On the night of March 13, 1980, 43-year-old attorney Lyman Smith and his wife Charlene were bludgeoned to death in their Ventura home on High Point Drive. Their 12-year-old son from a previous marriage discovered both bodies in the master bedroom several days later. Both victims had been beaten with a log taken from the family fireplace and were found bound with drapery cord; Charlene had been raped. Charlene’s wrists showed a particularly unusual, intricate knot that investigators noted at the scene.

An early suspect, a former business partner of Lyman’s, was arrested but later released for lack of evidence, and the case went cold. In the mid-1990s DNA from the Smith crime scene was linked to a series of other rapes and murders across California attributed to a single offender known as the Original Night Stalker and the East Area Rapist.

Did anyone in the community remember the Smith family or see anything unusual in the High Point Drive neighborhood around March 13, 1980?