Three women have tracked down hundreds of pages of old records, spoken to dozens of people and built their own version of a “murder book,” laying out the suspects and evidence in Jan Marsh’s killing.
At most high school reunions, people talk about kids, spouses and jobs. But at a party for 1970s graduates of Lynwood High School, two women on the dance floor were talking homicide.
But the women refuse to give up hope. When you get old, they believe, you want to confess the sins of your youth. Someone, somewhere, must know something.On Nov. 4, 1969, a student walking toward Lynwood High discovered Jan’s body in the side yard of a bungalow on a quiet suburban street. She was face down in the grass, a long-sleeved shirt tied around her nose and mouth.
Sanchez Simmons, 66, works for Orange County’s public health authority. Morales, 68, works for a logistics company in Long Beach. And McKillip, 64, is a researcher who helps adoptees find their birth parents.The women graduated in different years, and their lives had branched off. Sanchez Simmons built a life in Florida, McKillip married a longshoreman in Long Beach, and Morales stayed local.
Cheryl Sanchez Simmons, left, Rose Morales and Tina McKillip bonded over their shared interest in solving the mystery of Jan’s death. “When I first saw her on that lawn, the hair on the back of my neck went up,” Morales said. “I know it was a different time, but really? You’re going to put the body of a teenage girl on the front page?”
With the world all but shut down in spring 2020, the women started spending hours together on Zoom in their pajamas, drinking wine and talking over the case. They also compared findings in a Facebook chat called “the Snoop Sisters,” named for the 1970s television show about two sleuths of a certain age.
“You could clearly see that there was something strange going on at home,” said classmate Johanna Van Der Linde-Rosales, 68, in an interview with The Times. “Jan didn’t really talk in detail about it, but one could put two and two together.” She attended a packed Halloween party. On a Sunday night, her aunt and uncle took her to the fall carnival in a downtown park, mobbed with kids eating popcorn and riding the Tilt-O-Whirl. She was seen at a pizza parlor Monday night. Her body was found Tuesday morning.
“Dear Mr. Hefley, I understand that you used to be a police officer around 1973 in Lynwood, CA,” Sanchez Simmons wrote in a Facebook message. “I am doing research into a murder that you may have investigated.”Hefley had been a rookie officer when Jan was killed and oversaw her cold case as a detective in the mid-1970s. He had quit policing years earlier and left California. But he told Sanchez Simmons that he might still have some Lynwood files in his attic.
Few came up in Google searches. Many were too old — or had been dead too long — to leave a digital footprint. So the women worked the case the old-fashioned way: Digging through old records and calling the former bad boys of Lynwood, now in their 60s and 70s.— One man told amateur sleuth Rose Morales
The women narrowed in on a 17-year-old boy named Kenneth Labron Evans. According to police, Evans walked into Mr. B’s Liquor Store in Compton three days after Jan was found dead, bought two Cokes and told the clerk that someone had “strangled her with a T-shirt.” The next morning, Evans told Hefley he couldn’t remember anything, according to a summary of the interrogation. He added: “I sure wish I hadn’t ate all that dope when I was young.”Another suspect, Hefley said, was an employee for a local utility company, a man in his early 20s who ran in the same circles as Jan and left town shortly after her death.
The women had long thought that Lynwood police hadn’t tried very hard to solve Jan’s case. Maybe a cop wanted to protect an informant swept up in a slaying. Or maybe Jan’s death was just seen as the kind of thing that happened to a runaway teenager who partied with men. “I think he thought we were old ladies who were going to make a bit of a fuss, and then we were going to go away,” Sanchez Simmons said.
The women had hoped a detective would start investigating Jan’s case after their meeting. But no one did. Sanchez Simmons also built a relationship with Jan’s half-sister, Patricia Podolak. She sent a Christmas card, a photo of fresh flowers on Jan’s grave and a message that her sister had not been forgotten.
She went back again and again to a hazy memory from around the time of Jan’s death. She sat in the back seat of the family car as her mom talked to a tall young man with dark hair and stitches in the back of his head.“I remember him saying to my mom that he had tried to stop them, and it didn’t work,” Podolak said.
They decided not to. They were still hopeful the Sheriff’s Department would launch a new investigation, and wary of tainting any criminal proceedings. Lawton said in a matter-of-fact tone that she had tried to suppress her grief over her eldest child’s death. Jan was the love of her life, she said. But she was working full time, with four other children to look after.
McKillip confirmed that two of their suspects had died: Montgomery in 1993, Evans in 2012. She also learned that Meyers had died in Arizona in 2022. The Sheriff’s Department had not contacted him. McKillip said she deeply regretted not acting on her impulse to drive there, interview him and dig through his trash.Lawton died in 2022. Until her death, she had saved a pair of Jan’s jeans, covered in doodles in blue and black ink.
They couldn’t help wondering whether other cold cases had missing evidence boxes, too. Frustrated and disappointed, the women sent tart letters to the five Los Angeles County supervisors, then-Sheriff Alex Villanueva and Dist. Atty. George Gascón.
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