2 Years Later, Husband Still Suspect in Slaying

As his wife’s strangled body lay unclaimed in a San Diego County morgue, Daniel Rodrick began dismantling their life together. He bought a new bedroom mattress. He sold their car. Within weeks, he pawned her jewelry, sold her treasured antiques, took down her pictures. He moved.

It’s been two years since Carolyn Rodrick’s slaying. And while her husband has succeeded in shedding his past life with her, he admits he’s been less successful in shaking the suspicions that continue to swirl around him, doubts that have cost him family and friends and earned him a prominent defense attorney.

“I know I’m their main suspect, it’s me,” Rodrick said during a recent interview at his new home. “But that is because they have nothing. No evidence. . . . Nothing. Which makes me their obvious choice.”

Rodrick, 39, concedes that his marriage was not idyllic but insists he never harmed his wife. “There’s no history of violence or fighting in 17 years,” he said of his marriage.

He said police have made his life miserable, insinuating his guilt to friends and family, but doing little else to find the person responsible for his wife’s death.

Rodrick told authorities his wife disappeared from the couple’s Irvine home in the middle of the night on July 21, 1995. Hours later, her corpse was found alongside a desolate two-lane road near Temecula but would not be identified for 17 days.

Investigators acknowledge that the more than two weeks that Carolyn Rodrick, 35, spent in the morgue as a “Jane Doe” set back their investigation. It was the result of a communications glitch that kept authorities from connecting the two cases sooner.

Rodrick accuses police of conducting a shoddy investigation, citing the morgue mix-up.

“Why did it take so long? What were they doing?” he said. “This was just another body to them.”

In the 24 months since, detectives said they’ve been as baffled by the unsolved murder as they are by Daniel Rodrick’s response to it. Particularly troubling, they said, is his refusal to allow them to talk to his 16-year-old son or 12-year-old daughter--who were at home the night their mother disappeared.

Daniel Rodrick said his defense attorney, James Riddet, calls police regularly on his behalf, but detectives contend they have yet to hear from either for an update on the case.

“Relatives do not typically give up on the murder of a loved one,” said San Diego County Sheriff’s Det. Rick Scully, adding that Rodrick has not been ruled out as a suspect. “It’s perplexing.”

Rodrick refused to discuss his wife’s death in detail, referring most questions to his attorney, who declined comment.

On the anniversary of her death, Carolyn Rodrick’s friends and relatives said they still hold out hope her killer will be caught. The victim’s sister, Janet Vanzyl, said her family’s only comfort is knowing what “a paranoid life” the killer must be leading.

“It’s not enough, but it’s something,” said Vanzyl, speaking from her home in South Africa.

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They married young. She was 19 and called off the wedding at least once before the ceremony took place in front of a few relatives in South Africa in 1979. Two years later, they moved to the United States, settling in Irvine.

Their marriage was tumultuous. They fought loudly and often. He accused her of infidelities. The petite blond responded with insults, often in front of their friends.

“She’d like to say stuff like, ‘Oh, be a man,’ which didn’t seem to help things,” said Jan Cleary, a former neighbor.

Added Vanzyl: “My sister . . . made up for her size with her mouth. No one will dispute that.”

Friends recall Carolyn Rodrick as a free-spirit, once riding her Arabian gelding named Prancer up to the drive-in window of a fast-food restaurant. She was described by supervisors at the Great Western Bank in Fashion Island as bringing “fun to the workplace.”

She adored her children. Not long before her death, she spent the night in the hospital with her daughter, who had just had her tonsils removed.

“I am most proud of my kids,” she wrote in a work survey. “They set goals and reach them.”

Carolyn Rodrick was also unhappy. Friends said she often spoke of financial troubles and complained about her marriage.

In a note written to her mother a year before her slaying, Carolyn Rodrick admitted she and her husband were “never suited.” On flowered stationery, in girlish handwriting, she wrote she had to fight the urge to “slap his face” every time she saw him.

“I do not see a way out. . . . I hate waking up and facing each day,” she wrote.

To this day, friends said they never believed she would abandon her children, vanishing in the middle of the night without her house keys, a change of clothes, her purse or wallet.

“She was miserable, she conveyed that to us,” said Ginger Casey, another bank employee. “But none of us really expected she would leave those kids.”

Carolyn Rodrick was wearing jeans, a black, long-sleeved shirt, white shoes and two silver rings on the night of her death. With no identification, she offered few clues to those who found her, discarded “like a piece of trash,” Scully said.

Her body had rolled 20 feet down an embankment, where it joined soggy garbage and rusted furniture at the illegal dumping ground.

Daniel Rodrick would later tell police that he woke up that morning, found his wife gone and suspected she had left him. Shortly after 9 a.m., he called the bank to ask about her.

Co-workers said they became alarmed and asked him to call police. He said he wanted to give her more time to show up, so a bank manager called police instead.

Officers were waiting for Rodrick when he returned home that afternoon. He was able to identify what she might have been wearing by figuring out what was missing from her side of the walk-in closet, police said.

On Aug. 10, police brought Rodrick to the station and told him his wife’s body had been found. Detectives searched Rodrick’s home but said they didn’t find much. By then, Rodrick had gotten rid of the couple’s old mattress, their Mercedes and some of his wife’s personal belongings--items authorities said they would liked to have inspected.

“We had zip,” Scully recalled.

Daniel Rodrick said he wants only to go about raising his children. He bristled at the notion that his behavior has been unusual. He said he is only doing what police told him.

“They told me to get a lawyer and so I do, and now that’s suspicious,” he said. “I have nothing to hide and I never have. You try to raise two kids after all that has happened. It’s not easy. I just want to move on with my life.”