Posted on Sun, Feb. 05, 2012

Nearly 30 years ago, a small, red toolbox found in a field west of Modesto by kids looking for lizards turned out to be a booby-trapped killing machine when a curious young mother took a hacksaw to its small padlock.

The bomb that killed Jennie Holloman blew 3-foot chasms in the floor and ceiling of her mobile home, disemboweled her toddler and sent shrapnel into a neighbor's barn across the street. It also left her husband, Gary Holloman, a truly hollow man.

News accounts over the years have described the horrific homicide but never revealed its most painful secret, to Holloman, at least — that he was the prime suspect. For decades, he has struggled to turn authorities' suspicion elsewhere, even hiring his own private investigators.

He's estranged from the tiny daughter he pulled out of rubble. Pieced together by surgeons, she's now a woman with children of her own. She says her father is obsessed with the case and has let it ruin his life.

Disabled and retired at 57, Holloman continues chasing leads, reading books and trial transcripts featuring motorcycle gang members he suspects built and sold the bomb. He also maintains a Web site dedicated to solving the murder.

In case a shadowy figure familiar with vehicle ignitions doesn't appreciate his poking around, Holloman revs his pickup by clicking a remote starter from at least a block away, just in case. He blames a dozen short-lived relationships on his inability to allow anyone to get close, saying, "I'm always afraid they're going to die."

After almost 30 years of mostly private frustration, Holloman said he no longer cares whom his questions offend, even if it endangers him.

In a series of interviews, including a visit to the now-peaceful site of the grisly blast, Holloman periodically wept, especially when fingering tattered bits of his wife's clothing he's kept all this time. He apologizes, saying he can't hide emotion as well since the onset of Parkinson's disease a few years ago.

"I don't want sympathy," Holloman insists. "I want justice."

Dust, debris and death

On Sept. 19, 1982, Jennifer "Jennie" Holloman, 21, took a hammer and screwdriver to a padlock securing a 12-inch toolbox brought to the door by her nephew and another boy who said they found it among tall weeds near Woodland Avenue.

Her husband suggested she fetch a hacksaw, which would do less damage than prying, and he went into the bathroom of their single-wide mobile home. It sat on 28 acres owned by his parents, next to a house that was vacant at the time.

A white blast pumped shrapnel through walls, missing his head by 6 inches. When Gary Holloman came to his senses, he stumbled into the living room and shouted for his wife into 3-foot hole in the floor where she'd been kneeling.

"I hate to think I was screaming at her (as if she were) alive, screaming into the hole and no answer," he said.

Finding no dial tone on the telephone, Holloman rushed to a neighbor's home, then returned and realized his 20-month-old daughter was moving under the debris. His thoughts never turned to a 5-month-old son, later found unharmed in a bedroom.

"I picked her up and her intestines fell out," Holloman said, wracked at the memory. "I laid her by the door because it was the cleanest spot, took a piece of paper, pushed them back in and held her till the paramedics arrived. I watched her turn blue and her eyes shut."

Robin Holloman lived, minus a kidney and some intestines. A chunk of shrapnel worked its way out of her arm seven years later. At 31, she now has a family of her own. "If you saw me walking on the street, you would never know," she said.

Her father, who was divorced before marrying Jennie, took a third wife three years after the blast. Mention of Jennie became a "major taboo," Robin said. After a cousin revealed the truth about the bomb, Robin referred to "my broken mommy," a family member later told her.

"I used to go to the library as a kid to look up old articles on microfiche machines," she said, "because it wasn't talked about in my family, and it wasn't like you could Google it."

Her brother, James Holloman, now 29, said: "We didn't go out of our way to tell people our history. It never came up."

Their maternal grandmother, Pat Drury of Oakdale, said she cared for the children every weekend. "I was convinced I would pour as much love into those babies as I could, so I had to make nice with Gary" and didn't talk much about her dead daughter, she said.

A closed door

Gary Holloman said his new wife hid old family pictures and insisted on leaving the past behind. Suffering with traumatic memories, he was borderline suicidal and her approach may have helped in the short term, he said.

"She was a good person, but it would consume (me). She said she couldn't compete with a saint," he recalls. They divorced in 1990.

Robin's search in her later teens took her to the property, which had been sold soon after the murder. She also visited the Woodland Fire Department and talked with a volunteer who responded on the fateful day.

At 20, Robin legally changed her surname to Solovieff in honor of her mother; Jennie had gone by Solo, a shortened version adopted by her father as a young man.

Robin remains close to her paternal grandfather, "so it wasn't about getting away from 'Holloman,' " she said. "It was a way to have a connection to (my mother)."

"I didn't know a lot about her," said James Christopher Holloman, who went by his middle name in his youth, including at Davis High School in Modesto. "You always wonder what somebody would have been like and how it would have affected you if things had been different."

His grandmother said Jennie Holloman was "a live wire, a happy mother." She played cornet in Beyer High's marching band and at MoBand picnics in the park, and talked her way into a circus band every night while it was in town.

A life cut short

"She was really a sweetie, one of those people everyone liked," said Kathleen Reeves, Jennie's older sister. They talked on the phone about 10 minutes before the explosion.

"She was never in any trouble," Reeves said. "I don't know anybody who had a problem with her, and we never thought somebody was out to get Jennie."

Jennie Holloman had just started a job at an Arby's restaurant and had returned to classes at Modesto Junior College a few weeks before her death.

James Holloman began using his first name years later upon joining the U.S. Army, which took him to Iraq.

"I had a mortar land in front of me. The fuse blew but the shell did not," he said. "Some things make you think. For my dad, that would have been significant, to lose two people like that."

His father now lives a few miles from James Holloman's young family in another state. Gary Holloman asked that it not be named.

"While I'm not directly impacted (by my mother's death) because of age, I can see how it affected other people," James Holloman said. "It was always an issue."

Family members said no one was affected more than the victim's husband. He agrees.

"She was 21 going on 16, a kid, a real tomboy," said Gary Holloman. He had hired her to work at a hamburger shop he briefly owned on McHenry Avenue when she was 17. They dated after it went under, he said.

"If she hadn't married me, she wouldn't have gotten killed," Holloman said. "I'm guilty maybe from that angle."

But he's innocent from every other, he said.

Stanislaus County sheriff's detectives became suspicious when Holloman failed part of a polygraph test a week after the murder, he and his private investigators said, and have been slow to check out a complex conspiracy theory that Holloman pieced together over the years.

Biker link?

Holloman's camp believes the toolbox bomb was meant for Gary's brother, Gene, who died of diabetes at age 35, four years after Jennie's slaying.

Gene Holloman believed it too, a former girlfriend and stepson told The Bee in separate recent interviews.

The Holloman brothers had grown up with livestock near Empire, and Gene later raised calves at their parents' property on Woodland Avenue, where Gary's family lived.

Severe diabetes led to amputation of Gene's legs, but he got by on prosthetics and could ride horses and drive tractors. His enemies expected him to disk a field where the bomb was found, a former girlfriend and Gary Holloman told The Bee. A tractor pulling a heavy cultivator might have set off the blast.

David Huston, Gene's stepson at the time, remembers finding the toolbox on unplowed ground with a childhood buddy; they were 11 and 10. They tugged at the lock, picked up the toolbox and carried it to the house, tripping and dropping it on the way, never dreaming of the damage it would soon do.

"It's weird and awkward to say I carried a bomb that killed somebody," he said. He was fond of the aunt he lost that day and remembers crawling around with his toddler cousin before the blast.

Things were never the same, Huston said. In interviews with authorities, his stepfather pointed fingers of suspicion at those closest to him. The strain contributed to the split between his mother and Gene, Huston said.

Gene Holloman moved to Texas after Jennie died and tearfully apologized before his death, his brother said.

A private investigator in 1986 found a link between Gene Holloman's enemies and a dangerous biker gang suspected in a spate of area bombings in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Gary Holloman said.

Holloman said the case was stymied from the start because an initial sheriff's detective, who since has died, was friendly with another detective who had good reason to be angry with Holloman; the colleague was Holloman's former father-in-law and knew that Holloman had cheated on his daughter before their divorce.

Soon after the bombing, Gary Holloman admitted to detectives that he had been unfaithful in both of his marriages. Detectives made it clear he had become their top suspect, he said.

In a 2010 interview at the Sheriff's Department, Holloman laid out his bombing theory, including drawing the connection between his brother's enemies and dangerous bikers. But the detective showed little interest and continued accusing Gary Holloman, according to a transcript.

He shared similar information with the district attorney's office and the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, according to e-mails provided to The Bee, but was turned away, he said.

In a recent interview with The Bee, a sheriff's detective said the department will pursue any credible lead and welcomes new information. "By all means, contact us so we can see where it takes us," said Sgt. Brandon Kiely, otherwise declining to discuss an open case or previous detectives' methods.

Relying on court testimony from other cases, Holloman said the suspected pipe bomb maker previously had been convicted of a felony tied to an explosion. He was free at the time because of an immunity grant from authorities who needed information in pursuit of violent biker chieftains, and became a murder victim himself a few years later, court transcripts suggest. The bomb likely was sold to Gene Holloman's enemies and the killing was not sanctioned by the biker gang, Gary Holloman said.

Rewards offered by the governor's office and The Bee's former Secret Witness program yielded nothing at the time.

But Holloman couldn't let it go, and the premature ending of Jennie's life continues to define his.

Bee staff writer Garth Stapley can be reached at gstapley@modbee.com or (209) 578-2390.