Roger Harrington—Patty Harrington

Roger Harrington’s relationship with Patty Harrington was both familial and shaped by the unanswered questions surrounding her murder with his son, Keith Harrington. He welcomed the young couple into a house he owned in Dana Point, spent time with them in ordinary family life, and later searched for an explanation that might make sense of their deaths. His conviction that the killer knew them brought Patty’s past into his account of the crime, but evidence that emerged after his death overturned one of the beliefs he had held most firmly.

Family Life and Growing Closeness

Roger owned the house at 33381 Cockleshell Drive in Niguel Shores, where Keith and Patty were living while Keith was a medical student and Patty worked as a registered nurse. His main home was elsewhere, but he was glad to have family close by. The arrangement made their house a regular setting for his connection with them, not merely a place he owned. He referred to the couple as the kids and had recently been spending a great deal of time with them.

Their shared activities were practical and familial. Roger helped install a new sprinkler system in the yard, and the three of them cleared brush the Saturday before the murders. That evening, they hosted a barbecue at the house for Patty’s father’s birthday. These details place Patty within an active family relationship with Roger: they worked together around the home and gathered with her relatives, rather than appearing only as a couple observed from a distance. The account presents no separate conflict between Roger and Patty; instead, it shows him participating in the everyday life they were building together.

Roger’s recollections also preserved his assessment of Patty as a person he believed suited to Keith. He described her as warm and clean-cut, qualities he associated with his son. He knew she had ended a previous live-in relationship because the boyfriend used marijuana. His later doubts about the couple’s history did not erase the affection and approval reflected in this earlier portrait; they developed alongside it, as Roger tried to interpret a marriage that had been cut short before he felt he knew all of Patty’s background.

The Marriage and Roger’s Reservations

Keith and Patty had married within a year of meeting at the medical center where Keith was studying. Before Patty, Keith had had a long-term girlfriend, a fellow undergraduate premedical student whom the family assumed he would marry. The relationship ended when she chose to attend another medical school. Roger could not understand that breakup and privately worried that Keith was rebounding and moving too quickly into his marriage with Patty.

That concern belonged to Roger’s view of his son’s decisions, not to any recorded disagreement with Patty. The same recollection that records his unease also emphasizes that Patty seemed well suited to Keith and that the couple appeared devoted to each other. This contrast matters: Roger’s later focus on Patty’s background did not arise from evidence of a troubled relationship between the spouses, as he described it. It arose from his conviction, formed after the killings, that the answer had to lie somewhere in the life of a daughter-in-law he cared for but believed he might not have fully known.

The book anchors his connection to the couple in a domestic visit that became the discovery of their deaths. Roger arrived expecting to see them for dinner. A handwritten note from friends, left the previous day, asked Keith and Patty to call if their plans had changed; their cars were at the house, but the front door was locked. Roger entered with a key kept above the patio trellis and carried in their unusually bulky mail. The ordinary expectation of dinner, the family’s access to the house, and the familiar domestic setting make the discovery part of the relationship’s story: he had come not as an investigator, but as Keith’s father and Patty’s father-in-law, accustomed to being welcome in their home.

Grief and the Search for an Explanation

The case remained unresolved for years, and Roger repeatedly returned to the details of Keith and Patty’s deaths. He hired a private investigator, offered a large reward, and saw friends and co-workers reinterviewed. None of these efforts produced the information he needed. He also consulted a clairvoyant in desperation, but that brought no answer. In the book’s account, the murders became an unending mental loop of fragments that did not cohere for him.

By 1988, eight years after the murders, Roger had settled on a theory that gave particular weight to Patty’s past. He said he was sure the motive lay somewhere in her background rather than Keith’s. The couple had been married only a few months, and Roger wondered how much anyone really knew about Patty’s earlier life. This was speculation born of an unresolved investigation, not a conclusion established by the evidence presented here. Its importance lies in what it reveals about his position as a grieving relative: he was trying to reconcile his warm view of Patty with the possibility that some unknown part of her history had mattered to the killer.

The bedspread became central to that interpretation. Roger believed the killer’s act of covering Keith and Patty’s heads meant the couple must have known the person responsible. He told a magazine, “Whoever did it knew them and was sorry they’d done it,” connecting the gesture to familiarity and remorse. His reading joined two enduring questions—who had killed them, and what their relationship to that person might have been—into a single explanation. It also made the covering a supposed sign of recognition between killer and victims, though Roger had no way to confirm that inference.

An Answer That Came Too Late

Roger’s search became a defining part of his life after the killings. A profile of his effort ended with his explanation for continuing: “That’s why I keep living: I don’t want to go till I find out.” The remark conveys how closely his hope of learning the truth had become tied to his future. The killer remained unidentified in Roger’s lifetime, despite his reward, his investigator, and the repeated reconsideration of the case.

Three glass tubes preserved in manila envelopes eventually helped move the investigation toward an answer. They were opened and tested in October and November 1996, and investigators were preparing to contact the families by December. Roger had died on March 8, 1995, so he never learned of the results. The chronology leaves a stark gap between his years of searching and the later forensic progress: the evidence that might have changed his understanding arrived after he could receive it.

The later account specifically corrects his interpretation of the bedspread. Roger had understood the gesture as remorse and as evidence that the killer knew the couple. The explanation given in the book is different: after the killer had bludgeoned another couple to death in a messy attack, he covered Keith and Patty to avoid getting their blood on himself. That correction does not undo Roger’s affection for Patty or the family life they shared. It does show how the lack of an answer allowed a practical act by the killer to acquire, for a bereaved father-in-law, the meaning of an intimate connection that the eventual explanation did not support.