It was nearing midnight when a large man emerged from his rented blue Dodge and approached a brick home at the end of a cul-de-sac in Covina. He wore a handmade Santa Claus suit with boot-covers, belt, beard, glasses and gloves. Hardly suspicious. It was Christmas Eve.
But underneath were black street clothes, five 9-millimeter handguns and $17,000 in cash plastic-wrapped to his body. He was pulling a compressor wrapped in Christmas paper and primed with high-octane fuel. In one shoe was a printout for a ticket on a Northwest Airlines flight to Moline, Ill.
The man knocked. Inside, a family Christmas party was ending, and Sylvia Pardo's relatives had gathered near the door to say good night.
The door swung open and an 8-year-old girl ran to Santa. He shot her in the face. Then he stepped into the house and opened fire. Sylvia's sister frantically dialed 911.
"His name," she told the dispatcher, "is Bruce Pardo."
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Nine people died in that rampage on Knollcrest Drive, including Pardo's former wife, Sylvia, and her parents. Pardo, 45, took his own life a few hours later.
Six months later, a fuller portrait of the killer and the crime has emerged from interviews with family, friends and investigators. The FBI and Covina police are creating a criminal profile of Pardo, seeking insight into what triggered one of Los Angeles County's worst mass murders.
Although privately troubled by the deterioration of his marriage, Pardo glowed with charm and generosity in public. Even those closest to him had no inkling that last June, long before his divorce was final, he had begun secretly assembling an arsenal and plotting an elaborate getaway.
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley in the 1970s, Pardo, the son of an engineer, showed a knack for mathematics. After graduating from John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, he went to Cal State Northridge to study computer science.
He loved being the center of attention. At his Cal State graduation, he carried a life-size inflatable doll.
Friends and co-workers recalled him as exceptionally bright, and he landed a job as a software engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. But he wasn't the most industrious worker, they remembered. He seemed to relish chances to defeat the system. Once, a colleague recalled, he hacked into the JPL computer system to learn his co-workers' salaries. He seemed to come and go as he pleased, disappearing after a fresh snowfall only to return with a goggles tan line.
