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George Manning had reported his wife missing after he found their Crown Vic parked by our hill and moved it back down to his house, almost twelve hours after she was dead. When the police showed up on his doorstep that evening with the news that a body had been found in the remains of the burned out house on Magnolia, he was able to identify it as that of his wife by a necklace she had worn having miraculously survived the inferno. It was a gold plated figure of Big Bird, hung from a thin, gold chain. George and Jamie had given it to her as a birthday present only a month before.

  When the police interviewed George Manning about why his wife would have been up in the abandoned house in the early morning hours of July 9th, he had broken down and confessed that he thought that his wife could have been responsible for the murders of the little girls over the last few weeks, but wouldn’t let himself believe it. He’d told them that she had in fact owned the house, given to her from a previous husband that had killed himself, though the city had condemned it until they could afford repairs, which they couldn’t-and may have been taking the girls there to do what ever it was she did to them. He said that he’d been reading the articles in the papers and had noticed certain items missing from around the house, like their cookie jar and a bed sheet from his daughter’s bed. He never called the police because he swore he loved her and she had been through enough already; a husband that had killed himself nearly in front of her and a daughter that needed assistance and care almost around the clock, which she tried so desperately to do. That and the fact he was terrified of being left alone to take care of Jamie.

  Since Emily Manning’s body was so badly charred in the fire the police weren’t able to take fingerprints from it. Instead they were able to lift prints from her jewelry box at home and match them to a partial set found on a tire iron used to subdue and kill a dog at the house of one of her victims, confirming that Emily was indeed the Sesame Street Killer.

  In the end, Jamie Manning was taken from her father and placed in a state funded home for disabled children. George didn’t serve any time since the police couldn’t prove that he knew of his wife’s nighttime activities and thus couldn’t make him an accessory to the murders. He did, however, begin to drink heavily and lost his employment with the Corona-Norco Unified School District. In August of that year he also lost his house and we never saw George Manning again.

  Emily Manning’s main cause of death was listed as ‘Death by Fire.’ I’ve always wondered if the pathologist found the BB in her eye socket when he performed her autopsy.

  We never heard anything about a BB gun being found at the site of the fire. Although half of it was made of plastic and would have melted to a black mass, the barrel and trigger should have survived.

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