A Mother’s Beheading Shakes Little River

Little River, Mendocino County — The night before the shooting and killing and roaring flames changed everything, Asahn Smith got a text from a friend he hadn’t spoken with in years. Fletcher Pinkham, his old hip-hop songwriting pal, had a new tune called “Cannabis Cowboy.”

“I can show you how to grow that fire,” rang the chorus. 

“The song — it’s super catchy,” Smith told the Chronicle.

It may have also been horribly prescient.

Early the next morning, on Feb. 20, 2024, police say Pinkham staggered out of the woods at his mother’s home in a remote area of Mendocino County, with her four-story house engulfed in flames. His 75-year-old mother’s decapitated body, shot more than a dozen times, lay burning inside. Her severed head was pulled from a pond outside the house, according to multiple sources familiar with the investigation who weren’t authorized to speak publicly. 

Pinkham, who was living with his mother at the time, was gibbering unintelligibly, officers reported. His nearby car was stocked with guns, ammunition and clothing.

The 39-year-old man was taken to a county hospital for evaluation before being booked into jail on murder charges, where he now awaits psychologists’ conclusions on whether he is mentally competent to stand trial.

As far as most folks in this tightly woven coastal enclave of woodsy villages are concerned, the evaluations will just confirm what they’ve feared for decades. Pinkham killed a man nearly 20 years ago in what was described as self-defense. It left him damaged, they say, and since then, he has been violently troubled, a time bomb likely to explode in one way or another.

Now, as they struggle to make sense of Pinkham’s arrest and the death of his mother, artist and singer Linda Mercurio, 75, they wonder if anything could have been done to stave off the sorrow that has gripped their community for weeks.

This is a bucolic part of California where people move to get away from city bustle, so thinly populated that most folks know at least a bit about each other. And around here — according to more than 50 law enforcement officials, neighbors and family friends contacted by the Chronicle — the Pinkham-Mercurio family was known as sweet, super-smart, musically gifted and athletic.

That held perpetually true for Pinkham’s mother, brother and sister — but even as the family notched professional and artistic achievements over the past 20 years, things changed for Fletcher Pinkham himself.

He turned from an amiable BMX rider and Little League baseball star into a man with a hot temper and destructive relationships with drugs and booze, according to court records and interviews with dozens of people who know him. 

The breaking point apparently came in 2005 in Santa Barbara when, according to court records and police, he stabbed a man to death with a bayonet during a marijuana deal gone bad. He was not charged in the killing after officials concluded he acted in self-defense.

Over the ensuing years, Pinkham was convicted at least a half-dozen times in Mendocino and Sonoma counties of battery, drug charges and of assaulting three people who took out restraining orders against him. He was also thrown out of bars in the village of Mendocino so many times bartenders lost track.

“Fletcher was trouble, and everyone in town knew it,” said Will Poehlmann, bartender at the oldest bar in Mendocino, Dick’s Place. “You felt bad for him, but I had to toss him out of here about a year ago. He could get so angry, and he was saying racist stuff about the border wall and people there.

“I don’t think Fletcher was ever the same after that thing in Santa Barbara, after taking a life,” he said. “He started really liking hallucinogens, LSD. It messed with his mind. His mom? She was sweet, but having a son like that was hard.”

Smith made music with Pinkham for years when they were young men, and he has trouble reconciling the musician with the crime he’s accused of committing. The new song lyric about fire was referring to smoking pot, but seems to carry a disturbing connotation in hindsight. 

“It blows my mind that I was communicating with him 12 hours before the fire,” Smith said. “I had stopped talking to him after 2013 because he’d been in trouble and I didn’t need that in my life, but a year or so ago he contacted me and said he wanted to reconnect and make things right. And then that night before the fire he sent me that song. He called me several times, and now I wish I’d picked up.

“Fletcher has had his troubles, but I still can’t wrap my head around it,” he said. “I mean, he loved his mom. But for him — I think taking a life in 2005 affected his soul. I don’t know if he ever got past it.”

The hamlet of Little River consists of a couple of businesses along Highway 1 and about 100 residents scattered into redwood-studded mountains overlooking the coast. It’s a short drive from tiny Mendocino, which with a grocery and an actual main street is the nearest place to shop. The four-story house where Mercurio raised her three children lies five miles deep into those mountains along a winding road.

Today, most indications of what by many accounts was a placidly rural early family life are gone. The house burned utterly, leaving little but charred rubble, a cement foundation and large Tibetan prayer flags ringing the property.

As a youth, Pinkham was known as so fun-loving he’d jump his bike off the deck, for being the life of parties. His sister Heather was an A student at Mendocino High School, which the kids all attended, and as a piano prodigy at 14 she played in the Mendocino Women’s Choir with her mother, who sang alto. Eric, the other sibling, was also an A student and a tech whiz.

Today, Eric is a top engineer at a Bay Area computer firm and Heather is a renowned composer and pianist touring Europe.

Fletcher moved through winery and hotel jobs before settling into tech work himself. His LinkedIn profile says he was most recently president of Focus Tech Inc. in Santa Rosa, installing security systems. Calls to the company were not returned, but the owner of the previous tech firm that employed him told the Chronicle he was fired in 2018 after crashing a company vehicle and refusing a drug test.

Pinkham declined an interview request at the county jail, and his siblings did not respond to messages from the Chronicle.

“The family is devastated, and the kids want justice for their mom,” said Kathy Wylie, who taught all three children in school and has visited with the siblings since the fire. “Their lives are going to be hell, and now they have this sibling who is probably going to go away forever.

“Linda raised pretty exceptional kids, and this thing that happened has been a real shock,” she said. “Heather and Eric were brilliant, and what we remember about Fletcher is that when he was a kid, before he got that violent side, he was the best BMX rider around. His physical ability was amazing — he’d do jumps no other kid would do, wheelies around town. I’d call it daring.”

Pinkham’s Little League coach described the youngster he coached from ages 10 to 13 as “a sweet kid, never got in trouble, always listened to you.”

“He was a really good athlete,” said Gary Poehlmann. “He was such a mellow, soft-spoken kid, but then after that thing down south where he was getting robbed and stabbed that person to death, he was an angry person.”

Pinkham had been living in a family-owned house in Santa Rosa and earlier this year he was frequently visiting his mother, several people said. And he seemed to have improved.

“I saw him two months ago … and he said he was back in town and he’d turned things around,” Poehlmann said. “I was so relieved that he looked so good, because the last time I’d seen him a couple of years ago, he was pretty messed up.”

Robert Hollister, an auto mechanic who lives down the road from the Pinkham home, said he also thought maybe things were turning around for Pinkham.

“A giant tree fell on the back of my building here during the last big windstorm, and four days before the fire Fletcher stopped by and offered to help me get rid of the stump,” Hollister said, standing next to the smashed part of his home. “A few months ago he said he was back in town, getting his fill of the outdoors — you know, shooting guns, fishing, doing the things we do up here. It was a real change from the guy I’d known. He had real anger issues for a long time.”

He said Mercurio asked him about 10 years ago to hire her son “because he needed to stay out of trouble. So I gave him a job. He lasted three days. He didn’t like getting his hands dirty. All he wanted to do was write rap songs and grow pot.”

He shook his head sadly. “Linda did everything for him,” he said. “She tried to push him to be successful, but it didn’t seem to take.”

Indeed, Mercurio frequently sought help for her son, several friends said. She asked Poehlmann to write a letter to a judge after one of his assault convictions, and she took him to a Zen center for meditational healing. It fit with who she was.

“Linda was a calm, lovely human being,” said Cynthia Frank, who directs the women’s choir. “She was a good mother, and we’re all shocked and appalled at what happened.”

Struggling to help her son didn’t mean Mercurio didn’t live a full life, though. She ran an import business, traveled frequently, created artwork in her home, and frequently attended gatherings at the Zen center with her husband, Robert Pinkham, who died in 2021.

Her skills as a singer dovetailed nicely with her daughter’s keyboard expertise, Frank said, and in 2006 they performed with the women’s choir at Carnegie Hall in New York and at a church at 9/11’s Ground Zero. 

“I just saw Linda at the store the day before the fire happened, and she seemed fine,” Frank said. “It makes no sense.”

To another neighbor, though, Pinkham’s anger issues and rap sheet were warning signs that should have been heeded. Jade Aldrich is a family support advocate in Mendocino County, and both she and county Supervisor Ted Williams say local mental health resources are radically underfunded.

“We mostly keep to ourselves up here, but I just have to think, how did we do this child — and later, this man — a disservice?” she said. “Could we have helped him more? Our resources are so scarce up here it can take weeks or months to get your first clinic visit — and the nearest one is in Fort Bragg,” about 20 miles away.

Mendocino County Sheriff’s Capt. Quincy Cromer said investigators can’t share what they found at the death scene, or details of the investigation, but “it’s still our belief that the fire was set to destroy or conceal evidence.”

The day of the fire, the mountain canyon where the house sat was shrouded with fog, and the smoke didn’t stand out too much at first, Aldrich said. Power was out in the area, “so at first we thought maybe it was just people lighting fires for heat because of the outage.”

When firefighters and police finally showed up, the home was engulfed. Pinkham staggered out from the trees — some responders said he was naked — and “he was acting strangely, talking nonsensically, not making a lot of sense,” Cromer said.

“We didn’t know if he needed medical attention or not, so we did take him to a hospital for examination and a blood draw.”

He went from there to jail in Ukiah, where the appalling incident now joins a strange pantheon of eye-opening crimes in this widespread county throughout the years.

Maniacal murderers Charles Manson and Leonard Lake ran operations in Mendocino in the 1960s and '70s, as did deranged People’s Temple preacher Jim Jones. In the middle 2000s, Aaron Vargas made headlines when he gunned down his childhood rapist and the townsfolk of Fort Bragg rallied to his defense.

“This has always been a place where bad stuff happened,” longtime resident and stone-carver Robert Millhollin said as he grabbed groceries at the tiny Little River Market. “I’ve repaired probably 30 marble headstones from the 1800s where one says this guy was shot, then next to him his brother was shot, and next to that the sheriff was shot.

“But I’ll tell you, there’s more to this area than that,” he hastened to add. “This is really an art colony around here, with a rich heritage. It’s a good place to be away from everything, but when something like this death happens, everyone knows about it. It hurts.”

The blaze at the Pinkham house burned so fiercely it was three days before it cooled enough for crews to find Mercurio’s remains.

Six days later, 50 people gathered for a memorial at a local Zen center. According to people who attended the memorial, the monk who officiated told the hushed crowd: “Listen to the ocean, listen to the wind, and let it sweep through your mind. You’ll never get to the bottom of how something like this can happen, because there is no rational explanation for it.

“But you can rest in the truth that in Linda’s love and dedication to her children, she gave everything.”

(SF Chronicle)