Chapter Thirteen
For the last time that day the bailiff announced that court was in session, and Ford addressed the bench:
“Your Honor, I would like at this time to summarize the events which led to the filing of the petition by Devon Suellen Osborne alleging that her husband, Robert Kirkpatrick Osborne, met his death on the night of October thirteen, 1967, and asking the court to declare him officially dead and to appoint her as administrator of his estate. Nine witnesses have been heard. Their testimony has given us a fairly complete picture of Robert Osborne.
“Robert Osborne was a young man of twenty-four, happily married, in good health and spirits, and planning for the future, both the very near future — he was driving into San Diego that morning to pick up a new tennis racket, attend a growers’ luncheon, visit his mother, and so on — and the distant future — his wife was expecting a child. He was the sole owner of a ranch. It would never have made him a millionaire but it was operating in the black and he had only himself and his wife to support, his mother having inherited money from her sister. The troubles in his life were minor, mainly concerned with the management of the ranch, the difficulty of getting adequate help at harvest time, and so on.
“On the morning of October thirteen,1967, Robert Osborne rose, as usual, before dawn, showered and dressed. He wore gray lightweight gabardine slacks and a dacron jacket in a gray and black plaid pattern. He kissed his wife goodbye, asked her to be on the lookout for his dog, Maxie, who’d been gone all night, and told her he’d be home for dinner about seven-thirty that evening. Acting on doctor’s orders, Mrs. Osborne remained in bed. Before she went back to sleep she heard her husband outside calling the dog.
“Mr. Secundo Estivar, the next witness, testified that Robert Osborne appeared at his door while the family was having breakfast. He had the dog with him and acted very upset because he thought it had been poisoned. There was an exchange of angry words between the two men, then Robert Osborne departed, carrying the dog in his arms. It was still early when he appeared at the veterinary hospital run by Dr. John Loomis. He left the dog at the hospital for diagnosis and continued on his way to San Diego. As he drove toward the highway he saw Carla Lopez walking along the street and stopped to ask her about the possibility of her two older brothers coming back to work for him. He told Miss Lopez his present crew was no good and had no experience.
“The crew he referred to was composed of ten viseros, Mexican nationals with visas which allowed them to do agricultural work in the United States. Mr. Estivar made a record of the names and addresses of the men but he didn’t examine their visas carefully nor did he check the registration of the truck they arrived in. Such things seemed unimportant at the time. The tomato crop was ready to be picked and crated and the need for pickers was aggravated by other factors. During the preceding month one of Mr. Estivar’s sons, Rufo, had married and moved to Northern California; another, Felipe, had left to look for a non-agricultural job, and the border-crossers who’d been working the fields had their minibus stolen in Tijuana and were without transportation. It was a critical period at the ranch, with Mr. Estivar and his oldest son, Cruz, putting in sixteen-hour days to keep things going. When the ten viseros showed up, they were hired on the spot, no questions asked.
“They remained for two weeks. During those two weeks they kept, and were kept, to themselves. As Mr. Estivar remarked from the witness box, he was not running a social club. The bunkhouse where the viseros slept, the mess hall where they ate their meals were out of bounds for Mrs. Estivar and Jaime and his younger sisters, for Mrs. Osborne, for the cook, Dulzura Gonzales, and even the Osborne dog. This isolation made the job of the sheriff’s department not only difficult but, as it turned out, impossible. The men Mr. Valenzuela spent six months searching for were hardly more than shadows. They left no tracks and no pictures in anyone’s memory, no gaps in anyone’s life. Their main identity was an old red G.M. truck.
“The truck departed from the ranch late in the afternoon of October thirteen. Around nine o’clock that night, as Mr. Estivar was preparing for bed, he heard the truck return. He recognized it by the peculiar squeak of its brakes and the fact that it parked outside the bunkhouse. The Estivar family kept ranchers’ hours. Shortly after nine they were asleep, Mr. and Mrs. Estivar, the two sons who were still living at home, Cruz, the oldest, and Jaime, the youngest, and the nine-year-old twin girls. We have reason to believe they all slept through a murder.
“The victim, Robert Osborne, had arrived home about seven-thirty from his trip to the city. He had his dog with him, completely recovered and eager to run after being cooped up at the vet’s all day. He let it out and proceeded into the house, where he had dinner with his wife. According to her it was a pleasant meal lasting an hour or so. At approximately eight-thirty Robert Osborne went into the kitchen to give Dulzura Gonzales some money for her birthday, since he’d forgotten to buy her a present in San Diego. He took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet. Miss Gonzales noticed that the wallet contained a lot of money. We don’t know the actual amount, but it hardly matters — murders have been committed for twenty-five cents. What matters is that when Robert Osborne left the house he had in his possession enough money to constitute what Miss Gonzales called ‘a real temptation to a poor man.’
“While Robert Osborne was outside looking for the dog, his wife, Devon, went into the main living room to play an album of symphonic music which had recently arrived by mail. It was a warm night after a hot day and the windows were still closed. The drapes had been opened after sunset, but the windows faced east and south toward the riverbed, the Bishop ranch and the city of Tijuana. Only the city was visible. Devon Osborne did some straightening up around the room while she listened to the music and waited for her husband’s return. Time passed, too much time. She began to worry in spite of the fact that Robert Osborne had been born on the ranch and knew every inch of it. Finally she went out to the garage, thinking that her husband might have driven to one of the neighboring ranches. His car was still there. She then telephoned Mr. Estivar.
“It was almost ten o’clock and the Estivar family was asleep, but Mrs. Osborne let the phone ring until Mr. Estivar answered. When he learned of the situation he asked Mrs. Osborne to stay inside the house with the doors and windows locked while he and his son, Cruz, searched for Robert Osborne with a jeep. Following instructions Mrs. Osborne waited in the kitchen. At a quarter to eleven Mr. Estivar came back to the ranch house to call the sheriff’s office in Boca de Rio. Mr. Valenzuela, with his partner, Mr. Bismarck, arrived at the ranch within half an hour. They discovered a great deal of blood on the floor of the mess hall and called the main office in San Diego for reinforcements.
“More blood was found later that night on a piece of cloth caught on a yucca spike outside the mess-hall door. The cloth was part of a sleeve from a man’s shirt, small in size. On the following Monday children waiting for a school bus came across the body of Robert Osborne’s dog, which an autopsy later showed had been struck by a car or truck. About three weeks later, on November four, Jaime Estivar spotted the butterfly knife among the pumpkin vines. The floor of the mess hall, the sleeve, the dog’s mouth and the butterfly knife — these were the main areas where blood was found and from which samples were sent to the police lab in Sacramento for analysis. Three types of blood were classified, B, AB and O. Type O was confined to the sleeve; both B and AB were in considerable quantity on the floor; B was in the dog’s mouth and AB on the butterfly knife.