Mar 18, 2008

Couple were brutally beaten to death

Bay City News

Charlene Abendroth, 57, and Ernest Scherer, 60, were brutally beaten to death inside their home in the Castlewood Country Club in unincorporated Alameda County near Pleasanton, Sheriff's Sgt. Scott Dudek said Monday.

The couple, married 31 years, had gone out to dinner on the evening of March 7. They left the restaurant at about 8 p.m., Dudek said at a press conference held at the sheriff's office in Dublin.

The next day, Scherer didn't show up to a Saturday meeting he had scheduled, leading investigators to believe the couple was killed sometime between 8 p.m. March 7 and the morning of March 8, according to Dudek.

The couple's adult daughter, who spoke with her parents daily, was the first to become concerned. She had called several times and still hadn't heard from them, Dudek said.

At first she thought they might have gone on a trip, since they often traveled in the winter and early spring, but it would have been unusual for them not to have told her, so she notified the sheriff's office.

On March 14, at about 12:30 p.m., the sheriff's office received a call from a country club employee who had looked in a window of their home at 18 Castlewood Drive and saw what appeared to be a body. Sheriff's deputies responded and entered the two-story, 2,000 square-foot home, where they found the two bodies lying in close proximity to each other in the front of the house, Dudek said. Both victims were wearing their pajamas.

"It's a hard time for the family. It was a brutal scene," Dudek said.

Some things inside the home had been disturbed, but Dudek said it was too early in the investigation to tell whether a burglary had taken place or whether someone had tried to make it look like a burglary.