There was an outpouring of grief from the community, as well as outrage. Every lead, no matter how insignificant, was followed: a 16-year-old Fillmore boy - found later near the riverbank where Joyce’s body was discovered - was questioned and released. A mysterious caller to the then Santa Paula Daily Chronicle claimed to have overhead a man in a bar about 300 miles from the city talk about murdering Joyce. The story was too good to be true, down to the caller claiming that his bar acquaintance had dropped his wallet and the driver’s license had fallen out, revealing his identity.All leads were followed, no matter how insignificant, eventually including the gut feeling of a Santa Paula Chronicle employee who worked with Joyce’s mother Inez. Mrs. H.Y. Riddle had visited the gravesite hours after the services and encountered Calvin Ray Reed standing over the freshly turned earth. A cold-ugly feeling, “I just had a feeling,” gripped her, Riddle later said in a Chronicle interview.Riddle, raising her two grandsons and supporting her invalid husband with her job at the Chronicle as well as caretaking the Masonic Temple, asked Reed if he was sure that the grave was Joyce’s…he said yes. Reed told Riddle that he had been out earlier in the day – during his lunchtime break from his job at the Briggs Packing House - and saw a woman he was sure was the slain girl’s mother.Riddle knew that Reed had been jailed earlier that year for making obscene and threatening phone calls to a Ventura woman, and at the gravesite she asked herself, “What is a guy like that doing here?” She asked Reed if he knew Joyce and he said no, and Riddle wondered about his interest in the grave.“You know Calvin, the so-and-so that did this…would do himself and the world a favor if he committed suicide,” Riddle told Reed. Reed didn’t reply, just nodded his head as he looked down at the grave.It turns out that another woman had her own suspicions: she observed Reed’s car in the cemetery over several days, gunning the engine of his vehicle repeatedly near Joyce’s final resting place before then peeling off. Meanwhile, Riddle’s feeling of unease deepened over the five days since she had seen Reed at the cemetery: she couldn’t sleep as she struggled with her suspicions and her conscience if her potential accusation turned out to false.Like many other Santa Paulans, Riddle knew and liked Reed’s parents and his wife, Connie, who had warned her about being out after dark just days after the murder. Connie was sitting beside her husband in his car as she called out her concern to Riddle.Finally, during the Chronicle lunch break five days after she saw Reed at Santa Paula Cemetery, Riddle made up her mind and walked into the office of Chronicle Managing Editor Otto Reynolds, emotionally confessing to her gut-feeling that Reed had something to do with Joyce’s fatal, brutal attack. By 9 p.m. that same evening, Reed had confessed to the murder.
Part 2: All leads followed in Carranza murder, but gut feeling leads to arrest of Reed
March 02, 2005
Santa Paula News
Before the myriad of television shows spawned by CSI, before DNA testing that revealed the identities of criminals using miniscule traces of spit on an envelope flap or a microscopic bit of flesh under a corpse’s fingernail, before forensic science became a staple of popular culture, it was a gut-feeling – perhaps what led humans to discover fire and the wheel - that led to the capture of the most notorious murderer in Santa Paula history.
By Peggy KellySanta Paula TimesBefore the myriad of television shows spawned by CSI, before DNA testing that revealed the identities of criminals using miniscule traces of spit on an envelope flap or a microscopic bit of flesh under a corpse’s fingernail, before forensic science became a staple of popular culture, it was a gut-feeling – perhaps what led humans to discover fire and the wheel - that led to the capture of the most notorious murderer in Santa Paula history.The body of 12-year-old Joyce Carranza had been found in the Santa Clara River about seven hours after she disappeared while on her way to a Santa Paula Union High School summer arts and crafts class on June 29, 1964. Less than 100 steps from the school’s edge on 5th Street lived Calvin Ray Reed, a 22-year-old man with a troubled past when it came to women and his temper. Married with one child and another on the way, it was Calvin Reed himself who inadvertently provided the clue to just who raped and murdered sweet-natured Joyce, often called Joycie by family and friends.Reed, who confessed to Joyce’s murder after his arrest, is again up for parole, 41 years after Joyce Carranza died. Ray’s February 25 parole hearing will be at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga, where he has been incarcerated for over a decade since being transferred from a facility in San Luis Obispo.The entire Carranza family was highly thought of, said Ofelia de la Torre, whose late husband Louie used to give a ride to Port Hueneme to his fellow base worker, Joyce’s father Jess. “Jess had a bad heart,” noted Ofelia, and indeed Jess had been hospitalized from the third severe heart attack he suffered less than a week before the battered and strangled body of his youngest child was found in the river.Ofelia, then living in Ojai, received a frantic call from her Santa Paula-based sister Ramona Chavez when Joyce was found. “Ramona said something terrible has happened in our town, she kept repeating it and then told me about Joycie. I could not believe it, it was bad,” and although even now the murder of a child is “terrible, but then – when those things rarely happened – it was even more so.”Over 200 people attended Joyce’s memorial mass and burial on July 2, first praying at St. Sebastian Church – Joyce attended the church school – and then offering more prayers at Santa Paula Cemetery where she was buried. Jess had finally been told of his daughter’s death, and was taken for a final visit to the mortuary by ambulance and was transported back to the hospital before the Rosary.By then people were stepping forward and together to help find Joyce’s murderer: calls were coming into the lead agency Ventura County Sheriff’s Department reporting that Joyce had been seen near the SPUHS 5th Street parking lot before she disappeared. Legendary pilot Jim Dewey had taken up a helicopter to help investigators look for clues around the river area where her body had been found.
