Family has faith Jenner slayings will be solved

Three years ago this week, Jason Allen, 26, and his fiancee, Lindsay Cutshall, 22, spread sleeping bags on the sand of a secluded cove that locals refer to as Driftwood or Fish Head Beach.

The young Ohio couple also placed a Bible near where they slept, and where ultimately they died, when someone emerged from the darkness and shot each of them once in the head.

In the aftermath of the killings, the disturbing images of demons drawn on the driftwood, combined with the couple’s openly devout religious beliefs, helped fuel speculation that they were targeted for those convictions.

The source of the drawings, however, was not an avowed Satan worshiper but a 22-year-old Petaluma man whose identity has never been publicly revealed.

Jeff Winkler, a homeless artist who is well known at Petaluma’s Phoenix Theater, said he drew the images using a paint pen during an outing at the beach about two months before the slayings.

“I don’t dislike Christians,” he said. “I’m not Christian myself, but I’m definitely not Satanic. I draw all sorts of faces.”

Nevertheless, the dark images he created helped fuel the notion that Cutshall and Allen had unwittingly wandered into an evil lair.

Winkler said investigators interviewed him and ruled him out as a suspect, but that hasn’t diminished Chris Cutshall’s belief that his daughter was the victim of religious intolerance.

“Whether the person was tied to a Satanist organization, I don’t know,” said Cutshall, a pastor in Ohio. “But I believe the evil one was behind this and was ultimately responsible for taking our kids because they were Christians.”

Indeed, religion continues to play a powerful role in the as-yet unsolved case.

Within the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department, the case has led to something of a religious awakening among some investigators and a re-affirming of faith for others.

That includes Steve Freitas, who was the lead investigator on the case before taking over as Windsor’s police chief in 2005.

Freitas said he found God on his way to becoming a close, personal friend of the Cutshalls.

“This situation is what brought me to the Lord,” Freitas told an Ohio newspaper in 2006. “We’ve become close friends with the Cutshalls. We’re basically family at this time — spiritual families.”

The article noted that Chris Cutshall and Freitas vacationed together, including a trip to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton. Freitas also spent several days with the Cutshalls at their home near Fresno, Ohio.

Freitas, who is a lieutenant with the sheriff’s department, referred questions about his religious conversion to the agency.

In an e-mail, Capt. Dave Edmonds said the department would not comment on “employees’ private lives.”

Chris Cutshall said Tuesday that the relationship his family has developed with several detectives is not motivated by a desire for more attention to the case.

“Steve has become a very dear friend and brother in Christ,” Cutshall said. “I’m very glad that he is my friend. We love his family very much, and we’re thankful for the relationship God has given us.”

The Cutshalls are spending this week with the Allen family in Michigan, in what has become an annual gathering to mark the anniversary of their children’s deaths.

In the years since the Jenner deaths, Sonoma County detectives have looked for possible links with other cases, particularly a half-dozen unsolved slayings of couples in remote locations from the Pacific Northwest to Arizona.

Their known list of interviews includes a Wisconsin drifter, a Bodega Bay surf shop owner, a former counselor at the Christian whitewater rafting camp where Cutshall and Allen worked that summer, and Winkler, who said he voluntarily called detectives when his mother spotted the drawings in the media.

Winkler said he was interviewed at the sheriff’s department and asked to do some drawings. He said detectives told him not to contact the media because they didn’t want people to know that they had located the source of the drawings, which they hoped would spark interest in the case.

Several months later, Winkler’s mother, Deborah, said she was upset when “America’s Most Wanted” aired a segment on the case that still emphasized the drawings as being part of some satanic ritual, and she phoned the Sheriff’s Office to complain.

She said she was told that investigators were aware of the misinformation but were hoping to keep the case alive.

Her son said he also had questions about the process. “They were kind of misleading people, but I guess they had nothing else for people to call in about,” Winkler said. “I didn’t really care.”

Sheriff’s Lt. Rob Giordano did not return calls Tuesday seeking comment.

Detectives in the past have said they are open to all possibilities and have not focused on any one theory. However, the unsolved slayings of a young couple on a Canadian beach 35 years ago has drawn interest for its similarity to the Jenner case.

On the evening of June 22, 1972, Ann Durrant, a 20-year-old Canadian, and Leif Carlsson, 19, an exchange student from Sweden, set up camp on a remote beach near Tofino, on West Vancouver Island.

Police said that after the couple went to sleep, a 25-year-old Vietnam-era draft dodger named Joseph Henry Burgess snuck out from the bushes and shot each one in the head with a .22-caliber rifle.

Burgess, who was described by police as a religious fanatic, did not approve of pre-marital sex and had told a witness that the young couple’s behavior bothered him.

He disappeared after the slayings and was never found. Assuming he’s still alive, he would have been 57 at the time Cutshall and Allen were killed.

Is it possible that Burgess is responsible? If so, he may have made some false assumptions.

The young couple’s families say Cutshall and Allen had taken vows of chastity until their marriage, which was scheduled three weeks after they were to leave California.

Investigators say the couple slept in separate sleeping bags on the beach.

Chris Cutshall said he still has hope the case will be solved.

“We believe at this point that it won’t be what man does, but what God does,” he said. “He’s going to give us the break we need, and it clearly will be divine.”

You can reach Staff Writer Derek J. Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com.