Murder He Wrote

Yesterday I took a Sunday drive out to the Adelaida area about 20 miles west of Paso Robles in some of the most beautiful countryside in California. Ostensibly I was picking up a chain saw from my friend Marybeth. However, I elected to make a bit of an adventure out of it and check on the old digs of my late friend David Brooks a.k.a. "Studibaker Dave" who for the better part of two decades was the caretaker of the Klau/Buena Vista Mine complex. I also revisited the Adelaida Cemetery which I shared here last night. The Klau/Buena Vista Mine caretaker's residence picture below was where I found my friend Dave's body in 2010 and it was also the scene of a murder last month of someone known to Dave who had moved in after his decease.

Billy Law had actually been a source of hindrance to efforts by Dave's friends to settle Dave's affairs to his satisfaction at the time of his demise. Billy was no friend of mine and although what I know of him is through friends of Dave I know with certainty that he was not a good person and what happened was both criminal and karmic.

Back in the 1990's a young man was murdered around the corner from this house up Cypress Mountain Road about a mile from here. The late Dave Brooks, caretaker of the mine complex found that body shotgunned and run over in the road just down the road from the mine. There is a bad vibe out there I can sense although I have not directly experienced anything "paranormal" in the immediate vicinity.

I spent the night in the house in question a few different times during the Studibaker Dave Administration. I was never able to sleep well there but never felt immediately threatened or directly endangered. However, I was never comfortable there overnight. After dark the place took on a menacing personality despite the fact I am utterly unafraid of the dark and thrive in it with great natural night vision even at age 43.

This locality and the various morbid events that have happened there were the inspiration for a short story I wrote earlier this month for my creative writing class. I got an "A" on it and my PhD instructor strongly suggests I polish it some more and submit it for publication to various literary journals including Tellus, the Cuesta College literary journal. Before doing that rewrite I desired to revisit my muse of a mine complex.

Billy Law died in the front doorway of this house whereas Dave died on the sofa across the room over three years before.

The presence of a woman in this house has caused it to look more nested in than in Studibaker Dave's time when it looked like Sanford & Son's stockyard.

The barn in back used to be covered by a much larger corrugated steel structure which I was surprised to find gone.

Note the gun target to the left of the barn and further back by the base of the dirt pile... ironic given Billy Law was shot with a 9mm at point blank range with the magazine being emptied into him for emphasis by his old lady's big brat.

All photos by Kim Patrick Noyes (all rights reserved)