“Dude, We Smoked ‘Em All.” : Asking How a Party of Drinking and Rock ‘n’ Roll Erupted into the Shotgun Slaying of Three Teen-Age Girls

South Pasadena is a slice of the Midwest stuck incongruously between Los Angeles and Pasadena, with slanted roofs and big front porches and squads of kids cutting across lawns. Movie makers use the town to evoke Springfield, Ill., or Hannibal, Mo., lining up their shots so that you can’t see the San Gabriel Mountains looming to the north or the palm trees poking above the big, shady camphor trees.

It’s a quaint remnant of small-town America, population 24,000. Downtown is a little eccentric and on the bland side, with hardly a franchise outlet in sight. There’s a big, cluttered hardware store and a drugstore with a soda counter out of the Archie comic books. And down the street at the Rialto Theatre, a huge velvet curtain still swoops out of the wings to cover the screen after the movie is over.

Sure, there’s a new neon-lit strip mall on Fair Oaks Avenue that a lot of people call “that monstrosity.” And sometimes teen-agers play their stereos too loud, and the thump thump thump gets the neighbors riled up. But, for the most part, folks want to preserve the town wholesale. In fact, South Pasadena’s primary collective preoccupation for the past 30 years has been to keep Caltrans from rolling an eight-lane freeway link through the middle of town.

This is Norman Rockwell country, people say, just eight miles from downtown Los Angeles. Last year, it produced one of Southern California’s grisliest, most perplexing multiple murders.

Six teen-agers--three girls, three boys--had gotten together on a March evening, partying at 18-year-old Kathy Macaulay’s garage apartment in a palmy hillside neighborhood of Pasadena. In a scene that jolted hardened homicide detectives, the girls, all former or current South Pasadena High School students, were found shot to death--”beheaded by shotgun blast,” as one judge put it.

Police found Macaulay slumped against the stereo. Danae Palermo, 17, was stretched face down across a queen-size bed, and Heather Goodwin, 18, was sprawled half on the bed and half off. The scene was “beyond imagination,” says Pasadena homicide detective Michael Korpal, a 14-year police veteran, “the worst I’ve ever encountered.”

Within 24 hours, two of the boys who had been at the gathering were tracked down in Oregon and charged with first-degree murder. The murder trial of David Adkins, 17, and Vinny Hebrock, 18, both of South Pasadena, is scheduled to start in Pasadena Superior Court on June 15. Both have pleaded not guilty. Cayle Fielder, 17, the third boy who was there that night, was not charged and has become the prime witness for the prosecution. The defense attorneys will no doubt challenge Fielder’s story; one has said he plans to implicate Fielder in the crimes.

A full year later, few of the principals will talk openly about the murders. The parents of the victims and the defendants won’t talk to reporters, and they have directed acquaintances to do the same. Many of those who consented to speak wish to remain anonymous.

Even though residents may not want to discuss them, the senseless murders have sounded an ugly wake-up call for adults in South Pasadena. The teen-agers at Kathy Macaulay’s party that night, especially the accused murderers, may not fit the town’s image of itself, but they were all products of South Pasadena. “There’s a lot of kids like those kids,” says one teacher who knew most of them. Nowadays, parents say, when their children try to slip out of the house or when they get a distant, musing look, something lurches inside. “I ask a lot more questions now,” says the father of a teen-age girl.

SINCE THE MURDERS, THE SIX TEEN-AGERS WHO WERE INVOLVED HAVE BEEN REferred to as a “clique.” But they were a loose assemblage, held together by little more than their dislike of South Pasadena High School and the “snobs” who excelled there. All six had become part of the minuscule 1% of students who drop out of the school, except Kathy Macaulay, who, at the time of her death, had been ditching class for three weeks. These weren’t “mainstream” students, teachers say. “Frankly, most students probably didn’t know who they were,” one school official says.

South Pas High churns out college prospects like some marvelous inspirational machine. About 85% of the school’s graduating seniors march off to college every year. When classes are in session on the rambling, collegiate-style campus, barely a peep is heard from the classrooms, and the central walkway, which angles past banana and eucalyptus trees, is empty. “We have some rules and regulations about being in class,” says Principal Ben Ramirez. “We also have a quality teaching staff, and, frankly, most students don’t want to miss out.”

But like all Southern California high schools, South Pas has its cutups and its drug problems. “People like to make it seem like South Pas is just ‘Leave It To Beaver,’ ” says one senior there. “Then you go to the parties and see all the people loaded.”

The longtime truants, the inveterate druggies, the brawlers and a few others who don’t fit into the mainstream--28 at last count--end up at the continuation school, a single oblong room in the school district headquarters three blocks away. It looks much like any other high school classroom: Students sit at long tables, filling in workbooks or listening to recordings of drama classics. Three of the six teen-agers at Kathy’s house that night passed this way, and a fourth was a familiar figure outside, waiting restlessly for his friends to emerge.

“It’s a different ambience from the regular school,” says Bill Holmes, 52, the continuation school’s only teacher. If a student is really serious about schooling, he can come for both morning and afternoon sessions. But it’s low pressure; no one tells the students what to do, says the teacher.

Holmes, a brawny man with a friendly, even-keeled disposition, tries to encourage a sense of group identification among his charges. “You get the sense that they’ve been yelled at a lot over at the other place,” he says. “There’s no point in yelling at them here.

“There are some real high expectations (in South Pasadena),” adds Holmes. “It’s like, if you can meet the expectations, great. If you can’t, there’s not a whole lot of provision for it.”

“They want you to be a white middle-class kid who wants to be a doctor or a lawyer and who gets straight A’s,” says one skateboard-toting continuation student.

The last refuge for some teen-agers here is parties, where, often, the main activity is guzzling beer, very quickly. “You sit around and drink beer and get messed up, and then the cops come and break it up,” the student says. “Some people think they’re power drinkers. You see them drinking and drinking and drinking, until somebody says something dumb and a fight starts.”

THE ONLY OTHER THING UNITING THE SIX TEEN-AGERS WHO TOOK THE SQUIGgly road up through Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco to Kathy Macaulay’s house was Kathy’s impulsive generosity. An amiable, chunky girl with long, Goldilocks tresses, Kathy fussed over her friends like a fairy godmother, shuttling them around in her Ford Bronco and showering them with presents.

Friends found themselves swept up by Kathy for an excursion to a mall or Venice Beach. “She’d pick you up and say, we’re going to the beach or we’re going to a party,” says one 16-year-old sophomore, “and you could say, I’ve got to call my parents, and she’d just laugh and say, I don’t see a phone, do you?”

Theresa Biesek, one of Kathy’s closest friends, tells about skipping school last year on Valentine’s Day, Kathy’s birthday, and going to a Venice beauty salon to get Kathy’s hair braided. Kathy invited Theresa and another girl to do the same. “I said, no, it’s your birthday, you shouldn’t be buying us things,” Theresa says. “All I got her was one rose and a birthday card.”

“Kathy always seemed to have money,” says Theresa’s father, Tom Biesek, an operating engineer at Caltech. “Ask my daughter how much she was carrying at any given time, and it might be 40 cents. Kathy would have $40 to $100.”

The more perceptive of Kathy’s friends saw through Kathy’s “sparkly” personality, as one friend put it. “Kathy would give you the world if she could,” says Kelly Wilson, a junior at South Pas High. “She just wanted to be wanted.”

Kathy was finishing school in South Pasadena, even though she had moved to Pasadena in 1989 with her mother, Linda Macaulay, and stepfather, Michael Koss, both pathologists at County-USC Medical Center. They lived in a handsome house in the Annandale section of town. It is a striking hillside setting, with a footprint-shaped swimming pool, a sweeping view of the San Gabriels and, nestled in the arroyo below, the Annandale Country Club. Kathy, an only child, spent most of her time in a studio apartment over the garage.

She had a queen-size bed, with a menagerie of stuffed animals and a stereo, out of which poured an endless stream of classic rock ‘n’ roll. Kathy and her friends liked Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead. But mostly it was Led Zeppelin. “We loved our Led Zeppelin,” says Theresa Biesek.

Linda Macaulay and Michael Koss gave Kathy pretty much whatever she wanted. But Kathy’s friends say her parents frequently went to Seattle or Boston on business, leaving Kathy alone in her hillside retreat. “Kathy didn’t have much supervision,” says Tom Biesek. And while her parents were away, Kathy’s apartment became the group’s party center, a cozy haven to drink beer, experiment with drugs or play a little air guitar, friends say. “You could do anything you wanted up there,” says Peggy Shurtleff, one of the regulars, a statuesque blond girl with a tiny jewel embedded in her nose. “We were all pretty wild.”

Despite her determinedly upbeat personality, Kathy couldn’t hide her unhappiness, even from people who barely knew her. “She was a miserable young lady,” says neighbor Donna-Lee Bovi. “Sometimes she’d sit down at the foot of the driveway and cry.”

EVER SINCE JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, DAVID ADKINS had a reputation in South Pasadena as one of the local bad boys. As an eighth-grader, he and his surly friend Vinny Hebrock got caught with a television set and some other things from a burglarized apartment that was just around the corner from the police station. Dave said he was helping a friend move some stuff from his ex-girlfriend’s house. The juvenile court, unconvinced, gave Dave six months at Boys Republic in Chino. Vinny got probation.

Even before that, Dave was a high-profile figure in South Pasadena. A lot of people remember Dave and his brother Dan, who is 2 1/2 years older, and their poisonous rivalry. “Dave used to do really mean things to his brother,” says one girl who lived near the house where Dave and Dan lived with their mother, who was separated from their father. “Like he’d put rocks in a pillowcase and smash Dan over the head.”

When Dave was in seventh grade, he began an on-again, off-again relationship with Kathy Macaulay, who was a year ahead of him in school. Sometime after that, he acquired a reputation as a drug user. “After school, we’d smoke a joint, watch TV, kick back,” says Dave’s friend Job Carder, who has since found more satisfying pursuits in studies and sports. “We did that for a long time. Then I started hanging out with a new group of friends. They had no concept of smoking pot.”

Later, for a few golden months, Dave’s eighth-grade English teacher, Sandie Welles, took him under her wing; he even moved in with her for a while. But then his mother, Pam Discala, who had been waitressing in a barbecue restaurant, decided to move the family to Oregon, where she had relatives.

But in the fall of 1990, Dave reappeared at South Pas High School, a tall, loose-limbed boy with flaring nostrils and sandy curls, still bridling under the discipline of school. “He wasn’t like other guys from here,” says Amy Martinez, a junior at the school. “He was his own kind of guy. He didn’t care what people thought.”

Adkins seemed to have a racy outlaw appeal. A succession of girlfriends gave him money, helped him with his homework, took him to the library, brought him home to dinner, even got him involved in a Christian youth group. He seemed to inspire a deep, magnanimous urge to shepherd him toward a better life. “Dave was somebody who really wanted to get out of the bad part of his life, but it had much too strong a hold on him,” says one ex-girlfriend.

Kathy’s friends were distressed when she announced in January, 1991, that she and Dave were back together. “He was just using her,” says one friend. “She bought him anything he wanted, gave him a place to stay. We told her to stay away from him. But she never listened to anybody.”

It was a rocky relationship. Dave’s previous girlfriend, Michelle Sandford, was still on the scene, and fellow students prodded Kathy to assert sole rights. “Michelle was still trying to stay in contact with him,” says South Pas senior Morningstar Harmon. “People were creating rumors, and saying, ‘Oh, go kick her ass.’ ”

The two girls came together at a party, flailing and punching like street brawlers. Before friends pulled them apart, Kathy chipped Michelle’s tooth and Michelle banged Kathy’s head against a wall.

But Kathy won, apparently. She and Dave settled into a restive, argumentative relationship, full of public put-downs, sometimes addressing each other in the most vile language. “Whenever I talked to Dave, me and him alone, he’d just talk bad about her,” says Peggy Shurtleff. “He used to say how he hated her. You could see it coming with Kathy and Dave, something bad.”

Nevertheless, by March, 1991, Dave was spending virtually every night in the garage apartment when Kathy’s parents were gone.

Dave and Vinny, of course. Vinny was part of the package. A short, scowling youth, with thin lips and a pointed nose, Vinny had been Dave’s buddy since junior high school.

Burton Vincent Hebrock hadn’t attended school since he was 14, and he couldn’t read much more than the word the , he told police. Mostly, he sat on the public library steps, across the street from the continuation school, waiting for Dave, who had transferred there, to come out. “He didn’t seem to have any independent course of action but to sit around and wait for Dave and go out and get into trouble,” says a family friend and neighbor who has known the Hebrocks for 10 years and who asked to remain anonymous.

Vinny was the eighth child of Faye Hebrock, a short, dark woman who worked as a cocktail waitress. They lived with Vinny’s father, Burton, a tow truck driver, in various low-rent apartments around the San Gabriel Valley until Burton took 8-year-old Vinny off to Florida. “The father came home one day and said he was in trouble and he was going to take the kid and leave town,” the family friend says. Five years later, Vinny came back. “I get a call from him in Florida, saying could I locate his mom,” the friend says. “He said his dad had died of an expired heart. The white corpuscles had overtaken the red corpuscles.”

Back in South Pasadena, Vinny felt out of place--”A poor boy in a rich man’s town,” the friend says. He moved in with his mother, sharing an apartment above an electrician’s shop with his sister Tabatha (nicknamed Tiki), 22, and Tabatha’s husband and son.

When he was 17, Vinny got a job briefly, at an Arco station, sweeping up and moving cars around, but the owners fired him because he didn’t show up for work. “After he lost that job, he was really depressed,” the friend says. “He said, ‘No one will ever hire me again.’ ”

Sometime after he returned to South Pas, he had hooked up with Dave, and a rough, shoulder-punching friendship blossomed, with the two goading each other on to greater heights of adolescent cynicism. “Both liked to do crazy things, and they wouldn’t care what happened,” says Gabriel Ciupeiu, 16, a student at the continuation school. “They tried to sell fake drugs and stuff. They sold Kathy and Heather some No Doz, chopped up like cocaine.”

Teen-agers from generally sedate South Pasadena saw Vinny, with his carefully cultivated Jimmy Cagney image, as intimidating. “He looked like a mean guy,” says junior Morgan Williams. “He never smiled, and he was always in a bad mood. He always looked like he was going to beat somebody up.”

And there were more brushes with the law. One morning in February, 1991, a resident of a five-unit apartment complex heard someone trying to pry open her front door. It was the third attempted burglary in the building in a week, residents say. Police arrested Dave and Vinny on the spot. They were released to their mothers, but now they faced possible jail time.

Then, on the day of the gathering at Kathy’s house, Dave and Vinny borrowed Kathy’s red moped and snatched a purse from an elderly woman on Glenarm Street. “I have no excuse, I just did it,” Vinny would tell homicide detectives later. Their lives had become, Vinny said, a kind of extended party, and Kathy’s apartment its center. “When the party gets wild,” he told police, “we crash there . . . when we get too drunk to go home or whatever.”

NONE OF THE TEEN-AGERS AT KATHY’S HOUSE DISLIKED DAVE and Vinny more than Heather Goodwin. Vinny in particular seemed to enrage this diminutive punker. Vinny’s appearance at a party was enough to set her off, friends say. “She’d always have some smart, sarcastic comment,” Peggy Shurtleff says. “Like she’d say, ‘You know, you’re the ugliest’ “--a two-word obscenity--” ’I’ve ever seen in my life.’ ”

Heather had moved in 1989 from South Pasadena to San Marino with her father, Darrell, a Glendale insurance lawyer, and her mother, Mimi, an artist. Friends say her room was “very her, very Heather” with a big British flag on one wall, an Iron Maiden poster on another. A continuation school dropout, she was a sales clerk at a Clothestime store on Fair Oaks Avenue.

She was a flamboyant figure around town, with her reddish hair, buzzed off at the sides, but despite her in-your-face personality, Heather could be charming. “A lot of my friends never had anything to say when they came over,” Peggy says. “But Heather--she always made time to sit and make conversation.”

Danae (pronounced da-NAY) was the youngest of the murder victims but in some ways the most mature. She had gotten her General Equivalency Diploma, and she was supporting herself as a clerk in Brookstone in the Glendale Galleria and taking classes at Glendale Community College.

And she was drifting inexorably away from the South Pas scene, friends say. “I talked to her five minutes before she went to the party,” says Shane Adams, who worked with Danae. “She said she didn’t really want to go. She didn’t like the people that much, but she was going because they were old friends.”

A dark girl with porcelain-like skin, Danae was deceptively quiet, friends said. “She had a really strong personality,” says one friend. “If something went wrong, she’d just fix it right there. She wouldn’t let people push her around.”

Her parents, Don and Marlene Palermo, had split up when Danae was in junior high school, and she had alternated between their separate households, in Pasadena and South Pasadena. Her father owns two sandwich shops in the San Gabriel Valley. At Brookstone, Danae was one of the “cool” crowd, says Adams. “She knew the rock scene. Somebody would be talking about some group that nobody ever heard of, and Danae would say, ‘Oh, yeah, they’re great.’ ”

While the other teen-agers at Kathy’s house were growing up together in South Pasadena, Cayle Fielder was going to school in El Sereno. He moved in with his grandmother in South Pasadena during his sophomore year, quickly ending up in continuation school. Broad and bulky, with a bullet-shaped head and the thick neck of a defensive lineman, Cayle was an imposing figure. Friends say he was all bluster and good humor. “He was really protective over me, Kathy, Heather and Peggy,” says Theresa Biesek. “Like if one of us was having a party, he’d make sure that the people wouldn’t make a mess.”

But others say Cayle had a sinister side. One girl says she saw him pull out a gun at a gathering at his house and flash it menacingly--”showing off to everybody,” the girl says. She never went back. “He showed a side of him that I didn’t want to see.”

Some said Cayle was a drug source in the school--”he had it or could get it,” says Dave’s friend Job Carder. In pretrial testimony, Cayle said that he had used, among others, marijuana, cocaine, PCP and LSD.

“If you knew him he was nice,” Job says. “Maybe around girls he was nice, like all guys are nice. He’d push on people just like anybody else. Some people were a little intimidated by him because he was a big, fat bald guy.”

WAYNE AND DONNA-LEE BOVI lived next door to Kathy Macaulay’s house. From their home, they could look down on the neighbors’ pool patio. Late at night, they would often hear the crunching backbeat and plangent electric guitars of rock ‘n’ roll floating up from Kathy’s apartment or the slamming of car doors in the driveway.

Around 10 o’clock on March 21 last year, Wayne Bovi, a 44-year-old graphic artist, remarked to his wife that the teen-agers below had been awfully noisy all evening long. “He stood out on the balcony and started to yell down to the kids to be quiet,” says Donna-Lee Bovi. “Then he heard somebody yelling, ‘OK, dude, bring the gun.’ He thought they were yelling taunts to someone across the canyon.”

Bovi could see a boy--he doesn’t know who--crossing the patio below. “He could tell that the person was falling-down drunk,” Donna-Lee Bovi says. “There was no point in getting involved in a conversation with somebody that drunk. Then one of the girls said, ‘Shhh.’ ” Somebody turned the stereo down, and the Bovis went to bed.

Only Dave, Vinny and Cayle know exactly what happened after that. But police and friends’ accounts, as well as court documents and testimony at preliminary hearings--principally Vinny’s and Cayle’s--provide an account of some of the events.

With her mother and stepfather away at a conference in Chicago, Kathy had hastily convened the regulars at her apartment. The stereo was pumping out music, and most of the group was pouring drinks down recklessly, including two cases of beer and a liter of Jack Daniels. “We were just drinking and partying,” Cayle testified at one of the preliminary hearings, looking like an overweight Raul Julia in his tight-fitting suit, his bulbous eyes surveying the courtroom. “We smoked a pipeful of marijuana.”

There had been no special tension between Kathy and Dave that night, Cayle said, but hostilities between Vinny and the other two girls came boiling to the surface when Kathy, Dave and Cayle drove down the hill to a liquor store for more beer. “When we got back,” Cayle testified, “they were talking about a fight Vinny and Heather got into, a skirmish.” Vinny later displayed to police deep scratches on his neck and bruises on his arms, saying he had argued with the two girls after he tried to “smooch” with Danae and that Heather had kicked him in the groin.

At this point the sequence of events is blurry. Cayle said he fell asleep next to Danae on the bed. According to Vinny’s statement to homicide detectives, Dave directed Vinny to climb through a window into the main house, where Kathy’s stepfather kept a shotgun, a 12-gauge Mossberg for pheasant or duck hunting. Then the two marched back into the garage apartment. “He told me he was just going to scare her,” Vinny said. Kathy stood up and looked at the two boys in disbelief, Vinny said. “She looked dead at Dave. She thought we were kidding.”

Then Dave suddenly “crammed the gun into my hands,” Vinny said, and it went off, killing Kathy.

Heather tried to edge out the door, Vinny said, but Dave, taking the gun back, flung her onto the bed. “He walked up to her, put the gun to her head and shot her,” Vinny told homicide detectives. “And he walked up to Danae and shot her.”

The silence between shots was eerie, Vinny said. “Nobody said nothing. It was so quiet. All you could hear is the music.”

Cayle, jolted out of his drunken sleep by the first two blasts from the shotgun, said he rose up on his elbows just in time to see Dave shoot Danae on the bed next to him. “I looked over and saw Dave pull the trigger,” Cayle said. “He shot Danae just as I looked over. I stayed exactly as I was. Dave and Vinny were both saying, ‘Are you with us? Are you down?’ ” Dave was pointing the gun at him, he said.

After the shooting, the three boys fled, pausing only to get Vinny’s and Dave’s laundry from the dryer on the patio. For a brief moment, as Dave and Vinny bunched up their clothes, Cayle said, Vinny handed him the shotgun. Cayle said he held the gun with the ends of his shirt sleeves to avoid putting his fingerprints on it. “I was very confused at that moment,” he said.

But Cayle remembered a breathless conversation over the dryer. “Dave said, ‘Oh my God, I just killed my girlfriend,’ ” Cayle said. “Vinny said, ‘Yeah, dude, we smoked ‘em all.’ ”

With Dave driving, the three boys climbed into Linda Macaulay’s 1986 maroon Mercedes-Benz. Dave dropped Cayle off at his father’s apartment in Alhambra. “They said, ‘Don’t say anything or you’re dead,’ ” Cayle testified.

Dave and Vinny drove to downtown Los Angeles to buy some marijuana--”five dimes of weed,” Vinny said--and then they headed north on Interstate 5. “It was like a bad high,” Vinny said, “like something you’re trying to get away from but can’t.” They stopped once, at a gas station, Vinny said, trading some jewelry, including a bracelet with a charm with the letter K , for gas. What gas station? “The one with the blue and red sign,” said Vinny, unable to read the name.

Meanwhile, Cayle said, he told the story to his father, construction worker Mike Fielder, who ordered his son to go to his mother’s house in Seattle. But before his flight, Cayle made a late-night visit to Peggy Shurtleff. “I’ll never forget the look on his face,” says Peggy. “He was just stunned. I can’t describe it. The first thing he said was, ‘They’re all dead.’ I said, ‘Who’s dead?’ He said, ‘Kathy, Danae, Heather.’ I said, ‘This can’t be happening.’ ”

According to a police report, before Cayle left Peggy that night he told her to “do the right thing.” Peggy called Heather’s parents, who sent the police to Kathy’s house.

Police arrived on the scene of blood and wreckage at 2:48 a.m. More than 30 beer cans were scattered around, and dirty dishes were in the sink. A bathroom door was off its hinges--broken six months earlier, Fielder later told police, by teen-agers who wanted to join others in the bathroom to smoke pot.

Cayle called police from Seattle the next day to give them his version of events. Dave and Vinny were arrested that day at the Greyhound bus station in Salem, Ore. Police found the Mercedes a few blocks away and the shotgun along a bicycle path in Grants Pass. Among Dave and Vinny’s possessions were two Polaroid photographs, taken in the master bedroom of the Macaulay-Koss home, each depicting one of the boys holding a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun.

AFTER A JUVENILE COURT judge ruled in June that Dave and Vinny should be tried as adults, they were transferred from Juvenile Hall to the Hall of Justice jail in downtown Los Angeles, where they are being held without bail. One counselor who has spoken to them both found Vinny “unnerved,” while Dave struggled to appear unaffected by his incarceration. “He has a better mask,” says Pat Borrege, a Salesian brother who counsels inmates at Juvenile Hall.

Because of statements each have made that implicates the other, Superior Court Judge J. Michael Byrne has ruled that Dave and Vinny should be tried simultaneously but with separate juries, a rare but not unprecedented arrangement. Cayle’s and Vinny’s accounts of the murders are strenuously challenged by Dave’s attorney, Stephen Romero, as well as by Dave’s friends. It doesn’t sound like the Dave they know, friends say. “It’s totally contrary to the nature of the boy,” says Sandie Welles. Job Carder says that at a pretrial hearing he mouthed the words, “Did you do it?” and Dave replied vehemently that he hadn’t. “He looked scared and like he was telling the truth,” Job said.

Romero, who has questioned Cayle’s professed innocence, promises “fireworks” at the trial, “a lot of things coming out that haven’t been divulged before.” The lawyer discounts a statement Dave gave police after his arrest, including an assertion that he had taken LSD that night, as having been tricked out of him by police. “It wasn’t a detailed admission or a description, but an acquiescence to statements made by (Detective Michael) Korpal,” says Romero, who maintains Dave “never discharged the weapon.” Romero also says his client was denied legal representation until he was returned to California two days after his arrest in Oregon. Vinny’s attorney, Rickard Santwier, would not discuss the case.

At pretrial hearings, the victims’ families sit in a tight group, some of the women weeping at the sight, 15 or 20 feet away, of the two defendants.

“I haven’t been doing too well,” says Don Palermo, one of the few who would comment. “I had a pacemaker put in. You don’t know the feeling until you’ve experienced it yourself. It’s so devastating.”

Dave’s and Vinny’s mothers have been there, too, worried-looking women with thoughtful, clench-jawed expressions. Dave’s mother, Pam Discala, says only, “It’s hard, but we’re strong people.”

Joining Discala sometimes are Job Carder, Dave’s ex-girlfriend Michelle Sandford and her younger sister, Marci. Both girls are willowy blondes with long, fashionably crinkled hair. They are part of a kind of support team for Dave, a group of four or five girls who talk to him regularly on the telephone. (“We have a bond,” says one, “an impermeable bond.”)

Nobody talks to Vinny except his mother, Faye Hebrock. She is mortified by the murder charges against her son, says the family friend. “In her eyes, Vinny’s a public figure of ridicule.”

Linda Macaulay and Michael Koss still live in the hillside house with the expansive views. Kathy’s tan Ford Bronco, once a familiar a sight on the streets of South Pasadena, sits in the garage. It still displays a bumper sticker, put there by Kathy, with the title of an old Rolling Stones song: “Let’s Spend the Night Together.”