A parked car blocked the dirt road to the burning hilltop home of Dr. Victor Ohta. Leaving his pickup truck, Soquel, Calif., Assistant Fire Chief Ernest Negro ran to the house to find "the roof was really going." As the local fire trucks screamed up to the main entrance, Negro looked and found that it also was blocked by Dr. Ohta's maroon Rolls-Royce. "I felt awfully funny for a second," Negro recalls. "Somebody seemed determined to prevent anybody from getting near the fire. If I knew then what I know now, I would have gotten out fast."
What Negro and the other firemen soon discovered was the most gruesome mass murder in the U.S. since the Tate slayings. In the lagoon-shaped swimming pool in front of the $250,000 house were the bodies of Victor Ohta, 46. his wife Virginia, 43, their sons, Derrick, 12, and Taggart, 11, and the doctor's secretary, Dorothy Cadwallader, 38. Ohta, one of California's most prominent eye surgeons, had been shot twice in the back and once under the arm. The others had been shot in the head, and all were bound with their hands in front of them with the bright silk scarves and ties of which Dr. Ohta was so fond.
Police quickly ruled out robbery as a motive. The Ohtas were wearing expensive jewelry, and in Dr. Ohta's bedroom they found a valuable tape recorder, cameras and more jewelry. There was no sign of a struggle, and all the bodies were neatly dressed. Stacks of kindling were also discovered in the house, indicating that the fire had been deliberately set by the killer to attract attention. Said Kenneth Pittenger, deputy sheriff of Santa Cruz County, where Soquel is located: "It was like an execution."
Grisly Specter. Substantiating that theory, police found a typewritten, misspelled note under the windshield wiper of Dr. Ohta's Rolls-Royce. "Hallowween 1970," it read. "Today World War III will begin as brought to you by the people of the free universe. From this day forward anyone and/or company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the people of the free universe." The note was signed with fortuneteller tarot-card names, one name to a line: "Knight of Wands, Knight of Cups, Knight of Pentacles, Knight of Swords."
Haunted by the grisly specter of a Charles Manson cult, the frightened residents of the county turned on the numerous hippie communes dotting the surrounding hills. One recalled Mrs. Ohta complaining about the hippies two months earlier. A friend remembered that Dr. Ohta had recently chased uninvited young people away from his swimming pool.
But as the police combed the hills around Santa Cruz visiting communes and cabins, they found the hippies just as frightened by the murders as the townspeople. Said District Attorney Peter Chang: "The investigating officers who went into their communities found tremendous help from the hippie-type people." The big break in the case, leading to the capture of a suspect, came from the hippies.