Man Reportedly Seen Leaving Home With Body Is Arrested in Slaying

A 31-year-old man was arrested Saturday in Orange on suspicion of murdering his girlfriend after he returned home to find police called by neighbors who reported seeing him leave his apartment carrying a sleeping bag with a body inside.

Police found the body of the woman, whose identity was being withheld pending notification of relatives, in the trunk of Michael Raymond Goodson’s car after he pulled up in front of his apartment complex about 6 p.m. Police said the girlfriend, 41, lived in Orange County.

Investigators talked to Goodson for a while, then opened the trunk of his car and made their grisly discovery. After taking photographs of the woman, who apparently had been strangled, officers sealed up the trunk and waited for coroner’s officials to arrive. Goodson, a parts driver for an auto dealership, was arrested at the scene and taken to Orange County Jail.

“He was not combative,” said Orange Police Sgt. Art Romo.

Neighbors say that nearly 12 hours earlier, they watched Goodson walk out of his apartment with a body of a woman covered by a sleeping bag, according to police. Goodson hefted the load down a short pathway, placed it in the trunk of his car and then drove off, neighbors told police.

Residents alerted the Orange Police Department, but when officers arrived and broke into the ground-floor unit they found neither a victim nor a suspect, only traces of blood.

Goodson apparently lived in the apartment with his father, who police believe had gone to San Francisco for the weekend. Police were also trying to reach the father, whose identity they did not disclose.

No one reported hearing a fight in the apartment, which sits on a corner of the sprawling complex just yards from a gate out to the carport.

Ross Worthley, a 16-year-old neighbor who lives in an apartment that shares a wall with Goodson’s, said he got home at 12:30 a.m. Saturday but didn’t hear a sound until he awakened mid-morning to find police throughout the complex.

“I didn’t hear anything, and these walls are pretty thin,” said Worthley, who does not know Goodson.

After police were unable to find Goodson or a victim in the apartment during their preliminary search, they closed up the apartment and spent much of Saturday attempting to get a court order to conduct a thorough look. As curious neighbors looked on, the area around the unit at the Park City Apartments, in the 3800 block of Garden Grove Boulevard, was cordoned off.

Goodson was a stranger to most of his neighbors at the complex, a lush setting of plants spread between tan, wood-frame buildings with brown trim and aqua-blue doors.

“From what I hear, he was sort of on the odd-ball side,” said David White, who has lived in the complex for six years. “I heard one guy who parked next to him say he’d park his car sideways on day, then lengthwise the next.”

Denyce Fernando said that she saw Goodson occasionally but that he appeared “very quiet” and seemed the type that simply “went to work and came home” without much of a stir.