>> Squatter charged with the unlawful handling of human remains.
Robert Ross III (known as Red) heard from other homeless folks that the house in Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank neighborhood was unoccupied, so in late 2020, Robert moved in. Twenty-five year-old Robert was a meth user and he invited other users over frequently to party. Later, Detective Anthony Turner would say, “It was just absolutely filthy and just filled with debris, trash, foods, piles of stuff. There were buckets of urine and feces inside the house.”
Police were called to the house multiple times by neighbors reporting the squatters. The house, which sits behind a white wooden fence, was becoming increasingly run-down with brush overgrown. Officers, however, never had cause to enter the home.
No one would have suspected that homeowner Robert Enger’s corpse was lying on the floor in his house beneath a pile of debris. Robert was 62 when he was last seen in July of 2019. He had shown up at the home of a neighbor, bleeding from a head wound. Robert was taken to a local hospital, where he was treated and released. In hindsight, police believe this injury was the result of a botched suicide attempt.
Robert’s emotional anguish stemmed from the fact that he had been sexually abused by a high-ranking Marine as a child and feared the military was following him, he told neighbors. He was described as a friendly and helpful man.
In March of 2021, Robert Enger’s skull was found in a neighbor’s yard. A woman approached Santa Rosa Police in March to report that she’d found a skull while working in her brother’s garden. “I think I found a skull in my bushes,” she said. Police arrived at the scene to find the skull with scrape marks on it and a wire attached to it, along with two holes.
Upon searching Robert’s house, investigators found a homemade guillotine. Neighbors had described Robert as an excellent craftsman. It appeared that Robert had built a 20-foot-tall guillotine with a large metal spike in place of a blade, which he then used to decapitate himself.
