Carolands mansion murder: Survivor Laurie McKenna speaks, 20 years later

Archived article / From the Mercury News, Sept. 24, 2006:

BOGART, Ga. — It is hard to detect Laurie VanLandingham’s scars.



There are faint markings from the old knife wounds on both hands and wrists, scarcely noticeable unless she points them out. There is a bump of sorts on the top of her scalp, but only her hairdresser pays it any attention. The ring finger on her left hand is disfigured, stuck crooked at almost 90 degrees so she must wear her wedding band on her right hand. But the finger doesn’t give anything away. She just explains to the curious that she injured it in an “accident.”

Pretty and blond, she still looks like the California girl she once was. She doesn’t seem to have aged from her old pictures, the ones that ran in Bay Area newspapers 20 years ago with the miraculous tale of her escape from death.

Then there are the scars on the inside, equally hard to detect. They are scars that should ransack the soul. But she doesn’t let them. She’s built a life in this small Southern town where friends and neighbors know nothing of her past.

Here, they don’t know about the old Carolands mansion in Hillsborough. The killer, David Allen Raley. Her dead friend, Jeanine. They don’t know how she climbed out of that steep, remote ravine on her elbows, her hands and body and skull bloody from knife wounds and blows from a hammer. They don’t realize Laurie VanLandingham is the rarest of people: a survivor of the crime of murder.

She’s a mom and she’s married to a former San Francisco Giants pitcher, William VanLandingham. She lives in a large house that she and her husband remodeled. She runs a small shop in a strip mall that sells children’s clothes and toys. There are no signs of torment, and she is intensely proud of that.

“I look OK, my life is good, ” Laurie says now, curled up on a chair in her living room, safe from the stifling summer heat. “But I kind of feel like I made that part. I decided to make my life better. I could have wallowed.”

21 years ago

The villain in her life is drawing close to execution, and the memories are flooding back.

Laurie has been forced to relive them before, spending days in courtrooms under questioning from lawyers.

But this summer, at a far different point in her life, she shared her recollections with the Mercury News in a way she has never before done publicly.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t tremble with anger. She just remembered, with a seemingly unshakable calm.

She was Laurie McKenna back then.

On Feb. 2, 1985, McKenna, 17, and her friend 16-year-old Jeanine Grinsell set out for a typical teenager’s day driving around the Peninsula. It was a sunny Saturday morning. Grinsell, fresh off getting her driver’s license, wanted to tour one of the old mansions of Hillsborough. McKenna, a Burlingame High School senior, was game.

The two girls chose Carolands, an abandoned 100-room chateau built around 1915 by the heiress to the Pullman family’s railroad sleeping car fortune. It was a popular spot for local teens.

“We were two stupid girls, ” Laurie says matter-of-factly. “We literally joked about two girls caught in mansion, and we went in anyway. We didn’t understand the seriousness.”

On that particular day, David Raley, a pale, pudgy, 23-year-old private security guard, was standing watch over Carolands. He was known to give tours to curious visitors, especially young girls. He readily opened the doors to McKenna and Grinsell.

There isn’t much dispute about what happened over the next 12 hours. Raley confirmed most of the disturbing details when he was arrested. And McKenna testified to make sure the mansion’s walls didn’t lock away the secrets of that frightening day.

After giving the girls a tour of the mansion, Raley used a ruse to lure them into a vault, claiming he heard police dogs. He told McKenna and Grinsell they’d be in trouble if police caught them inside the mansion. To this day, Laurie regrets that moment in time, a moment they might have escaped and saved Jeanine.

“If we’d have just not believed his ‘dogs are coming’ thing, ” she says, rolling her eyes. “That was ridiculous.”

Raley toyed with the girls from that point. He refused to let them out of the vault unless they removed their clothes. When they disrobed to their underwear, he handcuffed them at knifepoint, tying McKenna to a bench while he led Jeanine away. Laurie could only listen.

“I had no clue what was going on, ” she recalls. “I was so clueless, even after hearing Jeanine screaming. I really thought we were getting out.”

Later, Raley returned with Grinsell and then led McKenna away, releasing her from the handcuffs. He tried to get her to perform sexual acts. He made her fondle him. The ordeal was only beginning.

‘I’m dead’

Convicted killers who wind up on death row rarely leave survivors. In most cases, only the families of the victims are left to mourn and remember. Raley’s crime should have been no different.

Laurie McKenna wouldn’t let it happen.

After Raley took time alone with each girl, the violence began. He stabbed Grinsell dozens of times. He stabbed McKenna 35 times, hitting her over the head with a hammer handle when she tried to resist. She fended him off with her hands and arms, which probably saved her life. As Raley kept pumping the knife at her, McKenna did not believe she would last.

“When you get stabbed, you just think, ‘I’m dead, ‘ ” she says now. “All I could think about was my poor mother. I kind of waited for the lights to go out.”

Raley tossed Grinsell into the trunk of his 1973 Plymouth, her hands bound with rope, and then wrapped McKenna in a carpet and locked her in alongside her wounded friend. They remained there for hours as he drove to his house in South San Jose. Finally he let them out to stretch their legs, providing them with blankets when they complained of the cold.

Raley’s lawyers suggested during the trial that these were signs of compassion, that he was “nice” to them. Laurie’s voice rises a bit when reminded of the claim. “Uh, I was there, ” she says with a wave of her hand. “That is definitely not true.”

But when asked why the girls didn’t scream or run when they could have, she looks almost confused. Then, slowly, she tries to articulate what runs through the mind of a frightened captive.

“You can’t understand how the whole world truly turns upside down, ” she says.

Soon, they were tossed back into the trunk. Laurie remembers craving water — to drink, to cleanse herself. Raley warned that if they screamed, his friend “Bob” would have to kill them. He then played Monopoly with his sister. Around midnight, he drove them to a remote area off Silver Creek Road and dumped them down a steep ravine, where they came to rest in a cold creekbed.

The girls didn’t dare move, worried that Raley was still lurking at the top of the ravine. All night, they didn’t hear a car go by. They faded in and out of sleep.

It started to drizzle, and that’s when Laurie says she finally began to cry.

Crawl to safety

The area where Raley left McKenna and Grinsell to die isn’t the same remote spot anymore. Housing developments and Silver Creek Country Club’s golf course surround the site now, and Silver Creek Road dead-ends at a parking lot nearby. A vestige of the old road is now a trail that snakes around the ravine and creek where McKenna climbed to safety.

With her hands useless, Laurie says she “commando crawled” on her elbows to the top of the ravine when the sun came up that morning. There she just sat by the road, her hair caked with blood. Grinsell screamed from the ravine below. Two men in a pickup stopped to help. They called for an ambulance.

But when they tried to comfort McKenna with a hug, she recoiled. She did not want to be touched.

McKenna was put in an ambulance. She remained in the hospital for days, heavily sedated on painkillers, and her hands and wrists required surgery. But she soon began the process of rebuilding her life.

Grinsell wasn’t so lucky. She died on an operating table in the emergency room. A doctor later said a puncture wound in her neck may be have been the fatal blow.

“The fact of the matter is, she’s not here. That’s the most important thing that most people forget, ” Laurie says. “Should have got married, had kids, done it all.”

Her voice trails off.

Time to heal

Raley was sentenced to death in 1988. A Santa Clara County jury had found him guilty of murdering Grinsell and attempting to murder McKenna. That jury deadlocked on whether he deserved to die, but prosecutors pushed for the death penalty at a retrial and a second jury recommended he be executed for his crimes. McKenna had been the star witness. Composed and unwavering on the witness stand, she did what she could to get justice for Grinsell.

She always knew it would be many years before Raley might be executed. So she tried to move on, at least when she wasn’t being called to court. It was hard. Burlingame High suggested it might be best if she didn’t return to school to finish the last few months of her senior year, given the notoriety surrounding the case and the stress. She agreed but did attend her high school graduation.

Mostly, she just healed.

Laurie says now that it wasn’t until she reached her 20s that her ordeal started to claw at her insides. Until then, she just tried to have fun. She lived near the ocean in Santa Barbara. She moved to Lake Tahoe for several years, opening a snowboarding shop in Squaw Valley. She later got her own apartment in San Francisco. She didn’t think twice about living alone, even though her friends thought she was crazy for doing so.

She’d won a $1.5 million settlement from the security firm that hired Raley, so she was financially secure. But then, a half-dozen years after the murder, the anxiety attacks suddenly hit. She couldn’t function. She became panicky. But she knew precisely why, and what to do.

“It took a long time for it to become really real for me, ” she says. “It was real clear where I had to go with it.”

Her first therapist dozed off when she told her story. Her second therapist, however, understood. She told Laurie the first therapist simply couldn’t deal with the disturbing origins of her emotional troubles.

There was no magic in the sessions, but they were effective. “She didn’t talk much, ” Laurie says. “She made me do everything.”

Eventually, the therapist told her she’d “graduated” and that she didn’t need to come back anymore.

“Some people have lives, ” she says. “It’s just part of my life. I got dealt maybe one bad card, but I think everybody at some point gets dealt one bad card. Mine was just a little weirder than most.”

Sharing her story

The years passed, as they invariably do in California’s death-penalty system, and Laurie kept moving on.

Within her close circle of friends and family, she could always share and remember her thoughts on what happened that grim winter day in 1985. She sometimes even told bad jokes about the ordeal to leaven the mood.

While living in San Francisco, she met her future husband, William VanLandingham, then in the minor leagues and on his way to pitching for the Giants. Eventually, she had to tell him what happened, why she had tiny scars on her hands, why her finger was mangled.

He couldn’t make it through the entire account before cutting her off.

“He can’t bear it, ” she says now.

William believes his wife has dealt with her demons well, though it’s hardest in February when she’s reminded of Jeanine.

“It’s kind of in the past, ” William says. “We don’t even talk about it. I don’t think she wants to talk about it at all.”

Nine years ago, with their first child on the way, the couple moved to Bogart, a quiet, muggy suburb of Athens, home to the University of Georgia. William — who pitched for the Giants from 1994-97 — was winding down his baseball career, preparing to become a landscape architect. They picked an old Victorian a mile or so down a two-lane country road, where all the homes were separated by trees and acres of land.

When they first looked at the house, it was deserted and decrepit. They had to climb through broken windows to get inside. If anybody should have been afraid of a house like that, a place where things might go bump in the night, it should have been Laurie VanLandingham.

But Laurie was more concerned about the home’s ragged condition. William loved the place, so they moved in and overhauled it. They have a cozy, spacious front porch that overlooks their long driveway. There’s a basketball hoop outside. Daisy, their cocker spaniel mix, greets visitors by peeing on the pavement as soon as she’s petted. Laurie’s mother, Sally, moved from the Bay Area to live nearby.

The folks of Bogart know nothing about what happened to Laurie McKenna 21 years ago. The VanLandinghams moved far from the Bay Area not to escape, but because William wanted to return to his Southern roots. But Laurie concedes the distance from her past has been a bonus.

“It’s not something I want to hide, but yet it’s not something I want everybody to know, ” she says. Then she adds with a smile that the subject is not exactly a “conversation starter.”

“It’s so scary to other people, ” she says. “It’s not scary to me.”

Ready for closure

The end could be drawing near for Raley, and that has made it tougher to push the memories away. It has made everything tougher.

Several years ago, Laurie had to return to San Jose to testify again as part of Raley’s final round of appeals in federal court. He lost that round. And this spring, he failed in what was likely his last, best hope of avoiding execution when a federal appeals court unanimously upheld his death sentence.

Ordinarily, Raley would run out of legal options in the coming months, but his case could be prolonged a bit because California’s executions are on hold while a judge considers a challenge to the state’s lethal-injection method. Whenever executions resume, Raley will be near the front of the line among the state’s 650 condemned inmates waiting to be escorted to San Quentin’s death chamber. He is the first death row inmate in line from Santa Clara County.

Laurie is not a fervent death-penalty supporter, but she believes Raley deserves to die. She says she can’t even understand why he’d want to spend his life in prison.

But Laurie does not feel the way families and friends of murder victims often do. Forced to wait decades for an execution date, those survivors typically relish the end, the closure, the chance to speak of justice.

Laurie is ready for closure, but her feelings are tempered. She has no intention of attending Raley’s execution, finding the idea morbid.

“I don’t have that kind of anger, ” she says. “It’s part of moving forward. I feel like I’ve had justice, I’ve lived my life, he’s out of my hair.”

Just one aspect of the waiting bothers her. Raley’s lawyers have tried to forestall execution with what has become their central argument: The jury never heard enough about his troubled, tortured childhood to evaluate fairly whether he should live or die.

The argument leaves Laurie shaking her head.

“I just don’t know how that plays into what he did to us, ” she says. “That’s like I could turn around and kill somebody and say, ‘This guy did this to me, sorry.’ It doesn’t make sense.”

Putting it behind her

So many things have happened since she climbed out of that ravine.

Jeanine’s mother has died. Raley has outlived the judge who sentenced him to die, as well as his original trial lawyer. Carolands has gone from a curiosity, surrounded by weeds and guarded by the likes of Raley, to a gated, manicured, renovated jewel overlooking San Francisco. It has sparkling fountains. They held a charity luncheon and fashion show there last year.

Laurie is 39 now. She’s picked up a hint of a Southern accent. She understands that venturing into that old mansion changed her life. But she takes pride in how she’s resisted letting that day destroy her.

“Most victims are not here, they are dead, ” she says. “I’ve definitely been through an interesting life. I don’t know if I equate that with a survivor. I’ve done a good job putting it behind me.”

More than anything, faced with the prospect of public attention on Raley’s execution, she worries about her daughters, now 8 and 6 years old. She really doesn’t want to tell them, at least until they are adults.

“I don’t ever want to have to tell them, to be honest with you, ” she says. “At the same time, I feel like I’m hiding something. I don’t want to be a liar.”

For now, it is not too difficult for Laurie to keep her story hidden from her daughters. She does not need to deceive.

They don’t know what their mom endured or how she lost her friend.

They can’t see the scars.



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24 HOURS OF HORROR, TRAGEDY AND SURVIVAL

Here is the sequence of events leading to the 1985 death of Jeanine Grinsell. The killer, David Allen Raley, is now on death row. Laurie McKenna VanLandingham, who survived Raley’s assault, recently described the incident and her life since then to the Mercury News.

Feb. 2, 1985

1) Late morning. Laurie McKenna, 17, and Jeanine Grinsell, 16, took a tour of the Carolands mansion in Hillsborough with David Allen Raley, the mansion’s security guard. After the tour, Raley persuaded the girls to hide in a basement vault, claiming he heard police dogs.

About noon, Raley locked them in the vault. Over the next several hours, he beat and stabbed them dozens of times. Laurie was asked to fondle Raley. It is unknown what happened when Raley and Jeanine were alone.

2) Around 5:15 p.m., at the end of Raley’s shift, he put the girls in the trunk of his car. Jeanine was bound with rope, and Laurie was wrapped in a carpet. Raley drove them to his house in South San Jose. Raley let them out to stretch their legs, even providing them with blankets when they complained of the cold. But he also beat them again and locked them back in the trunk.

Later, he watched television with his sister and played Monopoly until about 11 p.m.

FEB. 3

3) Laurie testified that at some point during the night the car began moving. Raley drove the girls to a ravine off Silver Creek Road and dumped their bodies.

Around 8:30 a.m., Laurie climbed to the side of the road. Two men in a pickup stopped to rescue the girls. They were both rushed to the hospital.

11:35 a.m., Jeanine Grinsell died in the operating room.

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