Officials make arrest in 19-year-old murders

For 19 years, the brutal murders went unsolved. And for most of that time, they were nothing more than a file folder in a drawer, an almost forgotten case growing colder by the year.

On April 19, 1987 -- Easter Sunday -- the bodies of George and Edna Darrow were discovered in their Huntington Park home. The elderly couple -- he was 78, she was 73 -- had been stabbed to death several days earlier. They were found when concerned neighbors alerted police that the pair hadn’t been seen for several days.

A 21-year-old handyman and gardener named Donald Eugene Phillips was an immediate suspect, primarily because he had been spending more money than he usually had in the immediate aftermath of the killings. But investigators hadn’t been able to put together enough evidence to arrest him.

And so the case languished. Then, on Thursday, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced that Phillips, who was living in Palmdale, had been arrested on suspicion of killing the Darrows.

Capt. Ray Peavy of the department’s Homicide Bureau gave credit for the arrest to Det. Steve Davis, who picked up the file several months ago, read through it and decided there might be a chance of success if he opened it again.

“I thought there might be a real possibility of doing something with it,” Davis said. “We just started interviewing people that we interviewed back then, plus anyone else who came to light, people who had known [Phillips] back then.”

Davis also went back to recheck a number of leads from the original investigation. But over the years, many witnesses had moved, some of them out of state, and a lot of time was spent simply tracking them down.

“It was a lot of shoe leather,” said Davis, who has been a homicide detective for 17 years.

Investigators are somewhat reluctant to detail what they found, fearing that revealing too much information could jeopardize the case. But what Peavy and Davis did say was that Edna Darrow was known throughout the neighborhood for almost always having large sums of cash on hand -- hence a motive for robbery and murder. The couple’s daughter, Edna Hare of San Diego, said her parents kept cash on hand because they had bills to pay but neither of them drove.

“When they got the pension check and the Social Security check, they would walk down to the grocery store and cash it,” Hare said. “It was not uncommon at all for her to carry money around in an envelope. She paid cash for everything.”

When Davis started knocking on doors, he found people were much more forthcoming than they had been in the immediate aftermath of the murders.

“It’s like the passage of time removes you from the moment,” he said. “It takes away the paranoia of what might happen to themselves and their family. Also, in the instant, there is a lot of fear. With the passage of time, the severity of what happened tends to wear off and I would say that’s what happened in this case.”

He said new information from witnesses -- including some who remembered Phillips talking about the murders over the years -- coupled with forensic work on the murder knife, justified the arrest.

Phillips was tracked to Palmdale, where Davis said he was living by himself, making a living doing construction work.

“He was pretty much a drifter kind of guy,” he said. “He doesn’t really have roots.”

Davis said there wasn’t any defining moment, as a movie script might call for, when the last piece of the puzzle fell into place. Rather, he said, it was a compilation of facts that was enough to build a circumstantial case against Phillips.

“Any time you have a circumstantial case, it’s never bingo,” he said. “It’s a long, involved process and you continue to find as much evidence as you can.”

For her part, Hare describes her first call from Davis, telling her the case was being reopened, as an unexpected blessing.

“I’m ecstatic they were finally able to do something about it,” she said. “My parents weren’t hurting anyone. They were just elderly, two old people with a dog and cats and this monster comes along and murders them.

“I’m so delighted Det. Davis picked this case to reopen,” she said. “All I could say was ‘Thank you, God.’ After all these years I didn’t think there was a prayer anything would happen, and that seemed so unjust.”

michael.kennedy@latimes.com