Biological Father Met Gillihan Just Three Months Before Slaying

Just weeks before Katherine “Katie” Gillihan was in her east Benicia townhouse, she boarded a plane to meet Robert J. Stalknecht near Houston.

Stalknecht said he is Gillihan's biological father, whom she found through the website Mylife.com. He contacted Benicia Patch to share his story.

When Gillihan was four days old, she and her mother boarded a plane in Houston and flew to California, Stalknecht said. For those four days, Gillihan was “Cynthia Denise,” the name she was given at birth. In California, her mother allowed the newborn to be adopted by Ron and Donna Gillihan. They raised Katie, who .

Stalknecht said he felt the adoption was the best thing for his daughter under the circumstances. “In Katie’s case, she wasn’t dumped,” he said. “I knew she had been placed by a reputable adoption agency and that her prospects were really great. … It was the best thing I could have done for her to let it go the way it went.”

When Stalknecht received an e-mail from Mylife.com stating a 26-year-old female from Benicia was looking for him, he was not surprised.  “I don’t know a lot of 26-year-old females from Benicia, California,” he said. “So I pretty much knew who it was.”

He wrote Gillihan a letter to explain the circumstances around her adoption and they began to correspond via e-mail.  “We got to know each other pretty well,” he said.  

“She told me, ‘All through my teen years I was angry. … Now that I understand it, I’m not angry anymore.’ ” After a time, Stalknecht invited Gillihan to come to his home in The Woodlands, Texas, north of Houston, to meet him and her birth mother, who was gravely ill at the time.

Gillihan flew to Texas and met him Dec. 6. Stalknecht said their similarities were amazing.  They had the same temperment—laid back and practical, liked the same food, kept the same kind of sleeping schedule and were very independent.

“It was such an easy relationship,” he said. “Almost no words required. … I could talk to her and we would both know exactly what I was talking about.”

While in Texas, he asked Gillihan if she would like to verify that he was her father with DNA testing, and she agreed. They both gave samples, which were sent to a lab in New Mexico. When the results came back 15 out of 15 traits matched. The test was determined to be 99.9993518 percent accurate. 

The number became a joke between them. After Gillihan returned from Texas, Stalknecht offered to help her replace a broken computer. When she asked him if he was sure, he said, “Yeah, I’m 99.9993518 percent sure.”

“And the thing about that,” he said, “was that she knew exactly what I was talking about.”

A few weeks after, that Gillihan's birth mother died, and she returned to Texas to help make the funeral arrangements with her biological father. While she was there, he made her an offer. “I’ll try to make up a lot of what you missed,” he said he told her. 

He offered to help her move to Texas to go to college and start over. “She had expressed interest that she did want to come here. When she left here, she had mentioned that she wanted to come back here and live here ... and at one point she told someone that with or without Adam (Disa), she wanted to come here," said Stalknecht.

They started talking about plans for her to move and were in contact by phone and by text.  The last time Stalknecht heard from her was by text message last week. They were chatting back and forth, talking about what kind of furniture she would like if she moved.  

“Considering the short time we had,” Stalknecht said, “we got a pretty good insight. … It boggled my mind. I’d never seen anything like it. As far as the similarities, I never believed that kind of stuff could be transmitted that way. … I always believed you are what you’re exposed to … and considering I’d never seen her, the similarities were unbelievable.”