On a clear day, the expanse of blue ocean seen from the living room of this San Clemente home seems almost endless. Sometimes, as day gives way to evening, a line of pink stretches like a crayon scrawl in the sky. When night falls, the sea is an abyss of black.

Margrit Ucar fell instantly for the panorama. Even before her husband, Manas, had a chance to see the house, she knew it was where they would raise their two young daughters, twins Margo and Grace.

Twenty years later, the home with the breathtaking view is where investigators say father, mother, daughters and a grandmother killed themselves.

Late last year, after a six-month investigation, detectives closed the case. Some time in early May, the exact date unknown, Margo and Grace, both 21; Fransuhi Kesisoglu, 72; and Manas, 58, committed suicide with Vicodin, sleeping pills and antidepressants, they said. Only Margrit did not have drugs in her system. As Manas lay unconscious from the overdose, she shot him in the chest. Then she put the gun into her mouth and fired.


Investigators are at a loss as to why. So are friends and family. There were no indications of marital troubles or psychological problems. No one was in financial straits and detectives found no evidence of bad health.

“There’s just nothing there,” said Orange County Sheriff’s Det. Dan Salcedo, who has been trying to decipher the case since late May. “I’d like to find something, have something, some possible reason to give the family some closure.

“If there were any problems,” he said, “they certainly kept it to themselves.”

Manas came to the United States in the 1970s from Istanbul, where he was part of a tight-knit community of Armenians who had migrated from Zara, a small town in central Turkey.


Everyone knew of one another. They knew Manas’ father, a tailor who could not find work in the big city, and his brothers. They knew of Manas’ successes as a student. But they knew little else about him, said Antranik Zorayan, a leader of a small, well-organized community of Zara immigrants who now live in Southern California.

Most years, Manas was busy studying. He earned a degree in engineering before moving to the United States for graduate study. Soon after completing his studies, he took a job teaching in the engineering department at Syracuse University.

“He was a very, very calm person,” recalled Bruce Pounder, a former student. “He was very smart and very generous with his time and willingness to help students like me.”

Margrit joined him in Syracuse. She had been raised in Turkey by Kesisoglu, who family members said was her mother. Margrit told friends Kesisoglu was actually an older sister who raised her from a very young age, a claim family members deny.


Margrit was a doctor but couldn’t practice in the United States because she lacked the proper credentials. In 1986, Margo and Grace were born.

The family bought the hilltop estate in San Clemente, where they would be near Margrit’s and Manas’ brothers, and settled into their new lives.

Manas was vivacious; Margrit was quieter. After many years of marriage, the couple still held hands and wrapped arms around each other, friends said. They were religious but not deeply so, going to St. Mary Armenian Church in Costa Mesa only on major holidays, fellow congregants said.

Through Manas’ work as an accident investigator, a lucrative profession that relied on his engineering background, they became close to a Laguna Niguel couple, attorney Glenn Rosen and wife, Peggy, but seemed to have few other acquaintances.


Margrit, especially, seemed to develop a special affinity for the Rosens. She told them about her trouble getting an expected inheritance from the estate of a murdered uncle, who had been the head of an Armenian orthodox church; she blamed the Turkish government for the holdup. She expressed confusion over why a sister-in-law, a new mother diagnosed with brain cancer, had decided not to fight the disease. “Why isn’t she getting whatever treatment she could get?” Peggy recalled Margrit asking. “Why didn’t she have the will to fight this cancer?”

Margrit’s daughters were her life, the Rosens said. Starting in 1992, she operated a jewelry shop named Margaux Grace after the girls at a high-end mall in Newport Beach.

Margo and Grace were inseparable. Through elementary, middle and high school they dressed identically -- in dark-colored turtlenecks with long sleeves and dark pants. Fellow students at Bernice Ayer Middle School said they were quiet, polite, sweet, smart -- and strange. The girls told acquaintances they would be together for the rest of their lives.

Sometimes Manas would join them at school for lunch. In the afternoon, he often arrived 20 minutes before classes let out and waited to pick them up, students recalled.


When the twins graduated from high school and enrolled at UC San Diego, Manas and Margrit followed, renting a house where they all lived together for much of the time during the years the girls were in school. Margrit told friends she wanted to tutor the girls as they prepared for medical school.

The girls distinguished themselves as pre-med students. They continued doing everything together; they took the same classes, wore the same kind of clothing -- dark shirts and pants, large gold crosses around their necks -- worked as teaching assistants in the same class and interned together at a psychiatric center.

Dr. Kai MacDonald compared them to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the indistinguishable characters in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

“It’s funny that certain people are so conjoined,” MacDonald said. “I guess I would consider them as something of a unit.”


Professors and mentors assumed that Margo and Grace would attend medical school together to study psychiatry. But there are no records showing they applied, said Salcedo, the head detective. Even a biology professor who considered himself something of a mentor said he wrote no letters of recommendation, though he assumed others had.

Margo and Grace finished their degrees in biology a year ago, one semester ahead of schedule. In mid-April, the family, accompanied by Kesisoglu, went on a short cruise to Mexico. After they returned, the girls went back to their internship at the psychiatric center and Manas returned to work.

On Saturday, May 3, someone used the family’s transponder to access their community vehicle gate. That was the last sign of them. If anyone from the household left the neighborhood after that, it was by foot, but no one recalls seeing them.

The home provides no clues to what happened in their final hours. There was no food on the table, no dishes in the sink. Everything was clean and put away. The girls and Kesisoglu apparently washed the pills down with water -- half-empty glasses were found nearby. The twins lay side by side on a bed in the master bedroom; Kesisoglu was next to them, on a chaise.


Investigators believe Margo, Grace and their grandmother were dead by the time Margrit, using a gun she bought years ago, shot Manas. Then she turned the gun on herself. His death was ruled a homicide, but investigators believe he took so much Vicodin he would have died anyway.

It was weeks before anyone found them. The girls’ failure to show up at the psychiatric center didn’t raise alarm because they didn’t have a regular work schedule. Margrit’s and Manas’ brothers, who live within an hour’s drive, called the home, to no avail.

They assumed the family was on vacation.

On May 25, after trying repeatedly to reach the family, the brothers arrived at the house. It was Margrit’s birthday. By then, the five bodies were badly decomposed. Detectives say the family had been dead three weeks.


When news broke about five found dead, dressed all in black, rumors flew. The story became fodder for curiosity-seekers who tried to visit the house and for bloggers, who tried to piece together the family’s history. There was talk of a cult; of a strange, insular ethnic community; one neighbor told investigators that Manas was angry because the girls were not accepted by a medical school.

Relatives dismissed the significance of similar clothing.

“That’s the first thing everybody picked up on,” said one close relative who asked not to be identified, saying the family has been bombarded by inquiries since the deaths. “It was said over and over again that they always wore black. . . . I have photographs. They didn’t always wear black.

“It’s just an inexplicable, horrific tragedy that we’re still dealing with. They were a very loving and warm and beautiful family.”


For now, the house Margrit once prized stands empty. And in his cubicle in downtown Santa Ana, Salcedo sits with a foot-tall stack of transcripts, coroner’s reports and financial documents about the Ucar family. The family’s computers have been analyzed. Nothing supplies an answer.

Manas’ and Margrit’s will was not updated, although they often are in cases of suicide. There was no paperwork indicating the couple was heading toward divorce. There were no unusual phone calls or notes, “no indication that somebody was going to do something,” Salcedo said.

“Everybody seemed to be content with their lives.”

Salcedo hopes that someday, someone comes forward with information that will help people understand.


“The investigation is closed as far as causes and motives,” he said. “A reason why is something I’m always going to keep open.”

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paloma.esquivel@latimes.com

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latimes.com

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