July 13, 2004
El Toro Memorial Park
The 25-foot iron gate at the entrance to the old cemetery was locked. I hadn’t counted on that. I had always planned to arrive early, to be the first one there, so I could find the ideal spot to watch the day’s drama unfold.
But I was too early. Apparently, even the dead kept business hours. That’s how I ended up parked outside a graveyard sipping convenience store coffee and watching the sun rise over the headstones.
Waiting wasn’t a problem. I was used to waiting. I’d been waiting for such a day for 30 years. And in a quest for the truth, what’s a couple more hours? Soon enough a crowd of investigators – county prosecutors, homicide detectives and forensics experts – would descend on a patch of grass inside that covered the unmarked grave of a young woman buried in 1974.
No one had claimed her body at the time of her death, an apparent suicide by hanging. No one seemed to care. The coroner’s notes said next of kin “unknown.” She left a battered old Rambler sedan, a small checking account, a Montgomery Ward credit card and a purse with eight $1 bills. Orange County paid for her burial. She got a $98 county-issue wooden casket and a reservation for Space No. 9 in Lot 16 of Block 22b. No tombstone. No name on her grave.
In life, she was Linda Louise Cummings.
She was born in Rockford, Illinois – one of the first baby boomers.
She was 27 years old when her naked body was found 50 years ago on Jan. 25, 1974, hanging from a clothesline cord in the bedroom of her modest and newly rented Santa Ana apartment.
The original coroner’s death certificate said she committed suicide.
There were reasons to doubt that conclusion, and her body had been exhumed once before. Now, a county prosecutor was revisiting the troubling oddities of her death – getting a judge’s formal order to dig up the woman’s remains for one more autopsy searching for evidence of foul play.
So, how did a little-noticed local suicide touch off such a massive law enforcement investigation so many years later? That was on me. I wanted Linda’s case reopened. How her case slipped through the cracks of the justice system had bothered me for 30 years. I lobbied for a new investigation. I gathered evidence to support it – I pushed, shoved and pleaded.
I didn’t know her, never met her. But I knew what happened to her. I knew this was not a suicide. It was one of those cases that haunt people like me – the kind of case that makes you feel like the truth hasn’t been told, that justice hasn’t been done, that evil is winning.
Some people can let go of such things, if only for their own sanity’s sake. After all, every mystery can’t be solved or every wrong righted. But I have a thing for untold truths, for scrappy underdogs and for victims who can’t stand up for themselves.
You see, I’m a newspaper reporter, now retired.
I wrote stories about justice and injustice. My job was covering trials, the legal system and some of the most interesting characters on all sides of the law for The Orange County Register.
Since early in my career I’ve known that the coroner’s suicide verdict was wrong. I’ve known Linda Cummings was a murder victim. I’ve known who killed her – the guy that got away with it. And that really angered me.
•••
The orange of sunrise gave way to blue skies by the time the big gates groaned open for the early shift of employees at El Toro Memorial Park.
The solitude of the hour and my proximity to Linda’s grave triggered a rush of images filed away in my reporter’s notebooks – descriptions of moments I wasn’t there to see but could never forget.
She was the third of four siblings – the 7-year-old twins Lloyd Jr. and Lani, and toddler Stevie.
She was clutching a doll at noon on Christmas Day in 1951 when the bells chimed at St. Mary’s Church as her 37-year-old mother Mary Ellen died of cancer a block away at Rockford Memorial Hospital.
Her father, Lloyd Sr., returned from World War II with service medals earned in Europe and the Pacific but also with an alcohol addiction he couldn’t shake. A hero in war, but a coward at home.
He did the unthinkable: He abandoned his kids. They were left to the not-so-tender mercies of the Illinois foster care system.
Linda’s gritty comeback from such a dismal start had inspired and intrigued me from the day I was introduced to her story.
In her mid-teens, she bought a one-way ticket on a Greyhound bus and traveled across the country to Orange County, to Santa Ana, to the front porch of her remarried father’s home on Chestnut Avenue. Her very pregnant stepmother didn’t know she was coming.
Linda joined an instant stepfamily. Stepsister Colette was 7. Half-brother Dwayne was a toddler. And half-brother Paul – baby Paul – was on the way.
She graduated from Santa Ana High, and found a job as a nurse’s aide at a small local hospital. There were so many stories about her care and kindness for her siblings, friends and her patients. She had a knack for cheering up terminally ill patients with her smile, sincerity and warmth.
By her 20s, Linda was supporting herself, living in her own apartment and driving her own car. She had plans to go to college, to become a registered nurse, to learn about business. She had a family. She had friends at work. She had a future.
Then, suddenly, she was dead. Comeback interrupted. Future canceled. Suicide by hanging, ruled the coroner. Case closed. Or, at least, that’s how it seemed.
Coming Tuesday, part two: Linda Cummings’ remains are exhumed in the search for evidence of a crime.
