Now he supports himself painting houses and trading the Western memorabilia he collects.
He takes the blame for a second failed marriage and other broken relationships over the years. While Vanessa's mother remarried and had two children, now grown, he said his mission to see Edwards pay for his crime consumed all the passion he had left.
"It's hard for people to understand," he said, bemused. "The relationship doesn't really go anywhere because you're trying to just get along, go to work, go through the motions. I wish I could wake up one morning and not be me."
When his mother fell ill in the late 1980s, he moved into her duplex in Oceanside to care for her. She died in 1994, but Iberri never bothered moving back to Pacific Beach.
He makes the occasional call to Cartier, now married with children, keeping up with where Vanessa might be in her life if not for Edwards. For companionship, he has Geronimo, a 56-pound Queensland heeler who has the run of his tiny house.
The refrigerator in his kitchen bears witness to a life both ruined and driven by Edwards' crime. There's the McCain-Palin campaign button, because he couldn't stomach the idea of a liberal in the White House. There's a newspaper photograph of him sprawled on Vanessa's grave at Lake Elsinore Cemetery, the modest stone etched in memory of "Our Little Nessy." There's a bumper sticker that reads: "Someone I Love Was Murdered."
Iberri doesn't know how Vanessa would have stood on the law-and-order issues that shape his political views. She was just a little girl, concerned about starting junior high. Whether she would have been liberal or conservative is just one of the things he never got to know about her.
Iberri used to get vicarious satisfaction joining other victims' relatives outside the gates of San Quentin during executions.
"When Robert Alton Harris was executed, I had a sign that said: 'Edwards -- You're Next,' " he recalled of that 1992 execution, when he still believed Edwards' death, too, was imminent. "I used one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's favorite sayings -- 'Hasta la vista, baby!' "
On the subject of mercy, he accords Edwards the same that the killer showed his daughter: none.
"There's no such thing as closure," he states with a knowing certainty. "Nothing will bring her back, but there is such a thing as justice being served. Still, 27 years. How can that be?"
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carol.williams@latimes.com
