CALISTOGA, Calif. — Standing outside the small church, the Calistoga police chief slowly surveyed the crowd of 350 townspeople assembled to mourn the death of the young civil engineer slain Halloween night in her Napa home.
The unsolved stabbing deaths of Calistoga native Adriane Michelle Insogna and her roommate, former South Carolina beauty queen Leslie Ann Mazzara, both 26, have brutally disrupted the bucolic tranquillity of California's Napa Valley.
With the killer still at large, Police Chief Mike Dick, a tall, squarely built man who watched Insogna grow up in this close-knit spa town, was taking no chances. Dick asked newspaper photographers for their business cards on the remote chance that the killer, whom police believe knew one or both of the victims, had come to the Tuesday afternoon memorial service at the Community Presbyterian Church and had been captured in one of the photographers' frames.
A roommate who escaped from the two-story tract home where the three single women lived together is the only witness in the case. Flanked by bodyguards, she sat quietly through the emotional service. As a protective measure, Napa police have not released her name.
Violent crimes are rare in the Napa Valley, home to about 100,000 people. The last homicide in the city of Napa, sparked by a dispute between two men at a quinceanera party, was more than three years ago. This is a place of tree-shaded lanes, slow-moving wine trains and leisurely lunches in the sun-dappled countryside.
When violence strikes here, it is as incongruous as snowfall in San Clemente.
To calm the jittery populace, Napa police have met with several hundred citizens in a series of public meetings. Hoping to quell fears that the killings were random, police chief Richard Melton announced he believes the crime was a "specific, targeted" crime.
But so far, police say, they have not identified anyone as the person who entered the wood-frame home around 2 a.m. Halloween night, climbed the stairs to bedrooms where Insogna and Mazzara slept and, after a struggle, stabbed both women to death. No weapon has been recovered.
Awakened in her downstairs bedroom by her whimpering dog and the sound of the struggle in the upstairs rooms, the roommate, also 26, fled the house and called police on her cellphone. A police officer, patrolling nearby streets, arrived at the scene minutes later.
