New book revisits 1988 Whitlock murder in Modesto

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Deborah Ann "Debi" Whitlock was found slain in her Modesto home March 25, 1988. Her mother, Jacque MacDonald, began a crusade to find her killer. She plastered her daughter's face on billboards, pizza boxes and buses — whatever she could do to generate a lead that might solve the case.

"People thought I was obsessed," MacDonald told the Merced Sun-Star in 2005. "But I was a mother. No one was going to murder my kid and get away with it."

An informant's tip in 1997 led investigators to Scott Avery Fizzell, who later pleaded guilty to Whitlock's murder. Fizzell was found, in part, because of MacDonald's persistence, and is serving a sentence of 31 years to life in a California prison.

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Whitlock's stepdaughter, Angela Dove, has written a book on the case, "No Room for Doubt: A True Story of the Reverberations of Murder," which will be released Tuesday by Berkley Books. Dove, who taught writing and literature courses at universities for several years and now writes for an arts and entertainment magazine near her home in Asheville, N.C., said she was honored when McDonald asked her to write the story.

"Debi Whitlock was my stepmother, and I was the last person to see her alive," Dove wrote in an e-mail to The Bee. "However, nothing could prepare me for what I discovered while researching this book. While talking to investigators, I learned that my father, now deceased, had been the top suspect in the case. Examining the evidence they uncovered, I was horrified to realize that, as one detective told me, 'all roads led back to Harold Whitlock.' My father had never told me he was the chief suspect to his wife's murder, but I gradually began to understand the anger, guilt, and self-destruction I always knew had driven my father to an early grave.

"In that moment, this book changed. It was no longer just about Jacque MacDonald; it was now a study in how one moment of violence sent two people careening in wildly opposite directions: one became a hero, and the other self-destructed."

Published to the right under "Related Stories" is an excerpt of the book. "It actually comprises two small pieces that appear sequentially in the book," according to the author. The first part focuses on MacDonald. "This is followed by Jacque's not-quite-confrontation with my father: it establishes him as the primary suspect and encapsulates some of the evidence against him."