SIMI VALLEY : Roofer, 24, Arrested in ’86 Stabbing Case

An unemployed roofer has been arrested on suspicion of killing a drunken transient in an abandoned Simi Valley farmhouse in 1986 just for kicks, authorities said Monday.

Simi Valley police allege that David A. Dunlap, 24, and two other men repeatedly stabbed Derek L. VanDusen in the back while he was sleeping at the abandoned chicken farm on Patricia Avenue that was widely used as a party house and “crash pad.”

“The information is that when they encountered VanDusen in the house, the decision was made to see what it feels like to kill somebody,” Lt. Robert Klamser said.

Dunlap was being held Monday on $250,000 bail in the Ventura County Jail following his arrest Friday. The two other men, both 23-year-old former Simi Valley residents, are already jailed for other crimes. One is in a county jail for misdemeanor drunk driving and the other is in Folsom State Prison serving a 19-year sentence for attempted murder.

Klamser said the other suspects’ names were not released because they were 17 when VanDusen, 33, was killed. He said the pair will be brought to Ventura County to face the possibility of being tried as adults in VanDusen’s death.

Police were first told of the possible involvement of the three men in 1988. Klamser said detectives tracked numerous leads--including interviews with dozens of transients and others who frequented the farmhouse--to amass enough evidence to charge them with the crime.

Klamser said investigators found no “smoking-gun-type piece of evidence.” Rather, he said, “there came a point that the accumulation of what we had was sufficient to support prosecution.”

There were no witnesses to the killing nor was a murder weapon recovered, Klamser said. He said the evidence was drawn from “multiple types of information from a variety of sources.”

“Obviously, it was sufficient for the D. A. to file a criminal complaint for murder and for a judge to issue an arrest warrant,” Klamser said.