“The Bedside Murders”: The Unsolved Murders of Nancy Warren and Clyda Dulaney

On October 14, 1968, 7-year-old Johnny Ussery awoke to his mother’s alarm clock ringing incessantly. He noted the sun coming through the windows and realized it was late—his mother had not woken him up for school. He crossed the small trailer where he, his mother, and two younger brothers were currently living and saw that his mother’s bed was made—that was unusual. Had she not slept in it? There was more. Her purse had been dumped on top, and the contents were scattered around the small sleeping space.

Johnny went outside, and there he found his mother, 24-year-old Clyda Jean Dulaney lying in the gravel next to the trailer. He knew something was terribly wrong. “The thing I'll never forget is that she was blonde, and her face looked the same color as her hair. She was all white”, Johnny would recall decades later.

Upon finding his mother unresponsive in the gravel, Johnny began screaming and ran the short distance to his great-grandmother’s trailer. The television screen was still on from the night before, but the screen was white and fuzzy. Inside the trailer, Johnny found his great-grandmother, Nancy Warren, also dead, lying in a large pool of blood. Her dachshund, Terry, was there, whimpering beside Nancy’s beaten body. The dutiful 7-year-old ran back into his own trailer, woke and dressed his younger brothers, and ran for help.

Johnny later said, “I will never understand why, but something made me stop and grab the three piggy banks we kept on top of the refrigerator. With one each in our arms, we ran to a neighbor’s house where I told them mommy and grandma are dead. I remember after a little while looking across the field at the trailer and seeing all the cop cars. I remember everything up to that point crystal clear."

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Clyda Jean Warren was born August 24, 1944, in Stanislaus County, California. She was the only child of Clyde Warren and Louise McCracken. She had married young, and by 19 years old, she had three boys: Johnny, Lane, and Brett. Her marriage soured quickly, and by the age of 22, Clyda Jean was divorced and living with her paternal grandmother in her hometown of Ukiah, CA. Clyda Jean’s grandmother, Nancy Warren, owned an antique shop south of town, and the two women lived in close-set trailers on the property; Nancy in one, and Clyda Jean and her boys in the other.

At some point during this time, Clyda Jean met and fell in love with a man 24 years her senior; CHP officer Don Dulaney. Though there is no record of their having legally been married, Clyda Jean took his last name, and within a year, the couple was expecting their first child—a little girl, due in November 1968. Don Dulaney lived in a small apartment with his teenage daughter from his first marriage and was in the process of looking for a large house that would fit his new family. Until then, the couple decided that it was best that Clyda Jean and the boys stay on her grandmother’s property.

On the rainy night of October 12, 1968, Clyda Jean, who was 8 months pregnant, and her three sons spent the evening at Don Dulaney’s apartment, watching a televised Disney movie. According to Dulaney, he took them home after the movie, and dropped them at Nancy Warren’s property at 8:45 p.m. He then headed to Sacramento, where he was scheduled to undergo specialized training the next morning.

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Sheriff Reno Bartolomie and a cadre of Ukiah police officers began the investigation. Sheriff Bartolomie labeled the case “top priority” and assigned his “top man” (Senior Investigator Earl Friend) to it, with instructions to “drop everything” when a new lead comes up.

Both women had been beaten and strangled with a leather bootlace. Each bootlace had been looped twice about the neck, then knotted in the back. Both women were fully clothed and seemed to have dropped almost immediately; Earl Friend was struck by the “lack of panic” at the crime scene. Robbery was tentatively ruled out, as the antique store wasn’t broken into, and there was a large amount of cash in plain sight in Nancy Warren’s trailer that wasn’t taken.

One by one, suspects were investigated:

• John Ussery, Clyda Jean’s first husband, was furious over the divorce and was fighting for sole custody of their three sons. He claimed to to be in Medford, OR at the time and was cleared as a suspect.

• Officer Don Dulaney, the last person to see Clyda Jean alive, told investigators he was driving from Ukiah to Sacramento for training, but signed in at Sacramento at 1:45 a.m.; giving him about 90 minutes unaccounted for. His explanation was that he had forgotten his uniform in Ukiah and had turned back to retrieve it.

• A blue pickup with 5 young men in “hippie-style” clothing was reportedly seen leaving the area of the crime scene at around 8 a.m., but those people were never tracked down.

• A station wagon with three men inside who were seen in the area, and later heard at a restaurant saying, “We’ll get away with this one like we did in Oregon”. An APB was issued for the vehicle and the men, but nothing panned out.

• The Manson Family was in the area at the time. According to local media reports, “seven persons belonging to a nomadic cult were arrested on drug charges in Navarro in the Anderson Valley on June 22, 1968. Susan Denise Atkins, 19, aka Sadie Mae Glutz, was among those arrested.” Additionally, “several Mansonites were guests of a Ukiah man at his home off Boonville Road” (close to the crime scene). Sheriff Bartolomie said both the Tate murders and the two murders south of Ukiah were “in the senseless category”.

As an adult, Johnny Ussery began to try to get in touch with the current investigator on the murders of his mother and great-grandmother, and got this reply about the Manson Family connection:

In regards to the Mansons, I think this is a possibility. I have exchanged information with Charles Tex Watson who identified was [sic] being in Ukiah as well as with Patricia Krenwinkle. Both adamantly deny involvement or knowledge but they may be lying. I have also interviewed the lead investigator from the LaBianca murders as early information was that Linda Kasabian gave info to LA authorities about the case and I didn’t get anything concrete.

But in the end, there was never any evidence found to conclusively charge anyone with the brutal triple homicide. Prints and blood evidence at the scene have never been matched to a suspect. Overnight rain had spoiled the chance to take casts of shoe or tire impressions. It is possible that DNA is no longer viable on any of the evidence, as antiquated testing may have destroyed the samples.

 “We don’t have one bit of evidence,” Bartolomie said about the case, “and we don’t have any motive. If we could come up with a motive, it might make it a lot easier, but we don’t even have a circumstantial evidence case against a possible suspect.