PLACERVILLE, Calif.  —  One by one, in the summer of 1984, teenage girls vanished off the streets of this historic town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

Denise Galston disappeared first. She was a skinny 14-year-old with a shy smile and trusting disposition despite a childhood marred by abuse.

Next to go was Lynda Burrill,18, who had been bullied in high school but was re-inventing herself. She had just moved out of her parents’ wooded home and into a shared house within walking distance to Main Street, which was as much of a party scene as this place had.

The last to vanish was Denise’s sister Debbie (they were two of triplets), who went to a birthday party one night in August and never came home.

Most people figured the girls had run off.

Then their decayed remains began to turn up in the dense national forest that surrounds Placerville, dumped behind rocks or deep in ravines veiled by towering pines.

By the time the third body was discovered that fall, the town was in turmoil. In an era of satanic panic, rumors of a murderous devil-worshiping cult were rampant.

Vengeance and justice have long been intertwined in this Gold Rush outpost, nicknamed Hangtown for its vigilante heritage, and the idea that its daughters were unsafe did not sit well. El Dorado County sheriff’s detectives were under pressure to solve the crimes before more girls went missing. Faced with that urgency, officials took a series of actions that would leave the question of justice elusive for decades to come.

Authorities focused on two troubled kids they suspected knew more than they were saying, according to police reports. Joanna Napoletano and Darlene Sindle had lived with the Galston triplets in a local foster home, and were known to run with a rowdy crowd. Police pressed these girls for months, according to court records, insisting that they knew who was responsible for the killings and may even have been involved. Both denied it.

The site of a former foster care home in Placerville where Denise and Debbie Galston, Joanna Napoletano and Darlene Sindle lived in the summer of 1984.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

Then, as winter closed in, after multiple interrogations deploying aggressive tactics, detectives finally drew new stories from the girls, ones that enabled police to make an arrest. Combined, their accounts now told the tale of a creepy loner, Michael Anthony Cox, who allegedly disliked girls he judged to be promiscuous — enough to kill them.

In the summer of 1985, almost exactly a year after the girls began disappearing, Cox was convicted of first-degree murder in all three killings. He was sentenced to death after a trial that provided no physical evidence linking him to the crimes, but relied on the testimony of Napoletano and Sindle, according to court records. Cox was packed off to prison, with a death sentence that hangs over him still.

Contacted by Times reporters in 2024, Napoletano and Sindle said police pressured, manipulated and deceived them when they were teens, leading them to concoct stories about Cox that were not true. Now middle-aged, both women say that they were malleable girls who came up with accounts they thought authorities wanted to hear, to protect themselves and convict a man who detectives seemed certain was guilty.

In the years since, Napoletano and Sindle have told authorities that they lied.

Both have recanted and said under oath that they gave false testimony on the witness stand. Still, four decades after his conviction, Cox remains incarcerated and maintains his innocence. Though his appeals remain open, the last court filing was in 2020.

Over the past year, The Times has dug into the case as part of a broader review of widely used police interrogation methods that critics — including some conservative leaders inside the law enforcement community and social justice advocates seeking reform — say can lead to false confessions and fabricated testimony.

Reporters have read through thousands of pages of police reports, interrogation transcripts and court records in the Cox case. They also interviewed Napoletano, Sindle and dozens of others who were living in Placerville at the time of the crimes or involved in the investigation and subsequent legal appeals. The Times found that the official record is riddled with discrepancies and contradictions that have further complicated the case.

Many of those involved in the Cox investigation, including the lead detectives and prosecutor, have died. Cox did not respond to multiple requests for interviews.

But earlier this year, El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson said he would reexamine the Cox case after Times reporters informed him they were looking into the interrogation methods used to elicit the women’s since-recanted stories.

El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson has become a leading critic of commonly used police interrogation tactics he believes can lead to false confessions.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

In recent years, Pierson has become convinced that a coercive interrogation technique common among U.S. law enforcement agencies can lead to wrongful convictions, and has championed new models of questioning. Earlier this year, after another Times investigation, Pierson posthumously exonerated a woman who had falsely confessed to murder in another gruesome 1980s killing in the same Sierra foothills town, a case that involved one of the same investigators. His office tracked down and convicted the real killer in that case, identified through DNA.

In the case of their friends’ deaths, Napoletano and Sindle said they are frustrated that no one believed them when they said at the start that they knew nothing about the crimes, and they worry that the truth may never be known.

“If Mike did it, then let’s get that real proof. Because me telling a story when I was, you know, 16 years old, isn’t proof,” Napoletano said. “It’s not proof.”

Part One: Bad blood

The Bell Tower on Placerville’s Main Street was a beacon for local teens in the 1980s, a place they would meet to plan that night’s adventures.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

The Bell Tower on Placerville’s Main Street was built in 1856 after a fire swept through the commercial district. Its namesake bell, changed out for a siren in the 1920s, was meant to avoid such calamities in the future. By the 1980s, when more modern methods of summoning help had supplanted its usefulness, the tower remained as a beacon for bored teenagers.

They would meet there to plan adventures. Just across from the Bell Tower was a video game arcade called The Oz, where hits by Prince and Madonna battled with the waka-waka sounds of PacMan.

It was near The Oz in January 1984 that Darlene Sindle, then 16, first spotted Michael Cox, a skinny 27-year-old with intense green eyes and short dark hair. In this insular community, it wasn’t uncommon for adult men, or at least a certain kind of man, to be hanging out in a spot frequented by giddy young girls.

Sindle, less than 5 feet tall with curly blond hair, was born with a birth defect, toes that were partly fused together, giving her feet a webbed appearance. She had also had been diagnosed with developmental delays.

Sindle had been placed in foster care, according to court records, after she accused her stepfather of sexually abusing her. (Later he would be convicted on charges of misdemeanor abuse, but he served no jail time.) She went to live with Nona Chapman in a ramshackle house by a freeway overpass. Chapman had a sickly husband and took in foster girls to help pay the bills.

An undated photo of Darlene Sindle.

(Courtesy of Darlene Sindle)

The girls mostly came and went as they pleased, Sindle and Napoletano said in interviews. They routinely drank, did drugs and smoked cigarettes — Marlboros when they could get them.

Within weeks of meeting, Sindle and Cox were an inseparable couple, even though he was more than 10 years her senior and had recently divorced his second wife, with whom he had two kids.

Sindle remembers liking that Cox had a job at the local convalescent hospital and a Chevy Monte Carlo, which he often slept in, parking it at a nearby church. He took her out to eat, home to meet his mother, camping in the woods and seemed like someone who could protect her, she said.

“I felt safe with him when I first met him,” Sindle said. “I felt comfortable.”

Cox understood hard upbringings. When he was about 6, he ingested gasoline, leaving him with seizures that for years had to be treated with phenobarbital. He was poor enough that he came to school in winter without a jacket, a former teacher would testify at his trial, and often was hungry enough that he devoured the snacks she gave him.

At trial, two of his siblings and a psychiatrist testified that Cox probably had been sexually and physically abused by his stepfather. His mother was hospitalized multiple times for alcohol use and attempted suicide, and it was often her children who called for help.

Michael Anthony Cox attends a legal proceeding in his murder case.

(Mountain Democrat)

By May 1984, two of the Galston sisters — Denise and Debbie — had joined Sindle at the foster home. Also living at the house was Napoletano, then 16. By the time she got there, she told The Times, she had already been in 27 foster homes across three states and had acquired a drinking habit and a propensity for lying. She, too, said she had been abused.

Napoletano recalled that she and the Galston sisters were not always kind to Sindle, whom they thought could be slow and strange. Their discomfort extended to Cox, whom Napoletano found sinister. She said that Sindle told her Cox pressured her into certain sexual acts.

“I mean, none of us, we didn’t like Darlene,” Napoletano said. “To be honest, we were all kind of abusive to Darlene and to him both.”

Part Two: The missing

The last time friends saw Denise Galston, she was at a “wandering party” on June 12, a Tuesday night, moving from location to location in downtown Placerville. She never came home.

By the time authorities started asking questions days later, memories of partygoers were hazy. Though only 14, Denise had that summer become a common enough sight at wild parties that her comings and goings were of little notice. And besides, it was not a crowd that cooperated with cops.

With dark blond hair and hazel eyes, Denise had a youthful beauty and hid her tough circumstances under a devil-may-care attitude. Though identical to her sister Debbie (their third sister took after their mother), she was more of a tomboy and trusting enough that walking alone through the semi-rural streets, with no sidewalks or streetlights, might not have have seemed dangerous.

Lynda Burrill didn’t run in the same crowd as the Galstons. She was older, with light brown eyes and freckles, and living with friends.

But she, too, hung out at the Bell Tower and The Oz. Sheralyn Young was Burrill’s roommate; Young later told police that on the Friday night Burrill disappeared, she had seen her walking toward a parking garage with Cox, and Burrill had said she’d be right back.

Like Denise Galston, she never returned.

Main Street in downtown Placerville.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

Young called Burrill’s father, Donald Burrill, to ask if she had come home. Alarmed, he called police and reported that his daughter had disappeared and was last seen with Cox.

On July 20, with Lynda Burrill still missing, detectives went to talk to Cox, according to police reports.

Do you know this girl? Det. William White asked, showing Cox a photo of Burrill.

Maybe, Cox answered. Sindle, his girlfriend, knew her better. Well, White asked, were you with her on June 29, as her father has said? Maybe, Cox answered. He might have seen her at The Oz, but then again, maybe not.

Police let it go. The disappearance of the two girls caused barely a ripple in the larger fabric of life in Placerville that summer. Until the bodies started turning up.

Baltic Ridge Road in Eldorado National Forest near where Debbie Galston’s remains were found.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

On July 31, two loggers cutting trees in Eldorado National Forest came across a human skull and other bones. There was no clothing found with the remains, and a pathologist was unable to determine how long the bones had been there.

Four days later, a married couple camping in the area stumbled across another set of remains. Once again, the pathologist could not determine cause of death.

This attracted interest from the Sheriff’s Department. One of its top homicide detectives, Sgt. Bill Wilson, was assigned to the case.

Wilson graduated from El Dorado High and, after a stint in the Marines, joined the Sheriff’s Department in 1964 at the age of 23. By the summer of 1984, he was one of the department’s stars.

On Aug. 4, Wilson and his partner, Officer Erol Harnage, drove out to Ferrari Mill Road in the forest near where both sets of remains had been found. They canvassed the area but found no physical evidence. No weapons. No signs of struggle.

Then another girl disappeared.

On the night of Aug. 8, almost two months after her sister went missing, Debbie Galston went to a birthday party. About 8:30 p.m, according to police reports, Debbie announced that she had to return home and set off on foot.

She never made it. Napoletano and her new boyfriend eventually went looking for her.

Just before they left the foster home on their search, Napoletano later told police, Sindle looked her straight in the face and said Debbie wouldn’t be coming back.

A day went by. Then another. Napoletano was fearful and despondent. To cheer her up, she later told police, the new boyfriend proposed a picnic. On Aug. 10, two days after Debbie had disappeared, Napoletano, the boyfriend and his dog climbed into his grandparents’ truck and set off for a spot tucked in the mountains above a clear blue lake.

A creek beneath North South Road in Eldorado National Forest where Debbie Galston’s clothes were found tied to rocks and bushes.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

At around the halfway point of their drive, near the Camp Creek Bridge, she recounted to police, the boyfriend announced that the dog needed water. He and the dog walked down to the creek. Napoletano got out to take in the view. Then she started to scream.

In the rushing stream down below, she recognized her own clothing. Her turquoise pants. Her beloved polka-dot top. She told police she had lent this outfit to Debbie Galston to wear to the birthday party nights earlier.

The clothes, along with Debbie’s shoes, had been tied to rocks and bushes right below the bridge.

As if, this time, someone wanted them found.

Part Three: The bodies

Napoletano told police she was sure something horrible had happened to Debbie, just as she was now sure something had happened to Denise.

But detectives didn’t believe the story she and her boyfriend were telling, according to court records. Officers brought them back to the bridge after they turned in the clothes. “We’re not going home until you can tell us the truth,” one of the officers said.

Napoletano swore she knew nothing else. The couple said it was a coincidence they had stopped at the exact place the clothes had been left.

But things only got more complicated.

According to police reports, when Napoletano returned to the foster home and told Sindle what she had discovered, Sindle said that she and Cox had recently gone camping in the same place where the clothes had been found.

Within hours, Sindle seemed to have a mental breakdown, according to accounts relayed in police reports: On the night of Aug. 11, she was wandering around the foster home talking about “guts.” Later, she picked up a knife and started chanting. The foster mother called the police.

Officer Phillip Dannaker arrived and tried to make sense of Sindle’s ramblings. “I see Denise being strangled and Debbie having her head bashed in,” she told the officer.

Dannaker asked Sindle if her boyfriend might have had something to do with the missing girls. “I don’t know,” Sindle answered. “He might have. I have these feelings. That’s all I know.”

The remains of Denise Galston and Lynda Burrill were found in a densely wooded area off Ferrari Mill Road in Eldorado National Forest.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

Police knew something the girls didn’t: Days earlier, the coroner had used dental records to identify one of the skulls found off Ferrari Mill Road. Investigators suspected it belonged to Denise Galston.

After speaking with Sindle, Dannekar sought out Cox and found him asleep in his car, according to police reports. Dannekar woke Cox and searched the vehicle. Among the things he found were a loaded .357 Smith and Wesson revolver; a loaded Ruger rifle; a .380-caliber Armi Tanfoglio semi-automatic pistol; handcuffs; and a knife.

Cox told officers the weapons were for protection, but beyond that had little to say. “I don’t have anything to do with the girls … period,” he told officers.

Sindle, meanwhile, came even more unglued.

On Aug. 14, according to police reports, Chapman found Sindle maniacally chopping up a piece of binder paper with scissors. Chapman told her to put the scissors down. Sindle complied, but then took out a knife and began jabbing at a second piece of paper.

“What’s the matter? Are you afraid I’ll stab you?” she asked Chapman. Sindle was taken to a psychiatric facility for evaluation.

While she was there, the coroner identified the other remains that had been found in the forest as Lynda Burrill.

Detectives blanketed The Oz and other areas where teens hung out, asking them about the missing girls and about Cox.

Rumors, already simmering, started to boil. Cox had a reputation for yelling slurs at girls out of the window of his Chevy, an unsavory fact that ballooned into motive in speculative conversations.

On Aug. 31, Sgt. Wilson went to El Dorado Convalescent Hospital and tried to talk to Cox again, but he refused to speak without an attorney.

Detectives instead turned to Sindle, who had been released from the psychiatric facility and returned to her family’s trailer with her mother and stepfather.

But Sindle offered nothing, and in early September, she married Cox in a civil ceremony in Nevada.

“He was a very caring man and that’s what I needed from him,” Sindle said recently of Cox. “He always watched out for me.”

Detectives went back to Napoletano. According to trial testimony, they had hooked her up to a polygraph machine and blitzed her with questions after she found the clothes. The polygraph examiner had found Napoletano’s answers “inconclusive,” according to later court filings.

But Napoletano said that wasn’t her understanding. Instead, she recalls being told that she had failed the test and that they now had proof she was lying. During Cox’s trial, the prosecutor would at one point offer to stipulate that she had failed the polygraph, one of many discrepancies in the court record.

Napoletano remembers feeling grief-stricken and terrified. In late August, she left California and went to Washington state, where she had a brother.

It was a brief respite.

Around noon on Saturday, Oct. 27, two hunters stalking deer stumbled upon skeletal remains a few miles from where the other two sets of bones had been found. Within 48 hours, medical authorities confirmed they belonged to Debbie Galston.

Detectives now had a triple homicide, and the pressure to make an arrest exploded.

Part Four: The witness

At this point, detectives had no physical evidence, no causes of death, no motive and no suspect besides Cox, police records show.

Wilson again sought out Napoletano, tracking her down in Washington.

Like many detectives of the era, Wilson used an interrogation technique that relied on creating a theory of the crime based on what they knew and what evidence they had, then grilling suspects — drawing on facts and fiction — until the suspects broke down and confessed.

While Sindle and Napoletano weren’t technically suspects, Wilson made it clear in his interrogations that in his version of the crime, they were at least witnesses and maybe even accomplices.

Napoletano told The Times that she started to wonder if Wilson might be right. Maybe she did know more than she thought. It was strange that she, of all people, had been the one to find Debbie Galston’s clothes, she remembers thinking.

But there were so many holes in her memory. She had been getting blackout drunk often. “I would wake up somewhere and not remember what I did the night before,” she said. “Not remember who I was with, or anything I did.”

Was there something, buried in her brain, that she had repressed?

The polygraph she believed she had failed became a turning point for her. She returned from Washington, convinced that justice for her friends depended on her pulling a lost truth out of her consciousness.

“If you fail the polygraph, I must know something, right?” she remembers thinking. “So I came back feeling like I have to tell them something, but I don’t know what I know.”

And it was then, police reports and trial transcripts show, that Napoletano’s story started to shift. Yes, she told Wilson. She had held something back. On the night Denise Galston disappeared, she had seen Cox and Denise arguing.

Wilson offered a suggestion. Napoletano should meet with a psychologist who might be able to help her remember what else she knew.

At the end of October, Napoletano had the first of many sessions with a psychologist Wilson knew.

According to court testimony and interviews, they met in an office in the sheriff’s station. Under his guidance, according to police reports, Napoletano told him she was able to remember that not only had she seen Cox and Denise Galston arguing but that she and Denise had actually been together and gotten into Cox’s car.

More memories were returning as the meetings continued, according to police reports. Now, she recalled that after she and Denise got into Cox’s car, he drove them to Sly Park, a popular spot in the woods. She and Denise didn’t want to go, she said, but he had insisted. Once in the woods, Napoletano asked to be let out of the car to go to the bathroom, and hitchhiked back to Placerville.

In their next session, the psychologist and Wilson drove Napoletano out to Sly Park to have her locate the spot where the killing took place. When they got close to where Denise’s body had been dumped, Napoletano became so upset that they returned to the station, according to police reports.

Napoletano would say later, in interviews, that she was aware of the approximate location of the murder scene because it had been publicized in the local newspaper.

After days of hours-long meetings with the psychologist and detectives, Napoletano finally told a story that gave authorities ammunition to arrest Cox.

Napoletano said that on the night of June 12, she, Denise Galston and Cox had driven to the woods. She had gotten out of the car to go to the bathroom. She heard Denise scream her name. She claimed that she ran toward her friend, and saw that Denise was naked, running through the woods, with her hands bound behind her. Cox was chasing her. As Napoletano watched, Cox caught up to Denise, knocked her down, climbed on top of her and stabbed her, she alleged.

Napoletano told detectives she stumbled away without being caught, made her way to the road, and hitchhiked back to Placerville with a guy she knew only as “Joe.”

She had never spoken a word of what happened, she told the detectives. She had been too traumatized.

On Nov. 10, police arrested Cox for the murders of the Galston sisters and Lynda Burrill.

At his arraignment, Cox pleaded not guilty, and told his weeping mother not to worry.

Part Five: The confirmation

Michael Cox’s murder trial was moved from the El Dorado County courthouse in Placerville, shown above, to South Lake Tahoe, amid concerns about juror bias.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

Despite the arrest, the case against Cox had weaknesses.

Napoletano’s story didn’t offer a motive for the killings. Police still had no physical evidence linking Cox to the crimes, despite searching his car and testing his weapons. And Napoletano had a documented history of both lying and problem drinking.

Detectives turned their attention back to Sindle, police reports and interview transcripts show, pushing her to offer up any detail that could back Napoletano’s new tale.

On Nov. 9, two days after Napoletano allegedly recovered her memory, Sindle’s mother and stepfather brought her into the sheriff’s station at the request of investigators.

Her short-lived marriage to Cox had dissolved just days before, after only two months. According to trial testimony, Cox had taken up with another woman. Sindle denied that to The Times, instead claiming she felt pressured into an annulment by her parents and police.

Wilson and Harnage peppered her with their theory of the crime, transcripts in court records show. Harnage told her that she was “the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle,” and minimized what could happen to Cox.

“You can help us get — get Mike help,” Harnage told her, according to excerpts of the interrogation included in court records. “We’re, we’re not askin’ you to, ah, send him away for life. We’re askin’ — we’re askin’ you to — get him some help.”

Harnage pushed Sindle to “try to remember.”

“It’s in there, Darlene. All you have to do is bring it out,” he said. “Something bad has happened with you. What did you see?”

Detectives sent Sindle into another room to talk with Napoletano. According to her testimony in court records, police had told Napoletano, falsely, that webbed footprints had been found at one of the crime scenes, footprints that could have been left by Sindle’s webbed feet.

That left Napoletano thinking Sindle knew more than she was saying. She pressured Sindle, asking her why, on the night that Denise Galston disappeared, Sindle had said, “It was gonna be all over, and [Cox] would be arrested.”

After talking to Napoletano, Sindle began to change her story.

Now, she said that the week before the girls started vanishing, Cox had said, “they were whores and tramps and should be eliminated,” and added that he “would kill three from the foster home and three afterward outside of the foster home,” according to a police report.

But Sindle still claimed to have no details about the murders themselves.

“I didn’t see anything,” Sindle told them. “I don’t know nothin’.”

On Dec. 4, police had another go, this time with a threat. Wilson visited Sindle at her parents’ trailer and warned that she could be prosecuted for withholding information, according to court records. Unless she told them something that could help them, she could be arrested.

However, if she helped, they could protect her. They offered her financial assistance from the county, telling her she could use the money to buy clothes or get her hair done. Wilson told Sindle that authorities were offering her immunity, according to interview transcripts. “Don’t be scared about going to jail,” he said.

Wilson told her that, like Napoletano, her true memories were buried.

“It was very shocking to you that he told you what he did. And so you just kinda blocked it out of your mind,” Wilson said. “You’re afraid to tell us exactly what conversation you and Mike had.”

Sindle’s story morphed further and started to fit the theory police had been pressing.

Cox, she now alleged, “told me that he did kill Denise.” She told police that he told her this “before he got hold of Debbie.”

Then, she said it was actually “a day after Debbie disappeared,” and that Cox told her he had been paid a few hundred dollars to murder the girls. Echoing rumors sweeping through town, she said the murders had something to do with a cult of devil worshipers.

“He was paid to do it,” Sindle said. “He was paid, um, to kill them — to have revenge on them. Some of the underground people told him to do it.”

She eventually said that on the day Debbie Galston disappeared, she and Cox had been cleaning his car when she found a unicorn key chain that belonged to Debbie. She said Cox confided that he had killed Denise and had intended to kill Napoletano, but that she had run away after he allowed her out of the car to go to the bathroom.

Sindle also claimed that Cox told her he had killed Debbie Galston and Lynda Burrill. She said Cox told her he had bound and raped the girls before stabbing them.

Though the story contradicted Napoletano’s in places and raised a whole new specter of satanic cults hiring contract killers, it was enough for the detectives.

They had their second witness.

Part Six: Case closed

The trial began six months later, moved to South Lake Tahoe over fears a Placerville jury would not be fair.

Cox’s public defender, Pat Forester, chose not to make an opening statement, according to the local paper. Cox did not take the stand.

Prosecutors presented weeks of testimony.

Ron Tepper, the county prosecutor, initially offered one piece of physical evidence. In April, a man scouting for wood had come across a man’s black-and-orange jacket covering a pile of girl’s clothes. They belonged to Denise Galston, and Cox’s mom thought the jacket looked like one he owned. This seemed like the nail in the coffin for Cox: proof he had been at the crime scene with Denise.

The jacket was important because Tepper’s theory of the crime was largely circumstantial.

Cox, Tepper argued to jurors, had possibly forced the girls into his car using a weapon, then drove them to the woods before killing them. The motive? Cox hated girls he considered “sluts, whores and scum,” Tepper said.

“Michael Cox was a judgmental person, who would single out young women and label them,” Tepper told the jury.

Tepper called girls and women to the stand to confirm that Cox had yelled slurs out the window of his car, or on the street.

Lisa Delashaw-Silveira was one of those witnesses. She knew the Galston sisters and often walked into town with them, or smoked Marlboros by the train tracks, she said in a recent interview. During the trial, she said, she was in juvenile hall on what she recalls as a truancy charge when investigators visited to tell her she needed to get in their car and drive to the courtroom in South Lake Tahoe.

“I do remember them telling me that if I didn’t do it I was going to get in more trouble and stay in juvenile hall longer,” she said. “Why would you even need me to say what I said? When I was that age, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just doing what I was told.”

Most damning for Cox was the testimony of Linda Crespin, a friend who said she had seen Cox with a scratch, similar to fingernail marks, on his forehead after Burrill disappeared, and that Cox told her girls like Burrill should be “eliminated.”

Tepper called dozens of people to testify. Scientists opined on soil and water conditions where the bones were found. Medical examiners detailed their condition. The hunters who found them described their surprise.

But the most compelling testimony came from the two teenage girls.

When Sindle took the stand, she barely peered above the microphone because she was so small. Since becoming a witness for the prosecution, the county had been paying for her to live at a hotel. Each day, she’d walk over to a nearby diner to eat, where she had fallen for one of the servers and gotten pregnant.

Her testimony did not go well.

She stumbled over facts and mixed up names. She testified, for example, that Cox never wanted to have anything to do with Debbie Galston. Then she said Cox routinely gave Debbie rides. She did not, however, repeat her claims about contract killers or satanic cults, and the prosecutor did not ask her about these things.

When asked crucial questions, her answer often was, “I don’t remember.”

“Did Michael tell you why he had done these things to these three girls?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes,” Sindle said

Well, the prosecutor asked, what had he said?

“I can’t remember,” she answered.

Napoletano had credibility issues as well. She told the jury about the night Denise Galston disappeared in June, but this version was different from what police had recorded her saying the previous November — enough so that Cox’s defense attorney played that recording to highlight the inconsistencies. She added that she had drunk a pint of rum and a six-pack of beer that night.

Meanwhile, the only piece of physical evidence linking Cox to the crime — the black- and-orange jacket — was discredited.

In a dramatic courtroom moment, an acquaintance of the young women revealed while on the stand that the jacket was his, and he had lent it to Denise the night she vanished.

The revelation raised questions about Napoletano’s testimony. In all her vivid recollections about Denise’s appearance on the night of the murder, she had never mentioned that her friend was wearing a black jacket.

In an interview about the case given to investigators years later during Cox’s appeals process, Wilson said that this blow left the prosecutor “going ballistic.” He had to quickly find a way to bolster Napoletano’s testimony.

Wilson picked Napoletano up on a Saturday morning and demanded that she direct him to the crime scene. Though she had gotten close in the past, Napoletano had never succeeded in leading detectives to the exact spot, according to court records and Times interviews.

This time, she navigated them to within yards of where Denise’s body had been found. Back in court, Wilson told jurors that Napoletano had led him there from memory.

Napoletano would testify later, as part of her recantation, that she found the site based not on memory but on instinct: By then, she said, she knew Wilson well enough to read his body language. When she directed him the wrong way, she said, he became visibly upset.

The prosecutor seemed to recognize Napoletano’s testimony was questionable, dismissing its importance in his closing arguments: If Napoletano “never came here and never said one word, between the testimony of Darlene and the other witnesses there is a fabric, there is a thread that goes through the case, and it weaves together with an absolute and compelling certainty,” he told jurors.

The jury returned a guilty verdict, and later a sentence of death.

Napoletano came home from court and made another confession, according to appellate court records: She told her new boyfriend that the testimony she had given in court was a lie.

Part Seven: Regret

“I just came up with a fabricated story so they would leave me alone,” Darlene Sindle now says of her testimony. “Michael never did any of this, and I’m going to take that to my deathbed.”

(Angela Pittman / For The Times)

After achieving a conviction in a brutal triple homicide that had terrorized his mountain town, Sgt. Wilson did an unusual thing: He invited Napoletano to move into his home.

According to testimony during the appeals process, Wilson and his wife felt sorry for Napoletano, who had endured so much.

Napoletano told The Times that she had felt grateful to Wilson. He brought her into a comfortable middle-class house that felt stable. Wilson’s stepkids called her their “foster sister.” When she got married in 1987, it was Wilson who walked her down the aisle.

But outside of the detective’s earshot, Napoletano was continuing to tell a story he likely would have been very unhappy to hear. The story was that she had lied on the witness stand so Wilson and county prosecutors could score a conviction against Cox.

When she got married, she confided it to her new husband, his mother and his sister, according to their testimony.

By 1990, Napoletano’s marriage was ending, and she was in a custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband.

He, her mother-in-law and another friend, in an attempt to bolster the husband’s custody case, filed legal declarations saying that Napoletano was a liar, citing her false testimony in the Cox case. She had told them that not only had she not witnessed Denise’s murder, but that she had spent most of the night in question passed out drunk in a park, according to court records.

This might have remained a simple domestic matter. But Cox’s state-appointed legal team, now working on his appeal, found out about it. After a defense investigator located Napoletano and confronted her in 1990, Napoletano told The Times, she felt both guilt and trepidation, fearing she could lose her children. She said she decided to take responsibility for her lies in the Cox matter, and hired an attorney to formally recant.

In California, all death penalty cases go through an automatic appeals process, and Cox’s attorneys, a team from the state public defender’s office, were protesting his conviction on multiple grounds. The state Supreme Court had appointed a retired judge, Bill Dozier, to act as a referee, basically investigating and summarizing the case for their review.

In the spring of 1994, Napoletano walked into Dozier’s courtroom and said that she had lied during the Cox trial.

“At that time in my life, it was not uncommon for me to tell lies,” she testified. “And I think my motive was partly to get everybody off my back.”

Speaking to Times reporters, Napoletano said that at the time of the murders, she believed Cox was guilty and that she had a responsibility to her friends to see him punished. She said she felt pressure, from authorities and her conscience, to help convict him, believing that if she didn’t testify, he might go free.

The state public defenders also tracked down Sindle.

Sindle again said the murders were part of a satanic ritual and added more details. She claimed that she, Napoletano and Cox were together on the night Debbie Galston was murdered. She said Cox drove them to a campsite. Once there, she said, Napoletano and Debbie had sex, and then Cox tied Debbie to an altar and nine men had sex with her. Then Cox cut her open with a knife, pulled out a fetus, and everyone ate the fetus. She said they killed Debbie and drank her blood.

Sindle signed a declaration memorializing all this. But more than a year later, she recanted that version, too, saying it was likely a dream.

She reverted to her original story, given shortly after the girls disappeared: She had no first-hand knowledge about the murders or Cox’s involvement.

Sindle, now 56, told The Times she lied as a teen because she was scared.

“I just came up with a fabricated story so they would leave me alone,” she said. “Michael never did any of this, and I’m going to take that to my deathbed.”

The women’s recantations became part of the legal review process. Dozier examined court transcripts and the crime scene, and reinterviewed witnesses. During that process, investigators for Cox spoke with Wilson, who defended his investigation, saying that “his gut reaction was that more than one person was involved in the murders,” and that “Darlene knew more than she was saying.”

When it came to Napoletano, Wilson said she was “truthful but may have embellished some ‘factual matters.’”

It took years, and upon completion, Dozier’s report spanned more than 1,000 pages.

In it, Dozier concluded that beyond lying, Sindle’s testimony had been coerced, and that “many manipulations of [her] during the interrogation process” led her to fabricate a story.

Dozier argued, however, that Sindle had been so befuddled and contradictory on the stand that the jury likely didn’t believe her anyway, rendering it moot that her testimony was both false and given under duress.

When it came to Napoletano, Dozier parsed her various versions of events, deciding some were true, others false. He concluded that she had been truthful when she said she had seen Cox kill Denise Galston, but then lied about hitchhiking back to town. He also concluded her later recantation of her full testimony was a lie, prompted by the circumstances of her custody dispute.

Notably, Dozier, who died in 2015, argued the exact opposite of what the trial prosecutor had claimed — concluding that Napoletano’s testimony was more reliable than Sindle’s.

When the state Supreme Court issued its ruling in 2003, the majority of the court agreed with his reasoning. “In general, Darlene’s credibility at trial was doubtful,” a majority of the justices said in their ruling upholding conviction.

They also cited Dozier’s finding that Napoletano was “a chronic liar,” but agreed with him that she likely had witnessed Denise Galston’s killing.

Ultimately, they determined that although both Napoletano and Sindle had lied, at least in part, it had made no material difference to Cox’s conviction.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Joyce Kennard rejected the assertion that there wasn’t good reason to question Cox’s conviction.

“I would not send petitioner to his death on such flimsy evidence,” she wrote.

The ruling all but ended Cox’s chance at a new trial.

Part Eight: The quest

El Dorado County Assistant Dist. Atty. Lisette Suder stands in front of boxes filled with files from the Michael Cox case.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

Pierson, the current El Dorado County district attorney, said in December that he and Assistant Dist. Atty. Lisette Suder are still reviewing the case. His office is examining records and searching for any items that could be tested for DNA.

“The evidence is, I hate to say, it’s not enough for us,” Pierson said. “The questions [about the case] are sufficient that we are putting time and effort into ensuring that it’s properly investigated.”

Sharon Burrill, Lynda’s mother, is in her 80s and lives in a nursing home. Her husband passed away, and thoughts of her daughter, now gone longer than she lived, center on the milestones they never shared.

“I wasn’t able to see her grow up, have children, find a nice man,” she said.

The third Galston triplet, who asked not to be named to protect her privacy, worries that the grisly circumstances of the murders of her beloved sisters have overshadowed their short lives. She wants people to remember them not for how they died, but for how they lived: chasing blue-bellied lizards in the backyard; eating turnips from the garden when food ran out; gold panning and camping and fishing together, inseparable.

She said Denise was a social butterfly who wrote poems and loved school. Debbie hated school and dreamed of being a model. Her sisters, with their identical looks, would prank teachers by switching places. Both of them were smart; all three were desperate for a sense of happiness and stability that never materialized.

“We were just kids that nobody wanted, trying to find our way in life,” said the third triplet. “Trying to find who we belong to.”

Darlene Sindle says she thought Michael Cox would be released from prison after she recanted her testimony. “I ruined his life,” she says.

(Angela Pittman / For The Times)

Sindle now lives in the deep woods along the Oregon coast and has recently married again, though her health is failing.

She was unaware that Cox remained in prison until contacted by Times reporters, and said she thought that her recantation three decades ago would have helped him seek release.

“I ruined his life,” she said. “He don’t need to be in there being punished for something he didn’t do.”

Napoletano is less sure. She still lives in California, but she bears little resemblance to the troubled teenager of her young years.

Now in her 50s, she is a devout Christian who has replaced the fractured family of her childhood with a strong bond with her own children and grandchildren. She believes that Cox may be guilty, but said she is troubled that her false testimony was so crucial to the conviction.

A June 2007 photo of Michael Cox at San Quentin State Prison.

(California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation )

“Nobody believed the truth,” she said. “That’s the part that really bothers me.”

Napoletano wonders what would have happened if detectives hadn’t pressured her for information she said she never had. Maybe, she said, she wouldn’t be left with this horrible feeling of confusion and uncertainty.

She concedes that, after 40 years, her memories are now hazy and unreliable, but she said that she knows that she lied at the time.

“I don’t know what the truth is about what really happened to my friends,” she said. “But I want the truth. You know, I want the truth for them.”