The Region - News from May 11, 1986

A Lebec man shot his 13-year-old girlfriend to death and then shot himself just before their car plunged over a 300-foot cliff near Gorman, the Ventura County coroner’s office reported. The bodies of Robert John Wagner Jr., 19, and Nichol Lynn Thompson, 13, were found near the wreckage of their car in the Hungry Valley area of Los Padres National Forest, and authorities assumed that they had been killed in the crash. But autopsies disclosed that the girl was dead of .22-caliber gunshot wounds in her head and chest evidently inflicted by Wagner, who died of a single bullet wound in his head.