'A Murder in My Hometown Has Haunted Me Since Childhood'

I was 10 years old when Olga Duncan, a young pregnant nurse, vanished from her Santa Barbara apartment one night in 1958. The discovery of her brutally-beaten body a month later in a shallow grave on a lonely road fed my worst fears and scariest nightmares. I was thunderstruck. How could something like this happen in my hometown?

It was a pivotal moment for me. For the first time in my young life, I realized that the world could be dangerous and that safety isn't guaranteed. The mystery of what happened to Olga scared yet fascinated me, and it ignited my life-long interest in true crime stories—not because I like blood and violence, but because of my own feelings of vulnerability.

Violent crime still shocked small-town America in the 1950s. Fear and disbelief gripped our entire community, and I had a front row seat to the real-life murder mystery in my own living room. My father, a reporter for the local newspaper, covered Olga's tragic story from her disappearance through the trials and execution of her killers.

I read every word of his newspaper articles. Late at night, when I heard the clicking of typewriter keys coming from his study, I left my bed and crept down the hall to ask too many questions. But it was my father's nightly spellbinding accounts of the trial of Olga's killer, told around our dining room table, that brought the brutal and bizarre characters involved in her murder to life. Daddy had no filter.

When Olga disappeared, I immediately went on high alert. If she could vanish into the night and end up murdered out on familiar Casitas Pass Road, then what about me? It was not knowing where the danger lurked that haunted me. I worried that I couldn't count on God for protection because we didn't go to church like the other families in our neighborhood, and my grandmother called Daddy an atheist. I knew that I needed to be careful, but we never even locked the door. We'd lost the key.

As a child, I was obsessed with learning how to prevent my own potential murder. I developed a fervid need to understand how and why Olga was killed. Did she make some fatal mistake that I could learn to avoid? I scrutinized newspaper photos of Olga's accused killers during the three months they were on trial, to learn everything possible about how to recognize evil people, but the defendants in the courtroom pictures looked so normal.

In 1965, a few years after Olga's killers were executed, I found Truman Capote's classic true crime book, In Cold Blood, on the top shelf of my father's book case. I've been an avid reader of the genre ever since.

The themes in these books—greed, love-gone-wrong, family conflict, killer psychopaths, and the diligent detective working to catch the criminals—fascinated me. I loved books that dove deep into the murderer's psychology and motivation, their cunning plans and twisted thoughts. These stories distracted me from my own mundane anxieties and gave me something really worth worrying about.

Of course, I read these frightful stories from the safety of my own home, experiencing the horror in a controlled environment, studying criminal behavior from afar and reassuring myself that I wouldn't end up like Olga or any of the numerous other victims I'd read about. I paid particular attention to stories about near misses, the women who got away from would-be killers, so that I might be able to escape an attacker myself.

After years of reading true crime and thinking about Olga's tragic story, I've come to realize that it isn't the violent stranger that I need to be most worried about. Olga Duncan wasn't reckless. She wasn't lured to her death by some random homicidal maniac. Like most female murder victims, the motive for killing her was personal. Her mother-in-law had hired two men to kill her.

The young DA who prosecuted Olga's mother-in-law said it well in his final argument to the jury: "One of the pities of this case is that the girl who was so brutally murdered on the night of November 17 might have been any girl...anybody's sister, anybody's daughter. Any girl could have been Elizabeth Duncan's victim if she happened to marry her son Frank."

Elizabeth Duncan told many people that she wanted to "get rid" of her daughter-in-law, but nobody told Olga about the threats or went to the police. I still think of Olga and the "what ifs"—the decisions and choices that others could have made to save her life. One of Elizabeth's acquaintances had been afraid for her own safety; others hadn't taken the threats seriously, or had wanted to avoid contact with the police. Olga didn't have a chance because no-one spoke up for her.

I still latch my windows, dead bolt the doors, never walk alone on an empty sidewalk at night, or park in an isolated parking garage after dark. But my father's words from so long ago about staying safe, when I was worried about what had happened to Olga Duncan, have stayed with me: "We all have to look out for each other." We have to act as a community. When we see someone in danger, we must speak up.

Deborah Holt Larkin spent more than three decades teaching students with special needs before becoming an elementary school principal. She is the author of the forthcoming true crime book, A Lovely Girl: The Tragedy of Olga Duncan and the Trial of One of California's Most Notorious Killers, out in October.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.