Mystery remains over couple’s separate deaths, one by hanging
Police say they have neither confirmed nor ruled out murder-suicide after a man and woman in a dating relationship were each found dead under grisly circumstances, the man hanging from a tree near Interstate 80 and the woman with traumatic injuries inside her Citrus Heights apartment.
California Highway Patrol officials first reported that a man had been found dead Saturday night, hanged from a tree with a rope around his neck about 30 feet away from eastbound I-80 west of Riverside Avenue, near the border between Citrus Heights and Roseville. The death was termed “suspicious” in an initial news release by CHP’s North Sacramento office.
Four days later, CHP officers and police discovered the man’s girlfriend dead inside her Citrus Heights residence on Auburn Oaks Court, less than a mile away from the scene of the hanging. The woman had “significant” upper-body trauma, according to a news release by the Citrus Heights Police Department, and had likely been dead “for a number of days” by the time the body was located.
The Police Department said the two deaths appeared to be an “isolated incident and there is no reason to believe there is any threat to the general public.”
“At this point, based on what we saw inside that apartment, we are treating this like a homicide, and we’re investigating as such until we can prove otherwise,” Citrus Heights Police spokesman Lt. Wesley Herman said Friday.
Herman said investigators confirmed that the woman had been dead “quite some time.”
“It’s not confirmed if this is a murder-suicide,” Herman added. “That’s certainly a possibility and we’re not ruling that out, but we have not confirmed that.”
The man hanging by rope from the tree has been identified by the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office as 59-year-old Robert Rankin.
A spokesman with CHP’s Valley Division had told The Bee early Wednesday that the incident involving the rope and tree was being looked at as a possible suicide, with nothing to suggest Rankin’s death was homicide.