Nineteen-year-old newlyweds Johnny and Joyce Swindle had just gotten married on January 18th, 1964 in their hometown of Jasper, Alabama, and had come to San Diego, California for their honeymoon. Johnny was on leave from the Navy, and he and his new wife had been spending a relaxing few days staying in a pleasant cottage near the seashore, and taking nightly strolls along the boardwalk at Ocean Beach.
But on the evening of February 5th, 1964, only two days before their honeymoon was due to end, their blissful beach vacation would be brutally cut short.
It was a little past eight p.m., and the night was black and moonless. Nonetheless, Johnny and Joyce were walking along hand in hand, enjoying the seaside, when suddenly five shots rang out in the darkness, partially muffled by the roar of the nearby surf.
Johnny was hit in the back, the leg, and the ear; Joyce was hit in the back and the arm. They both dropped to the ground, at which point the gunman approached their prone bodies and shot them each one time in the head at close range. Shortly afterward, a passerby discovered the couple lying in a pool of blood on a patio at the bottom of a set of concrete stairs. Joyce was pronounced dead at the scene, and though Johnny was still alive, he later died at the hospital without regaining consciousness.
Investigators theorized that the first shots had come from a sniper’s position on a nearby cliff ledge, further pointing out that the shooter would have been practically invisible in the moonless darkness. Though the killer had obviously approached his victims to finish them off, apparently no one on the beach had seen or heard anything unusual.
Police found a box of Valentine’s Day candy on the retaining wall near where the bodies were found, but were not sure if the Swindles had purchased the candy themselves or if it had been left there by the killer as some sort of bizarre message or calling card.
In spite of a massive investigation that involved interviewing all merchants and residents along the boardwalk, and even delving into the Swindles’ life back in Alabama, no motive whatsoever could be found for the heinous crime. While Johnny Swindle’s wallet and wristwatch, and possibly Joyce’s gold necklace, were found to be missing, police did not believe robbery was the ultimate reason for the shooting, which many of them attributed to a “thrill killer” who targeted the couple at random.
A later suspect in the case was twenty-three-year-old Michael Patrick Moeller, who was arrested in 1965 for the sniper-style murder of Honolulu police officer Bradley Kaanana. However, it was discovered that Moeller had been in the Air Force and had been on base in Amarillo, Texas the night that the Swindles were killed.
Another person of interest was a nineteen-year-old Marine who was stationed in San Diego before going AWOL and murdering his parents and 13-year-old sister with a hatchet in Illinois.
Authorities did speculate that there could be a link between the murder of the Swindles and that of Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards, which had occurred on a remote beach near Gaviota in early June of 1963. Both cases involved .22 caliber long rifles, though different guns were used in each killing, and in both cases, the shooter seemed to target a couple at random. There has long been speculation that the murders of both couples were early crimes committed by the still-unknown individual responsible for the later Zodiac slayings, with some researchers pointing in particular to the paint-spattered watch found at the scene of Cheri Jo Bates’s murder in 1966 as evidence that the same person killed both Cheri Jo Bates and the Swindles, as Johnny Swindle had his watch stolen from the scene. It should be noted, however, that the killings of Cheri Jo Bates, Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards, and Johnny and Joyce Swindle have never been conclusively linked with the canonical Zodiac murders, though the similarities are intriguing.
In 2020, Johnny’s sister Rita, in an interview with AL.com, confirmed that she likewise believes her brother and sister-in-law were early victims of the Zodiac, though she is also convinced that whoever killed them is most likely dead.
Crime Immemorial 