Murder of Beach-Goer Shocks Santa Barbara

SANTA BARBARA —  Phillip Bogdanoff, a civil engineer for the California Department of Transportation, took the afternoon off and was sunbathing nude at a secluded beach with his wife when two clothed men approached. In an apparent random act of violence in an unlikely place, one of the men pulled a gun and shot Bogdanoff to death.

Bogdanoff, 49, and his wife, Diana, 41, had spread a blanket on the sand on Thursday about half a mile south of Refugio State Beach, an area known as a nude beach, said Sgt. Jan Bullard, a spokeswoman for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department.

When the couple were approached by the two men, Bullard said, one of them asked: “Do you have any marijuana?” When Bogdanoff said he did not, one of the men pulled a handgun and shot him twice in the head. The two men then ran down the beach and were still at large late Friday.

“There were no sexual overtones,” Bullard said. “Nothing more to it. Just a random, violent act.”

While shootings have become commonplace in Los Angeles County, this is the first homicide the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department has investigated this year.

“We don’t expect this kind of thing to happen around here,” Bullard said. “It woke up a sleepy county.”

The beach where Bogdanoff was shot is just north of a campground at El Capitan State Beach.

“Whenever you’ve got a nude beach, you’re going to have some people who want to watch and make comments,” Bullard said. “But we haven’t had a lot of problems at that beach. A lot of locals go there, and it’s pretty secluded.”

About 25 sheriff’s deputies, several dogs and two helicopters searched the area for the suspects in Thursday’s shooting, but were unsuccessful. However, in addition to Bogdanoff’s wife, a number of fishermen had seen the two suspects earlier in the day, Bullard said. The Sheriff’s Department is preparing composite drawings of the suspects.

Bogdanoff, of Visalia, had been a civil engineer with Caltrans for 25 years. He was temporarily assigned to Santa Barbara to work as a bridge specialist on a freeway project. He and his wife were living in a trailer home near the beach where he was killed.