8-Year Mystery

There was nothing truly extraordinary about Joy Pleshe’s life, except the way she died. And even then, despite the peculiarly brutal nature of her murder, she died as anonymously as she had lived. Her death hardly rated a mention in local newspapers.

That was almost 8 years ago, so it would be easy to forget Paula Joy Pleshe--career woman, beauty salon manager, mother--and to dismiss her death as some wanton violent act that defies logic or explanation.

But Linda Roche cannot forget it. Joy Pleshe was her little sister, and when someone staked out Pleshe’s Cypress condominium and stabbed her 11 times in the chest, leaving her to die sprawled on the concrete of her carport in a pool of blood, a little part of Roche died as well.

“You can never really forget it, especially when you were very close,” said Roche, a merchandiser for a major movie studio in Los Angeles. “Our kids were born 3 weeks apart, we both lived in Cypress, we did everything together. There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t talk to Joy.”

Pleshe, 33, was killed July 14, 1981, in her carport just off Ball Road in Cypress. It was shortly after 6:30 a.m., and she was heading out to buy gasoline. She had planned to return home to pick up her 12-year-old daughter Leslie, who waited inside the condo.

When she reached her two-door, white Toyota, the attacker was waiting in the open carport area, where dozens of cars were parked within sight of the condominiums. Roche would later call the 11 stab wounds an “overkill.” The killer, described by police as a heavyset Latino man in his early 40s, calmly walked to a car parked on nearby Larwin Lane and drove away with another man.

Despite the discovery of the suspected murder weapon, a 6-inch butcher knife, and an anonymous telephone call from a woman who said she followed the suspects as they left the area, Cypress police have been unable to find the killers.

And while the case remains open, police conceded that they need someone to come forward with key information if they ever hope to find Pleshe’s killer.

“So far we haven’t come up with a heck of a lot,” said Larry Jordan, a Cypress police investigator. “We all have our suspicions but nothing we can prove or discuss in public.”

One puzzling aspect, Jordan said, is that nothing was taken from the victim’s body. Her purse was intact, and the killer failed to remove even her jewelry.

“There just doesn’t seem to be a motive at this point,” Jordan said, explaining that Pleshe was not personally wealthy.

“We haven’t located anything in her background to suggest that anybody would be after her for any particular reason. She pretty much kept to herself, had a responsible job and was a trusted employee at work. Apparently, she didn’t really have any enemies. In a lot of these cases, you find that there may be 100 people who wanted the victim dead. But in this case she seemed very well liked . . . not an obvious target.”

On the other hand, Jordan said, the killing had some of the markings of a planned hit. The killers apparently knew where she lived and staked out her car, waiting for Pleshe to come out in the morning.

“Someone sent them to get her, but what the motive is behind it, I don’t know,” the detective said.

As it turned out, several people heard her screams as Pleshe was being attacked, and at least one person got a good enough look at the two suspects to give police a description. But no one came forward to say they actually saw the murder or to identify the suspects.

The second suspect was described as a Latino man in his 20s, about 5 feet, 9 inches tall and 150 pounds.

The day after the murder, police received an anonymous call from a woman who said she followed the killers’ car for a few blocks, then lost track of them. The woman promised to call back, but never did.

“There are a lot of leads that the police tried to follow up on and a lot of personal things that I myself tried to do,” Roche said recently.

“I am not a detective. I am somebody who has suffered a real loss. It’s very difficult. You know that someone is walking around out there who had a motive and got away with it.”

Pleshe and Roche grew up in Long Beach, attended college there and went on to work for Bullock’s--both becoming beauty salon managers for the department store chain. Each married and divorced and moved to Cypress, their daughters becoming close friends who have stayed in touch over the years.

The night before the murder, they had gone out to dinner together in Cypress.

After almost 8 years, Roche said, the pain of losing her sister has yet to subside.

“If someone is killed in a car accident or has a disease, there is a finality to it,” she said. “But when someone is murdered, your life becomes violated. And having it unsolved is the absolute worst.”