and only two miles, and its Northwood neighborhood links them through a landscape changing from orange groves to uniform suburban housing. The contrast between familiar-looking homes and the violence that occurred inside them makes the city more than a backdrop: its streets and houses shape how the crimes are understood.

Northwood and the Changing Landscape

In 1981, David Witthuhn and Manuela Witthuhn lived at 35 Columbus, a single-story home in Northwood, then a new development spreading across what remained of the old Irvine ranch. Rows of orange trees, a packinghouse, and a camp for farmworkers still bordered the growing suburb, but construction was already remaking the area. Cement trucks increasingly drowned out the tractors, an audible sign of the transition from agricultural land to residential streets.

Five years later, another Northwood home became the scene of a murder. On May 5, 1986, eighteen-year-old Janelle Cruz was found dead in her family’s house at 13 Encina. The house, a three-bedroom, two-bath single-story property, stood about two miles from the Witthuhns’ former home. Its familiarity was part of the setting: the account describes it as virtually indistinguishable from many other houses in the community, including the one where Manuela had been killed.

The surroundings of 13 Encina also record how quickly Northwood’s edge moved. The house backed onto a park and stood near the end of a cul-de-sac; beyond a break in a hedge wall lay undeveloped land, orange groves, and open fields that separated the neighborhood from nearby communities. Those groves had occupied the site only a decade earlier. In the decades that followed, housing and a large shopping center filled much of the distance toward other cities, further erasing the agricultural boundary that had once framed Irvine’s expansion.

The House on Encina

By May 1986, the house at 13 Encina had been on the market for several months, but remained occupied by its owner, her husband, and their four children. On May 5, realtor Linda Sheen arrived in the afternoon to show the three-bedroom, two-bath home to a prospective buyer. A beige Chevette stood in the driveway, yet no one answered the doorbell or an earlier phone call. Sheen retrieved the key from the lockbox and let herself in. The ordinary transaction of a home viewing thus brought another murder in Northwood into view: Janelle Cruz, eighteen, was found dead in her family home that day.

The account places this discovery within a neighborhood of houses that looked much like one another, making the Encina home’s outward normality part of the contrast. It had not been abandoned or emptied; family life continued there while the property was offered for sale. Irvine’s residential landscape therefore links the two murders not only by proximity and time, but through the familiar domestic settings in which they occurred.

The Cases Reconnected by DNA

In late 1996, Mary Hong was reviewing a spreadsheet of about twenty unsolved cases with usable DNA profiles, each recorded across the five PCR markers then used for typing. She already knew the Harrington and Witthuhn profiles matched; while scanning the chart, she recognized that Janelle Cruz’s profile matched them as well. The discovery tied the 1986 murder in Irvine to cases that had not previously been treated as connected.

The apparent differences had obscured the geographic clue. Cruz was eighteen, about a decade younger than Patty Harrington and Manuela Witthuhn, and her murder came more than five years after Manuela’s. Yet Cruz had lived in Northwood, in the same subdivision as Manuela, and the two homes were only two miles apart. DNA made that proximity newly legible: Irvine’s familiar suburban blocks were not merely similar backdrops, but part of the setting in which investigators could recognize a connection across separate cases.

Residential Form and the Wider Pattern

The Northwood houses also fit a broader pattern described in the book: the East Area Rapist favored single-story homes, often near a park or other greenbelt, where he could observe houses from outside. Paul Holes explains that a single-story layout offered fewer points of access between floors and made it easier to assess activity from window to window; open space could also provide a vantage point for someone watching from outside. The Witthuhns’ home and the house on Encina were both single-story, and Encina backed onto a park near the end of a cul-de-sac. Those shared features place Northwood within the landscape discussed in the wider investigation, though the account does not establish that any one feature explains why a particular house was chosen.