Champagne Bottle Used in Family Slayings

A distraught aerospace worker who killed five people in his Artesia home before committing suicide bludgeoned all his victims in the head with one or more champagne bottles, also stabbing his wife numerous times with a kitchen knife, authorities disclosed Thursday.

“They were assaulted and suffered severe head trauma,” said Scott Carrier, spokesman for the county coroner’s office.

Ronald Taylor, 46, who police said committed the murders Sunday, died of “multiple traumatic injuries” after jumping from a nearby freeway overpass.

Taylor left a “brief goodbye note,” said Lt. Joe Brown of the Sheriff’s Department homicide squad, who declined to specify the contents of the handwritten document, though he said it did not shed much light on the carnage. The principal murder weapon, Brown said, was one or more filled champagne bottles.

The motive for the grisly slayings remains unclear--and may never be known precisely, say police, who, like neighbors and friends, describe the killer as a seemingly hard-working family man until the last day of his life.

“This appeared to be a happy family,” Brown said.

However, investigators determined that Taylor was worried about debts and anxious about his job at a Boeing plant in Huntington Beach where potential layoffs are a source of great tension among workers.

“There were a number of concerns about his employment and about the family finances,” Brown said. “What we don’t know, and may never know, is whether these were the things that drove him to commit this crime.”

Nonetheless, police expressed confidence that it was Taylor and no one else who murdered five people at the two-story stucco home on a quiet cul-de-sac.

“There’s no question that Mr. Taylor did this and that he did it alone,” Brown said.

Police theorize that Taylor killed his wife, Ruthie Taylor, 44, his sister-in-law, Mylissa Campbell, 29, and Campbell’s 6-year-old daughter, Jolissa Morales, sometime Sunday afternoon.

He subsequently attacked his son, Rick Taylor, 23, and his son’s friend, Tomy Kang Jung, 24, when the two arrived at the house shortly before 7 p.m., authorities say. All the victims except Jung resided with Taylor.

After the slayings, police said, Taylor almost immediately left for the freeway overpass and leaped to his death.