A Fascination with Darkness: The Girl Who Said Satan Told Her to Pull the Trigger
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
Some obsessions start small — a favorite movie, a book read one too many times. For eight-year-old Kim Goytia, it started with a horror film about the Antichrist, and it never let go. By thirteen, she’d renamed herself after a fictional demon child, filled a diary with love letters to Satan, and taken photographs of her own sister just before killing her. The court sealed the case. The press was barred from the room. And somewhere out there today, in her late fifties, a woman who once told police the devil pulled the trigger is still walking around with a new name — and no one but her knows what she still believes.
In 1976, an eight-year-old girl named Kim Goytia sat in a darkened theater in Sacramento, California, and watched The Omen for the first time. Most kids that age would have had nightmares for a week and moved on. Kim didn’t move on. The film about a demonic child ignited something in her that never burned out — she started collecting copies of the novelization, and when the sequel, Damien: Omen II, hit theaters two years later, she was every bit as captivated by the dark side as she’d been the first time.
Her mother, Carol Sommers, later said Kim went goth before goth even existed as a subculture. She dressed head-to-toe in black, growled like an animal when confronted, and performed what her family described as satanic rituals alone in her bedroom. She began going by male aliases — most often “Damien Thorn,” borrowed directly from the films that had consumed her imagination.
No one could have guessed just how far that obsession would go. Or maybe someone should have.
The Shooting
On February 3, 1981, thirteen-year-old Kimberly shot her eleven-year-old sister, Stephanee, inside their apartment at the Greenhaven complex on Havenside Drive — a home the family had lived in for barely four months. The girls’ mother, Carol Sommers, had remarried just ten days earlier, on January 24, to Jim Sommers, a Vietnam vet.
When police asked Kimberly why she did it, her answer was chillingly simple: Satan told her to.
The timeline of Stephanee’s short life reads like a series of quiet warning signs nobody connected. She’d attended Gloria Dei Lutheran School from September through January, then transferred to Hollywood Park Elementary, and finally landed at Bear Flag Elementary School on the very day she died. Between early January and the shooting, she barely attended school at all.
Dr. William Geisreiter, the principal at Bear Flag, remembered meeting her. “She seemed to be a nice little girl, sweet and quiet,” he said. “She was frightened. I touched her shoulder and said we’d take care of her.”
Kimberly’s own school record told a similar story of drift — enrolled at Sam Brannan Junior High that same week, after transferring from Joaquin Miller Middle School, she hadn’t shown up for a single class.
Neither parent was home when the shooting happened. Kimberly called her uncle, Vic Corbella, who rushed to the apartment and phoned police once he arrived. Neighbors had already begun calling in reports of a disturbance.
The Lie and the Truth Behind It
At first, Kimberly told a story about four men in a brown Camaro pulling into the parking lot while she stood outside with her sister — a flash, then Stephanee crumpling to the ground. She repeated the account to her uncle and again to police in her first interview.
The story fell apart fast. Investigators found that Stephanee had been shot at close range, with shell casings recovered near her body — physical evidence no drive-by could explain. Confronted with the facts, Kimberly admitted the truth. She’d taken her stepfather’s .32 caliber automatic pistol from its drawer, used it, and put it back exactly where she found it. When Jim Sommers checked the weapon afterward, two rounds were missing.
The detective who interviewed Kimberly in the hours after the murder described her demeanor in stark terms: unemotional and not frightened.
When authorities searched her belongings at Juvenile Hall following her arrest, they found her collection intact — copies of The Omen and The Antichrist, carried with her even then.
A Motive Built on Fantasy
At Kimberly’s first court appearance, her public defender pointed to truancy problems and emotional fallout from her parents’ divorce — a divorce that had actually taken place back in 1972, when Kimberly was only four years old. The defense argued the shooting was accidental.
Witnesses told a different story: they’d heard arguing, then a gunshot, then crying, then a second gunshot roughly ten seconds later — a sequence that left little room for the accident theory to survive.
Prosecutors zeroed in on a more disturbing thread instead: Kimberly’s resentment toward her mother’s new marriage. But the timeline didn’t quite fit that narrative either — her fixation on The Omen began in 1976, four years before Jim Sommers ever entered the picture. Carol Norman had married Kimberly’s biological father, Steve Goytia, in June 1967; the marriage produced Kimberly that same month and Stephanee in November 1969, before ending in divorce in January 1972.
The Sacramento County Deputy District Attorney built a picture of Kimberly’s obsession by interviewing family, friends, and teachers. She’d worn black clothing exclusively for six months straight, according to testimony, and once dug a set of the clothes back out of the trash after her mother threw them away in frustration. She told her mother she prayed to Satan because she’d tried praying to God first — and nothing happened.
In the Omen novels, the character Damien photographed his victims before killing them. Kimberly did the same. She took a picture of her sister shortly before the shooting, and two more of herself afterward, dressed, predictably, in black.
“I Could Get Away With It Because I Am a Juvenile”
Testimony painted an increasingly disturbing portrait as the trial went on. Co-workers of Carol Sommers recalled her saying that Kimberly believed Satan held more power than God, and that she genuinely believed herself to be a boy — the son of Satan. Kimberly had written letters addressed directly to the devil, describing, in her own words, how soft his skin was and how beautiful he looked to her.
Friends of Carol Sommers testified that Kimberly had once told her mother outright: “If I do away with you and Stephanee, all my problems will then be over. And I could get away with it because I am a juvenile.”
Court documents referenced even more damning evidence — that Kimberly had confided plans to kill both her mother and stepfather in their sleep after Stephanee’s death, and that she’d shared those plans with her maternal grandmother, Helen Norman.
Her uncle, Victor Corbella, testified about a visit to Juvenile Hall, where Kimberly told him she’d actually intended to turn the gun on herself that day. “She said she was going to take her own life… on account of the marriage,” he recalled. She told him plainly that she couldn’t stand her stepfather. She’d warned her mother, too — that if she went through with marrying Jim Sommers, “an accident would happen and they would never be happy.”
Notably absent from any account of the trial: Steve Goytia, the girls’ biological father. No record suggests he attended the proceedings at all.
A Mother’s Warnings, Dismissed and Denied
Carol Sommers worked at the California Department of Justice, and her co-workers didn’t hold back on the stand. They testified that she’d confided in them almost daily about ongoing problems with her daughter. Carol later turned on them, calling all four co-workers liars and denying she’d ever said any of it.
One co-worker recalled a specific incident: after being disciplined, Kimberly started to growl. Another time, Carol and Jim Sommers had to physically wrestle a steak knife away from her during an outburst. Kimberly had also told her mother, matter-of-factly, that Satan sat above them, watching.
At one point, the prosecution asked Carol Sommers directly whether she believed her daughter was possessed by the devil, and whether she’d ever asked a priest to intervene. Public defender Betty Rocker objected immediately, and the judge disallowed the questions before Carol could answer.
The Verdict Nobody Got to Hear
Two months later, in April 1982, Judge Sakuma (1918 – 2011) dismissed the murder charge outright, ruling that prosecutors had failed to establish malice or premeditation. The charge dropped to voluntary manslaughter. Then the judge did something that ensured the public would never fully understand what happened: he barred the press and public from the remainder of the trial, issued a gag order covering the sentencing, and sealed Kimberly’s records entirely.
The only information that ever reached the public came secondhand, through a family member who spoke anonymously to a newspaper reporter — a four-year sentence, served at a special facility where Kimberly could be monitored around the clock and, ostensibly, get help.
Under California law at the time, even a full murder conviction wouldn’t have kept her locked up past the age of twenty-one.
Kimberly Goytia walked back into society with no public announcement, no press conference, and no lingering paper trail for anyone to follow. The public she rejoined had no idea a girl who’d killed her own sister, in the name of a figure she’d written love letters to, was living among them.
Where Is She Now?
Carol Sommers died in 2018. Her husband passed away in 2024. Every attorney, judge, and detective connected to the case is now dead too, taking whatever they knew — and whatever they didn’t put in the sealed record — with them.
That leaves only the question this case has always left behind. Kimberly Goytia almost certainly changed her name decades ago, and today she’d be somewhere in her late fifties, indistinguishable from anyone else in line at the grocery store. But the real question was never her name.
It’s whether, after everything — after four decades, a new identity, and a life the rest of us know nothing about — she still considers herself a servant of Satan.
COMMENT:
I knew Kimberly; I always think of her. She was very nice. We used to party together. I met her from her aunt and uncle that lived in Northgate. She did wear black clothes. I never heard her mention anything dark. She said she had a sister that died she showed no emotion. She was a quiet but polite person. Never wore makeup her hair was never done up. She was kinda plain. But had beauty. I hope she has her life together and she is doing well.