Zuma Beach Photos May Provide Clues to Woman’s Killers : Crime: A couple were taking pictures in the area. Four CYA escapees have been ruled out as primary suspects.

A couple who took photographs at Zuma Beach on Tuesday may unknowingly have pictures that would help identify the killers of a 43-year-old Northridge woman who was stabbed to death there, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said Friday.

Deputy Hal Grant said investigators are searching for the pair, described only as a black couple, who witnesses saw taking pictures near the restroom where Jaqueline Kirkham was assaulted a short time later by a group of young men, who fled in her red Nissan sports car.

Detectives believe that the couple inadvertently may have photographed the killers or that the film may contain other clues to the assailants’ identities.

“They are looking for anything on the photographs,” Grant said.

Meanwhile, four inmates who escaped from the California Youth Authority facility in Camarillo on Sunday--who deputies originally thought might be responsible for the stabbing--are no longer considered primary suspects, although they have not been ruled out completely, deputies said.

Although the four are still at large, “we have nothing to connect them to the crime,” Detective Ike Aguilar said. “But you can’t ever rule out suspects.”

Los Angeles police investigating a residential burglary by three armed men in Mission Hills on Friday thought the intruders could have been Kirkham’s killers because they arrived at the house in a red sports car and Kirkham’s car had not been found. The car, left behind when the robbers fled on foot, turned out to be a Camaro.

Later in the afternoon, CYA officials in Ventura County received a phone call saying that the escapees had been arrested by Los Angeles police. But that call proved to be a hoax.

The English-born Kirkham--a divorcee with two children and two grandchildren who was engaged to be married again--went to Zuma Beach every Tuesday afternoon, her day off from her job selling shoes at a Robinson’s store in Northridge, said her fiance, Steve Williams.

Generally, she would go to lie in the sun and tan, but in cold weather she would walk and sort through her thoughts, he said.

“She loved the beach,” he said. “She always went to Zuma.”

But in recent months, Williams said, Kirkham had complained about the number of “creeps” hanging around the beach. She rarely said she felt unsafe, but was bothered by the men who would set their towels down next to her, uninvited, and try to strike up a conversation.

“She didn’t feel as comfortable at the beach as she used to,” Williams said.