Michael Jacobs (33), his wife Marcy (31) and daughter Jennifer (9) were murdered inside their Sacramento house some time between the night of January 13, a Sunday, and the early hours of January 14, 1991. Their bodies were discovered on Tuesday, after colleagues of Marcy at the California Department of Justice, where she worked in data entry, started worrying she hadn’t shown up at the office or answered any phone calls.
At the time, police referred to the crime as “Sacramento’s Charles Manson case”, because of the brutality of the scene. Michael had been shot four times in the head, execution style, inside the locked garage. Marcy was also shot and stabbed multiple times. Her body was in the doorway of the bathroom, which led investigators to theorize she was killed while trying to hide in there. Jennifer had been shot in the face in her bed, and was found still clutching the doll she slept with.
The motive for the killings seems to be a very specific robbery. There was an open and empty safe in the garage where Michael was shot, and police believe that the safe actually belonged to a childhood friend of his called Richard McCarthy, and that it had a lot of money inside. McCarthy was a convicted felon who had connections to drug dealers and gangs and had disappeared three months before the murders of the Jacobs, after being released from a short stint in jail. To this day, no one knows what happened to him and, considering what happened to the Jacobs, he’s presumed dead.
This theory has been reinforced by a witness who said that a few days before the murders, Michael Jacobs told him about a call he got from two men he referred to as Dave and Gary asking to meet to discuss the money McCarthy had left with him. Michael and Marcy didn’t seem to have any connection with criminal activity themselves, but the authopsy revealed that both of them had metanphetamine in their systems when they were killed.
Despite having a number of persons of interest, police has never arrested anyone in connection to the crime because of lack of evidence. Encouraged by the recent solving of the East Area Rapist case, they have put the Jacobs’ murders back in the spotlight in the hopes someone will approach them with a clue. They are offering a $50,000 reward.