She was the daughter of a journalist. She watched her father report local news and become a small-town celebrity. She was enthralled with his stories, and his knowledge of everything from politics to people.
And when she was 10 years old, Deborah Holt watched her father, Bob Holt, snoop out one of the biggest stories of his career: the kidnapping and murder of Santa Barbara resident Olga Duncan.
Deborah Holt, now Larkin, has just released a book, A Lovely Girl, a spectacular true crime story about how Duncan was abducted from her apartment in the middle of the night and found dead a month later near Ventura.
Bob Holt had always told his daughter that he would write a book about the case, but he died, and now Larkin has written the book both in his honor and to tell Duncan’s story.
Larkin will talk about her book and sign copies at 6 p.m. Tuesday, at Chaucer’s Books in Santa Barbara.
“I was just shocked that this could happen,” Larkin told Noozhawk. “I took it very personally. I identified with Olga and I worried that something like that could happen to me. I am interested in learning about killers, and what motivates them.”
Larkin said the biggest lesson she wants people to take from her novel is that a killer is not necessarily a stranger or an intruder. Sometimes, it’s the person in your own home. In the case of A Lovely Girl, it was Duncan’s mother-in-law.
The book is also a memoir, with chapters that alternate between true crime and the personal story of Larkin hearing her father clattering away on a typewriter late at night in his study. She soaked up the details of her father’s craft, and, in doing so, learned about the macabre demise of Olga Duncan.
Duncan in 1958 was a pregnant wife of Frank Duncan, a criminal defense attorney in Santa Barbara.
According to Larkin’s book, Frank Duncan’s mother, Elizabeth Duncan, doted over him and called him “Mama’s Little Boy.” She opposed the marriage of her son and daughter-in-law, and made secret attempts to get it annulled.
Larkin tells the story of how Elizabeth Duncan harassed her daughter-in-law to get her to go away, but when that failed, she hired two hitmen to kill her.
The hired killers were originally going to shoot Duncan and bury her in Mexico, but their car sputtered and even broke down on Cabrillo Boulevard. They eventually made it onto Highway 101, but when they started having car trouble again they took Highway 150 toward Ojai.
Near Casitas Dam, which was under construction at the time, they killed their victim by burying her alive. A month later, Duncan’s body was found.
The book chronicle’s Bob Holt’s probing court coverage for the then-Ventura County Star Free Press. The trial in Ventura exposed Elizabeth Duncan’s devilish plot, and even hinted at the topic of incest, according to the book.
Frank Duncan defended his mother throughout the trial.
In her book, Larkin shines the spotlight on Olga Duncan the woman, and offers a cautionary tale.
“What I realized over the years is that most murders are personal and that women are killed by family members, close associates, oftentimes partners — in Olga’s case, the mother-in-law,” she said.
Bob Holt was at the center of the story, the local reporter whose coverage was superior to that of the big newspapers that descended on Ventura to cover the national story.
Larkin watched and learned from her father.
“He continued to talk about it long after the story was over,” she said.
Her father also wrote a “Dave Barry-style” column and he talked about their family. She recalls that people would approach her and ask about her dad.
“I remember a girl when I went away to YMCA camp, she said, ‘You are so lucky, it is so cool that your father is a reporter … and wow,’” recalled Larkin, who now lives in Mission Beach in San Diego. “I said, ‘it’s really not that great,’ and she said ‘my dad sells cars, that’s really, really boring.’”
In writing her book, Larkin researched old newspapers and court transcripts. She found many of her father’s photographs in her research.
Larkin has a bachelor’s degree in American literature from UC Davis and served as a high school principal in Julian. But to write a book, she went back to school, enrolling in a creative writing program at UC San Diego and taking about 35 units.
She initially thought she would fictionalize the story, but along the way realized that the story was too weird to be fiction, and if she wrote it as fiction, a publisher might say it was unrealistic.
So she wrote it in the creative nonfiction genre.
“I wanted it to read more like a novel, but it was true,” she explained.
Larkin hopes people appreciate that life is short and full of random acts.
“Olga wasn’t a risk-taker, she didn’t make any fatal mistakes, she just fell in love with the wrong guy and ended up with a crazy mother-in-law,” Larkin said of Duncan, a nurse at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital when she met her husband.
And she wants people to understand Duncan as more than just the woman murdered by her mother-in-law.
Elizabeth Duncan was eventually convicted along with the two hired killers, 24-year-old Augustine Baldonado and 23-year-old Luis Moya. The trio was executed in 1962.
In a historic footnote, Duncan was the last woman to be executed in California before the U.S. Supreme Court suspended the death penalty in 1972.
The book title, A Lovely Girl, comes from Olga Duncan’s landlord, Mrs. Barnett, who called her “that lovely girl, that lovely sweet girl.”
And on a personal level, Larkin hopes she can serve as an inspiration for others to pursue their dreams.
“I am a woman of a certain age who found an agent and got a book contract with a really established great publisher,” Larkin said. “I had this dream that I never let go of. I was going to do this.
“They would say publishers don’t want older adults, new writers that are going to be over 50 because they want to have long-term relationships with their writers who are going to write multiple books. But I thought if I write a really good book, maybe they will want that book. So if there is a message writing, it’s to keep at it.”
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
