Introduction: ‘The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders’ is a moniker for a group of unsolved homicides that took place in 1972 and 1973 in the general Santa Rosa area, located specifically in Sonoma County in the North Bay region of California. The perpetrator is responsible for at the murders least seven young female hitchhikers, who were all found completely naked in rural areas. Californian detectives strongly suspect that the killer spoke with and was familiar with some of his victims before he killed them.
Confirmed Victims: At roughly 9 PM on February 4, 1972 twelve-year-old Maureen Louise Sterling and thirteen-year-old Yvonne Lisa Weber disappeared after being dropped off at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena at around 7:30 PM. Weber was born in Carson City, Nevada on January 29, 1959 and Sterling was native to Santa Rose and was born on February 18, 1959. Maureen’s father Larry tragically died in a skiing accident in August of 1958 just months before her birth at the age of 23, leaving Arleen to raise both her and her older sister, Theresa alone during a time where that was easier said than done).The girls, who were both studentsat Herbert Slater Middle School, had no intention of staying at the skating rink that evening, and had plans to go somewhere else, most likely a nearby park with four older boys (who later took lie detector tests, which ruled them out as suspects). They were last seen getting into a car on Guerneville Road, northwest of Santa Rosa.
Sterling was last seen wearing blue jeans, a purple shirt, a red zip up hoodie and brown suede shoes, and Weber was also wearing jeans, a lavender and white tweed shirt, a black velvet coat, and brown suede shoes. Law enforcement only released that two pieces of evidence in relation to the case that were found with the victims: a single filigree type drop earring with orange beads and a basket weave mixed metal cross attached to a gold chain necklace. Neither item belonged to either one of the girls.
When one of the girls parents came to pick them up from the skating rink at 11pm, they were nowhere to be found, and in the early stages of the investigation LE had felt that they were runaways. Their heavily decomposed bodies were found on December 28, 1972 by 17-year-old Glen Frost and 18-year-old David Brooner, who were hiking through the area known as ‘The Devil’s Kitchen’ and down a steep embankment roughly 66 feet off the east side of the roadway. A single earring, orange beads and a 14-carat gold necklace with a cross were found at the scene, and the victims cause of death could not be determined, due to the advanced state of the remains. By that time Santa Rosa was in a panic, and a county wide program dubbed ‘The Secret Witness Program’ offered a $20,000 reward for any tip that would lead to the apprehension of the girls killer(s).
In 2019 an acquaintance of Weber and Sterling came forward and told detectives that she had spoken with them earlier on the evening they were last seen alive, and that the girls told her that a tall, slim man had asked them to smoke marijuana in the lobby of the ice arena (she declined to go with them), and that he strongly resembled Ted Bundy. However, that same friend was interviewed for the 2024 HBO Max documentary, ‘The Truth About Jim,’ and THAT time she said that Jim Mordecai (the subject of the documentary) was the man that was talking to her friends that evening.
There were also rumors that the girls had been looking for a ride to a nearby bowling alley so they could meet up with some friends, where other sources claim they were in contact with a gentleman who lived along the Russian River; detectives could confirm neither report. Schoolmates were questioned about the missing young women the week after they vanished, but nothing useful came of it.
Kim Wendy Allen was born on July 22, 1952 to Kimball and Roberta Allen, and had a sister named Annilee and a brother named Robert. Of her daughter, Mrs. Allen told The Press Democrat that: ‘she was never a speck of trouble to anyone from the day she came on this earth. She trusted everyone, believed that people were good.’ Kim graduated from the private, all-girls Ursuline High School in Santa Rosa, and despite being her senior class’s spirit leader she was an incredibly private person and usually kept her thoughts and opinions to herself, even with the people that knew her best. Allen lived in the 2200 block of Guerneville Road with two roommates and worked part-time at a natural health food store in Larkspur, located roughly forty miles south of Santa Rosa.
Kim was last seen on Saturday, March 4th, 1972, and in the morning she had been visiting with friends in San Francisco and hitchhiked her way to work in Larkspur shortly before her shift at Larkspur Natural Foods was due to start at noon. She worked for approximately five hours then began making her way back to Santa Rosa, and the second-year art student at Santa Rosa Junior College was picked up by two men outside of her POE. They dropped her off on San Rafael’s Belle Avenue, leaving her with nearly forty miles left to her destination.The men told investigators that they last saw her at roughly 5:20 PM trying to hitchhike near the Bell Avenue entrance to Highway 101, and was carrying an orange, aluminum-frame backpack and a large wooden sauce barrel with red Chinese characters on it. Like Sterling and Webster, she also frequently used hitchhiking as a means to get around despite multiple warnings from her mother and a professor about how dangerous it was.
Allen’s remains were found the following day at the bottom of an embankment in a creek bed roughly twenty feet off Enterprise Road in Santa Rosa. She had been bound at her wrists and ankles and had been strangled with a cord. She had been brutally sexually assaulted, and semen was found on her remains; a single gold hoop earring was found near the body. Detectives found skid marks at the top of the embankment and wondered if her assailant may have slipped or lost their footing while throwing or transporting the body. The two men that gave Allen the first ride (one which had passed a polygraph test) were both ruled out as suspects. Her checkbook was found in a drive-up mailbox across from the Kentfield (CA) Post Office sometime in the morning on March 24, 1972.
On November 11, 1972 thirteen year old Lori Lee Kursa was reported missing by her mother after disappearing while they shopped at a U-Save, and she was last seen on either November 20/21 in Santa Rosa while visiting friends. Someone reported possibly seeing her hitchhiking on November 30, however that was never positively confirmed by investigators. Kursa had a troubled home life, and she was a known hitchhiker and frequent runaway, and on December 14, 1972 her frozen remains were found in a ravine roughly fifty-feet off Calistoga Road, northeast of Rincon Valley in Santa Rosa. Lori’s murderer had thrown her body at least 30 feet over an embankment, and she was found wearing a single wire loop earring in each earlobe.
On her death certificate, Allens cause of death is listed as a broken neck with compression and hemorrhage of the spinal cord, and she most likely died one to two weeks before her remains were found; she not been raped. Two people later called in tips to LE about possible sightings of Kursa: one shared that they saw two men with a girl fitting her description on Calistoga Road. A second said they saw a young woman with a white male with ‘bushy hair’ driving a pickup truck that had been parked near where her remains were later found. Nothing ever came of either report.
A possible witness to Kursa’s abduction eventually came forward and told investigators that on an evening sometime in between December 3 and 9, 1972 he saw two men with a young woman fitting her description run across Parkhurst Drive then push her into the back of a van that had been parked on the side of the road. They said that the woman seemed to be physically impaired in some way and that the men were holding her up in between them. The driver was a Caucasian man with an afro-type hairstyle and after the three got in the van it quickly drove north on Calistoga Road.
At around 7 AM on February 6, 1973 fifteen year old Carolyn Nadine left her family residence in Shasta County and spent the next five months traveling. She was last seen wearing a brown leather jacket with a fur collar and faded jeans, and before leaving the Anderson Union High School student left a note for her mom and stepdad that read: ‘Dear Mom. Don’t worry too much about me, the only thing I’m gonna be doing is keeping myself alive. Love, Carolyn.’ In 2022 her older sister Judy Wilson told an interviewer that after she ran away Carolyn had stayed with her for a period in her apartment in Garberville, and that she had been an eyewitness to a double murder and was ‘afraid for her life.’
Wilson said that Carolyn was getting increasingly paranoid that she might be discovered by someone that that knew about the murders, and she left her duplex and hitchhiked to Illinois. Davis returned to Garberville in the summer of 1973 because her sister was going to have a baby, and she stayed with her grandmother for two weeks that July before returning to her boyfriend in Illinois. According to multiple reports, her grandma drove her to downtown Garberville on July 15,1973 and shared with her plans to hitchhike to Modesto, California, with plans of staying with friends. She parked in front of the post office located two city blocks away from Highway 101, and Carolyn was last seen hitchhiking in Garberville that afternoon near the Highway 101 ramp going southbound. Her remains were discovered in Santa Rosa on July 31, 1973, just three feet away from where the bodies of Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber had been found seven months before.
Carolyn’s naked body had been discovered face-down roughly twenty feet down the embankment, and the fact that the vegetation growing around the body was not disturbed told investigators that her remains had been thrown from the road and she rolled for a few feet after landing. The way detectives discovered her body told them that ‘either a very large, strong man had heaved the dead girl’s body off the roadside, or he had help.’
Davis’s cause of death is listed as strychnine poisoning, administered ten to fourteen days before her remains were found, however the ME could not determine whether the drug had been administered by needle or by pill. Strychnine is sometimes mixed with other poisons, however an autopsy showed no trace of either heroin or amphetamines in her system. Having heard of the unidentified young woman, Carolyn’s sister sent detectives her dental records, and two weeks after her body was discovered, Jane Doe finally had a name: Carolyn Nadine Davis.
The ME determined that Carolyn’s probable date of death was July 20, 1973, five days after her grandmother had last seen her. It could not be determined if she had been raped, and her autopsy reported that she had an injury to her right earlobe that seemed to be an attempted ear piercing; her left earlobe had not been pierced. Detectives strongly felt that her killer had thrown her body from the road, as the brush on the hillside seemed to be undisturbed, and one investigator said that a witchcraft symbol that meant ‘carrier of spirits’ was found close to her body. In 1975 LE shared that it was ‘a rectangle connected to a square, with bars running alongside’ made up of twigs and sticks, and was identified as an occult symbol going back to medieval England, and possibly hinted at a connection to the Zodiac Killer.
In the winter of 1973 twenty-three-year-old Theresa Diane Smith Walsh left home and hitchhiked across California, making her way to Los Angeles and often traveled using Highway 101. Back home in Miranda, her two-year-old son was in the care ofher mother, and she was separated from her husband. In late 1973 Walsh was in Malibu but made plans to go to Garberville for Christmas. She tried to arrange a ride home and even reached out to a group known as ‘Hitchhiker’s Anonymous’ for help but had no luck. At around 9 AM on December 22, 1973 Walsh said goodbye to her friends, who dropped her off near Zuma Beach; she was last seen wearing bell bottoms, a lavender blouse, a faux-fur brown coat, brown hiking boots, and an olive-green Boy Scout knapsack. Her remains were discovered partially submerged underwater six days later by kayakers in Mark West Creek; she had been hogtied with rope, raped, and strangled to death. It was later determined that she had been dead for roughly one week before she had been found, and a combination of high water and heavy rains suggest that she may have floated several miles down the river from where her attacker initially left her.
On July 2, 1979 the skeletal remains of a young woman were found in a ravine off Calistoga Road, roughly 100 yards away from where the remains of Lori Kursa were found seven years prior. Due to the advanced level of decomp, at first forensic experts believed that the victim may have been Jeannette Kamahele until dental records later proved this to be false. The young woman had been hogtied, and her arm had been fractured during the struggle at the time of her death; her body had been stuffed into a bag of some sort (maybe a duffel bag) before it was dumped in the ravine. Sonoma County Sheriff’s deputy Rick Oliver said that several pieces of evidence were found near the scene, but didn’t elaborate further.
It was determined that the young woman was between sixteen and twenty-one-years-old, wore hard contact lenses (that she kept in a metal container with cherries on it), had red/auburn/brown hair, was about 5’3”, and had broken a rib at one point in her life. Her weight and eye color could not be determined and no clothes were found at the crime scene. One medical expert hired by the sheriff’s department determined that at the time of her death the victim was roughly nineteen years old and was most likely killed sometime between 1972 and 1973. It’s also worth noting that hard contacts weren’t typically sold in the US and Canada after the mid-1970’s as soft contact lenses had become available.
* I have seen the next young woman listed as both a confirmed and unconfirmed Santa Rosa Hitchhiker victim: Twenty-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College student Jeannette Kamahele was last seen by her roommate on April 25, 1972 at around 9:30 PM, and had plans to hitchhike near the Cotati on-ramp of Highway 101. A friend may have (possibly) seen her abduction, and told investigators that she had seen Kamahele get into a faded brown Chevy pickup that had been fitted with a homemade wooden camper in the back and was being driven by a twenty to thirty-year-old white man with an afro-styles hairdo. Jeannette stood at 5’5” tall and weighed 120 pounds; she was of Pacific Island descent and had black hair, brown eyes, and had a large birthmark directly underneath her right breast. She was last seen wearing a dark brown short, Levi’s jeans, and gold-post style earrings.
Born on February 10th, 1952 Jeannette Kamahele spent her formative years in Japan thanks to her dads naval career, and attended Yokohama American High School, which was designated for American children of military service members stationed overseas. After she graduated from high school, Jeannette decided to move stateside, and decided to enroll at Santa Rosa Junior College and moved to Cotati, where she lived along the 900 block of Sierra Avenue with her roommate, Nora Morales. Because she didn’t have a car of her own Jeannette often hitchhiked to get around, and would often catch a ride to class by walking along the nearby Highway 101 on-ramp. No trace of Kamahele has ever been recovered.
Unconfirmed Victims: Seventeen year old Lisa Michele Smith was last seen hitchhiking just a short distance away from her foster home, located along Hearn Avenue in Santa Rosa. Her foster parents reported her as missing from Petaluma, California on March 16, 1971 and shortly after a young woman with the name of ‘Lisa Smith’ went into Novato General Hospital after an incident she had while hitchhiking on March 26, 1971. Smith told investigators that she was picked up by a man that pulled a gun on her and threatened to rape her but she was able to escape by jumping out of the pickup, which was going 55 miles per hour at the time. The young victim was treated for a skull fracture as well as multiple cuts and bruises by physicians, and a nurse at the facility said that she looked to be about twenty-one-years-old. At the time, she was wearing a white blouse with ruffles, a dark pea coat, green bell-bottom jeans, and cowboy boots.
In an article published in The Santa Rosa Press Democrat on April 1, 1971, the ‘Lisa Smith’ that was treated at Novato General Hospital was the same person as the missing 17-year-old Lisa Smith. The young woman that is believed to have been Smith left the hospital before detectives could speak with her, and she reportedly hitchhiked her way back to San Francisco. Her biological parents eventually caught up with her and took her back to their residence in Livermore, California.
In 2011 The Press Democrat reported that the two Lisa Smiths were not the same, and she was not actually found. As of March 2025 it’s still not certain if the two Lisa Smiths were the same person or two separate individuals, and all of the police reports and medical records pertaining to the case were deemed to be missing by 2011.
Fifteen-year-old Kerry Ann Graham and fourteen-year-old Francine Marie Trimble of Forestville, California both disappeared on December 16, 1978 after leaving their respective homes to visit a shopping mall in Santa Rosa. Their remains were found wrapped in duct-taped garbage bags that were buried in an embankment of a heavily overgrown wooded area beside a remote part of Highway 20 the following July, roughly 80 miles north of their hometown. Because of the advanced level of decomp, their exact cause of death has never been determined. At first Graham’s remains were mistakenly ID’d as a male, until genetic testing proved otherwise. Both victims remained unknown until November 2015, when their identities were confirmed thanks to DNA profiling.
In 1975, the FBI issued a report stating that fourteen unsolved homicides that took place between 1972 and 1974 were committed by the same perpetrator, which consisted of six of the known SRHM victims as well as the following young women:
Twenty-year-old Rosa Vasquez was last seen May 26, 1973, and her body was found three days later on May 29 near the Arguello Boulevard entrance at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco; she had been strangled and her remains had been thrown seven feet off the road into some shrubbery. On June 10, 1973 fifteen-year-old Yvonne Quilantang was found strangled in a vacant Bayview district lot; she had been seven months pregnant and was out and about in the community buying groceries.
Angela Thomas was found July 2, 1973, smothered to death on the playground of Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in Daly City. The sixteen-year-old was a resident of Belton, Texas and was last seen at 9:00 PM the previous evening walking away from the Presidio in San Francisco; a locket was discovered near the crime scene. Nancy Patricia Gidley was last seen at a Rodeway Inn motel on July 12, 1973, and her remains were found three days later behind the George Washington High School gymnasium. The 24-year-old radiographer had been strangled and was completely nude, except for a single fish-shaped gold earring. It was eventually determined that she died within the previous 24 hours. Gidley had served in the US Air Force for four years prior to her murder, and told friends and family members that she had plans of becoming a freelance writer for the San Francisco Chronicle and was going to San Francisco to be the maid of honour at the wedding of a friend from Hamilton Air Force Base. After some investigating, this was all proved to be false.
Twenty-three-year-old* separated mother of five Nancy Feusi disappeared after going dancing at a club called The Plumbers Hall in the eastern part of Sacramento, and her nearly naked remains were recovered fifteen miles away by a fisherman at 6:30 AM on July 22, 1973, alongside Pleasant Grove Road and Steelhead Creek in Redding; her clothes were recovered nearby, and she had been stabbed twenty-nine times, mostly in the stomach, chest, and arm. She was last seen alive roughly two miles away from the night club, only three and a half hours before her remains were discovered. Detectives found shoe prints and tire tracks close to where Nancy’s remains were found, which opened up the possibility she was possibly killed in another location and was brought to the scene where she was found.
In 2011, one of her daughters, Angela Darlene Feusi-McAnulty was accused of torturing, beating, and starving to death her 15-year-old daughter Jeanette Marie Maples. After she was convicted, McAnulty officially became the second woman in history to be sentenced to death in the state of Oregon, the first since the 1984 reinstatement of the death penalty. *Some sources say that Nancy was twenty-two.
Twenty-one-year old Laura Albright O’Dell was reported missing on November 4, 1973; her remains were discovered three days later in some shrubbery behind the Stow Lake boathouse in Golden Gate Park. Her hands had been tied behind her back, and her cause of death appeared to be from head injuries and/or strangulation. On February 1, 1974 nineteen year old Brenda Kaye Merchant was found dead at her apartment in Marysville; she had been stabbed over 30 times with a long bladed knife and had asphyxiated on her own blood. Her assailant left a bloody handprint behind on the screen door of the residence, and it is believed that she was attacked between 6 PM (when she was last seen) and midnight, when neighbors happened to overhear a loud argument. Donna Maria Braun was only fourteen when her strangled remains were discovered by a crop dusting pilot at 7 PM on September 29, 1974 in the Salinas River near Monterey.
Over the years, California investigators have strongly considered the possibility that the perpetrator of the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders was also active in Oregon, Washington, Utah, and Colorado, and additionally have looked into the possibility that there was a link to the Flat Tire Murders, which took place in Miami-Dade County in the southern part of Florida between February 1975 and January 1976. Also, in 1986 author Robert Graysmith published a list of forty-nine confirmed and possible Zodiac Killer victims, which included the Santa Rosa victims as well as some additional murders with some striking similarities, including:
Seventeen-year-old Elaine Louise Davis disappeared from family’s home in Walnut Creek, California on December 1, 1969, when she was left to watch her younger sister while her mother went to nearby Concord to pick her husband up from work. When Mr. and Mrs. David arrived home shortly after 11 PM, they found their three year old daughter alone in the residence with no trace of Elaine. At the scene there was no sign of a struggle, however investigators were immediately suspicious of foul play due to the fact that her purse and glasses were left behind. After they arrived home, her little sister told her parents, ‘they took her away, she didn’t want to go,’ and ‘there was a Volkswagen,’ the latter part was corroborated by neighbors. The young woman’s coat was found two days later on the side of the road along Highway 17 near Santa Cruz.
On December 19, 1969 the remains of Elaine Davis were discovered floating near Lighthouse Point near Santa Cruz, however a positive ID was not made until 2001. An initial examination determined that the victim was in her early twenties, which led investigators to dismiss her as a potential match. Her cause of death is undetermined, however medical experts leaned towards strangulation because of some damaged cartilage found in her neck. In 2000, the investigation was reopened as part of a routine review of cold cases and the following year a new examination of the remains were conducted, and the victims dental records proved that the body did belong to Elaine Davis.
Sixteen-year-old Leona LaRell Roberts had been kidnapped from her boyfriend’s home on December 10, 1969; eighteen days later her nude body was found on the beach at Bolinas Lagoon in Marin County, and although the official cause of death was listed as ‘exposure,’ her case was treated as a homicide. Twenty-three-year-old Marie Antoinette Anste was kidnapped in Vallejo after experiencing a blow to the head, and her body was recovered in rural Lake County on March 21; an autopsy revealed that she had drowned and had traces of mescaline in her bloodstream.
Seventeen-year-old Eva Lucienne Blau was found dumped in a roadside gully near Santa Rosa during the equinox on March 20, 1970, and the medical examiner determined that she had been hit in the head and discovered drugs in her system. Blau was last seen leaving Jack London Hall on March 12 after telling friends that she was going to go home. On the evening of December 3, 1969, twenty-one-year-old Sonoma State College student Kathy Sosic accepted a ride from a stranger outside her school’s library, and at some point during the drive the man pulled out a handgun and tried to assault her. Sosic managed to escape by jumping out of the moving vehicle, and thankfully she was not seriously injured.
Suspects: Over the years there have been quite a few men that have been investigated for the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, and the first I’m going to talk about is Ted Bundy. When these murders took place in 1972 and 1973 Ted was in an active relationship with Elizabeth Kendall (and was seeing multiple other women as well) and he graduated from the University of Washington in the spring of 1972, and began law school at the University of Puget Sound in the fall of 1973. He had quite a few jobs during this time period, and from September 1971 to May 1972 he worked one night a week at the Seattle Crisis Clinic (with Ann Rule), and between June and September 1972 he had an internship as a counselor at Harborview Mental Health Center in Seattle. From September to November 1972 he worked for Governor Dan Evans’ re-election campaign, and between November of ‘72 and April 1973 he worked at the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission, and helped draft Washington’s new hitchhiking law, and even wrote a rape‐prevention pamphlet for women. From September 1972 to January 1973 he worked with the Law & Justice Planning in Seattle, and between February to the end of April 1973 he worked for the King County Program Planning, Additionally, in September 1973 he held the title of the Assistant to the Washington State Republican chairman.
s we all know, Ted didn’t ‘officially’ become active until January 1974, when he brutally attacked and left for dead University of Washington student Karen Sparks, but it’s widely speculated that he began killing much earlier than that. Some people even believe he may have begun killing as early as fourteen with the murder of Ann Marie Burr, who was stolen out of her Tacoma residence in late August of 1961. Additionally, it’s thought Bundy killed two young stewardesses in the Queen Anne district of Seattle in 1966, as well as two young friends vacationing in the Jersey Shore in May of 1969. More realistically, he may have started killing in 1973, with the murder of a young hitchhiker in Tumwater, WA.
After Ted was captured for similar crimes in Washington/Colorado/Utah/Idaho he was suspected in the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders as well, however according to Sonoma County law enforcement he was ruled out as a suspect in the late-1970s then again in 1989 (as his credit card receipts reveal that he was in Washington on the dates of some of the disappearances). I mean, let’s be real: he was known to drive hundreds of miles to commit a murder, and he confessed to having killed in the Golden State before (the ‘1992 TB FBI Multi agency Report’ credits him with one kill in the state). Another reason investigators feel that Ted isn’t responsible for the SRHM is that they believe that the perpetrator most likely lived in the Santa Rosa area, and may have even worked a local job, like as a mail carrier or a public utility worker that would have been familiar with the remote, rural areas where the young women were left.
In an interview with The San Francisco Gate in 2011, retired Seattle Detective Dr. Robert Keppel said of Ted: ‘one of the last times I talked to Bundy, I mentioned California, and he looked at me like, ‘I can’t talk about that right now.’ I think he believed his execution would be stayed so he could talk for years about his crimes, but the governor had other ideas… Bundy is definitely a good suspect. The killings in Santa Rosa would fit his methods, he spent time in the area, and I’m sure he started killing well before 1974… it was an open market for Bundy.’
Some similarities between the cases and Ted’s victims sticks out to members of law enforcement, as the SRHM victim profile is nearly identical to his and were all young women between fifteen and twenty-five-years-old that wore their hair long and parted down the middle. Additionally, he also made sure to dispose of remains in out-of-the-way, rural locations completely nude, and the way the assailant subdued his victims was incredibly similar to Bundy’s, as they were strangled to death, either by hand or with a household item.
Bundy also matched the description of a young, ‘bushy haired’ man that was seen near the scene of at least two of the SRHM. The first is in relation to the disappearance of Jeannette Kamahele, who was last seen getting into the truck of a man with an afro which is a type of style that Bundy wore in 1972. Additionally, it’s worth noting that Ted did own a truck in the mid 70’s, as he bought an inexpensive one to help with his move from Seattle to SLC (I believe he gave it to his brother Glenn, or he at the very least drove it). Then there’s the abduction of Lori Kursa in November of 1972, where a similarly-described man with an ‘afro-styled hairstyle’ was seen waiting in the getaway van that Kursa was shoved into (although in this situation the driver would have been only one part of a three-man operation; whereas Bundy acted alone).
After his first arrest while investigators were looking into his background, they learned that Ted had been in California on several occasions in the late 1960’s/early 1970s, proving that he did have some ties to the area: in 1968 he attended Stanford University and in 1973 he visited Sonoma County while working on a political campaign for the Republican party. He had also driven through the region on numerous occasions between 1968 and 1974 while visiting with his one-time love Diane Edwards, who had lived in Palo Alto and San Francisco.
However, despite his (weak) ties to California, Bundy was not linked to any of the victims from the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, and investigators would later find evidence that placed him in Washington either right before or after several of the murders. In a January 1976 issue of ‘The Vallejo Times Herald,’ Sonoma County Sergeant Butch Carlstedt said: ‘I tried to tie Bundy to our cases but we found credit card receipts that put him in Seattle at the time of the murders here… He’s definitely cleared as far as we’re concerned.’ However, years later detectives in Sonoma County learned that this was anything but true, as on a few occasions there were two-day periods in between many of his gas receipts that supposedly placed him in Washington, which allowed Bundy upwards of two days to make the drive to California then back home to Seattle.
In 2011, authorities uploaded a sample of Bundy’s DNA into the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) in the hopes of matching to any victims that haven’t been tied to him yet. When speaking to ‘The San Francisco Gate’ in 2011, Sonoma County Lieutenant Steve Brown commented that: ‘the feeling was that one person committed the killings, and Bundy was looked at. But I always thought it must have been a utility worker or a postal worker, someone familiar with the area.’
Another suspect of the SRHM is The Zodiac, thanks to the timing of the murders as well as the general location of where they took place. Additionally, the killer was known to correspond in code using symbols and ciphers, and located on Kim Allen’s missing soy sauce barrel was some chinese characters. Also, there was a crudely constructed symbol made out of twigs close to Carolyn Davis’ remains that looked like it could have been constructed by the Zodiac. Investigators reportedly ruled out the killer as a suspect because the SRHM seem to have a sexual component to them, where the Zodiac murders did not and the killer progressing from homicides involving a knife/gun to brutal slayings involving rape would be a huge shift.
Zodiac suspect Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo owned a mobile home at Sunset Trailer Park in Santa Rosa at the time of the murders. In 1968 he had been let go from his job at The Valley Springs Elementary School for suspected child molestation, and in 1972-73 he was a full-time student at Sonoma State University. Allen was arrested by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office on September 27, 1974, and was charged with child molestation in an unrelated case involving a young boy. He pleaded guilty on March 14, 1975 and was imprisoned at Atascadero State Hospital until late 1977. In his book ‘Zodiac Unmasked’ true crime writer Robert Graysmith said that a Sonoma County sheriff said that chipmunk hairs were found on all of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker victims, and that Allen had been collecting and studying the same species of the animal.
Forty-one year old US Army veteran Fredric Manalli was a writing instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College and San Quentin Prison, and after he was killed in a head-on collision after his van veered into oncoming traffic on Highway 12 on August 24, 1976 he was a suspect in the SAHM; at the time of the accident he had no illicit drugs or alcohol in his system, but was taking medication for epileptic seizures. After his death police found sadomasochistic drawings in his van, and amongst his artwork were pieces showcasing Kim Allen, who was one of his former students as well as additional works involving two other young women and himself in a sexual manner. It’s also heavily speculated that he had one of Allen’s backpacks in his possession.
According to Robert Graysmith, ‘when the teacher’s widow was cataloging his property, she came across drawings of people being whipped. The sketches suggested the husband had been involved in S&M. The instructor had drawn himself as a woman and labeled it with the female version of his own name. Chief Wayne Dunham felt the deceased man might have something to do with Kim Wendy Allen’s death.’ In Graysmith’s book ‘Zodiac UnMasked,’ Sergeant Steve Brown said ‘I’ve actually got a photocopy of two of the drawings that they found. He drew Kim and he drew himself as ‘Freda.’ He drew the other girl and those two girls had classes with him. They tested it, but it wasn’t Kim. He probably taught Kim, and when she shows up dead, he became really obsessed with her. A weird dude.’
In 2024 HBO Max created a documentary titled, ‘The Truth About Jim,’ which explored the idea that a high school vocational agriculture teacher and part-time landscape designer named Jim Mordecai might have been responsible for the SRHM. Mordecai was born August 27, 1941 in Santa Rosa, and as early as 1953 his name started appearing in local papers thanks to his skill in basketball and football. He died of cancer in 2008 and his family had an isolated ranch in Sonoma County near Santa Rosa, where he spent a lot of time in the early-1970’s. He had no known criminal record and after his death family members found a box of mismatched jewelry among his belongings, which belonged to no one in the family. One item, a hoop earring with orange beads attached, matched the description of a piece of jewelry that was worn by one of the SRHM victims…but his family threw out the evidence and didn’t hold onto anything. A DNA profile of Mordecai was turned over to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department in August 2022.
Philip Joseph Hughes Jr. resided in Pleasanton, CA and was convicted of three murders in Contra Costa County in the early-to-mid 1970’s: in November 1972 he stabbed nineteen-year-old Maureen Field to death after she disappeared after her shift at KMart was over. Two days after she was last seen, her family got a phone call from an unidentified male caller, who said: ‘I’m calling about your daughter. She is dead. I killed her,’ then hung up. Her badly decomposed remains were discovered on February 15, 1973 on Morgan Territory Road. Just over a year after her death on January 26, 1974 fifteen-year old Skyline High School sophomore Lisa Berry disappeared while hitchhiking. It was later determined that Hughes (along with his wife and accomplice Suzanne Perrin) kidnapped Berry at knife point after picking her up near her home then took her to a basement in Oakland, where they sexually assaulted her then stabbed her to death. They then wrapped her remains in a bed sheet then dumped her in a shallow grave in a desolate area in Contra Costa County; she was found five years later in Moraga.
On March 19, 1975, Hughes and Perrin abducted then strangled, raped, and beat (with a hammer) twenty-five-year-old Letitia Fagot. Her nude remains were discovered in her Walnut Creek home after coworkers called on a welfare check when she never showed up for her shift; she had experienced blunt force trauma to the head. Hughes managed to fly under the radar until July 1979 when a friend of his then wife went to police and confessed on her behalf (this supposedly was due to Perrin’s intense fear of her husband). The day after the call to law enforcement was made, Suzanne met up with a Contra County Sergeant at a local restaurant and gave him information about her husband and the murder of Lisa Beery, and on July 13, 1979, detectives got a search warrant for their home. Because Hughes victims were stabbed it’s a deterrent to him being responsible for the SRHM and he is currently serving life imprisonment at California Correctional Institution.
Another serial killer Joseph Naso was investigated for the SRHM: known as ‘The Double Initial Killer,’ Naso was born on January 7, 1934 in Rochester, NY and after serving in the US Air Force in the 1950’s he met his first wife, who he lived with in San Francisco. Together for eighteen years when they separated, Naso continued visiting her and the two had a child together that eventually developed schizophrenia, and he spent a good part of his life caring for him. Nicknamed ‘Crazy Joe’ for his unusual behavior, Naso took classes in a few different colleges in the general San Francisco area in the 1970’s, and in the 80’s resided in the Mission District of San Francisco, then in Piedmont and Sacramento; in 2004 he relocated to Reno, Nevada and worked as a freelance photographer. He also had a long history of lower-level crimes, like shoplifting, which he committed up to his arrest in his mid-seventies.
Nevada law enforcement arrested Naso in April 2010, and while searching his residence discovered a diary where he listed ten unnamed women along with some correlating geographical locations. The journal proved that he stalked and sexually assaulted his victims then photographed them in suggestive poses next to mannequin parts. He was charged with the murders of four sex workers on April 11, 2011 and was later charged with the murders of two additional victims. On August 20, 2013, Naso was given a guilty verdict by a Marin County jury and on November 22, 2013, a judge sentenced him to death.
Another name that came up in my research a few times in relation to the SRHM was Robert Kibbe, or the I-5 Strangler, who was known to target young, vulnerable hitchhikers in the later part of the 1970’s. Kibbe was first arrested for assault and battery in 1987, after he tried to handcuff a sex worker named Debra Ann Guffie, who managed to fight him off and flag down a nearby police officer for help. With her testimony, Kibbe was arrested and sentenced to eight months in country lock-up, and it was at this time that LE began to piece together their case against him. He was arrested in 1988 for the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl that took place the year prior, and was convicted of first degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. The SRHM’s fall a bit outside of when Kibbe was active, as he didn’t begin killing until September 10, 1977 when he met twenty-one-year-old Lou Ellen Burleigh for an interview; the two met again the following morning and she was never seen again. He was also known to cut off the hair of most of his victims in order to remove the duct tape before he would abandon them, and this was never seen in the SRHM murders.
Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin Angelo Anthony Buono Jr. were also briefly investigated for the SRHM but they were both ruled out as suspects, as they weren’t active until October 1977. Known as the Hillside Stranglers, they were convicted of killing ten young women in Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978 (Bianchi killed two women in Washington by himself). Buono died on September 21, 2002 and Kenneth Bianchi is currently serving a life sentence in Washington State Penitentiary.
Joaquin Cordova is another possible perpetrator in the SRHM: at the time of the murders in 1972/73, Cordova was a twenty-two-year old bartender that was arrested for the rape and assault of a twenty-nine year old woman in his home. During the assault he told his victim that she was ‘different from the other girls,’ hinting at him doing this multiple times prior. He was ruled out by investigators (as he was in jail during the murders).
I would like to give credit to the ‘unresolved’ true crime website, who said the following about a man named ‘Campo de Santos: ‘outside of these big name, serial offenders, there are a couple of other small-time criminals that I discovered during my research into this case. One is a man named Campo de Santos, who operated under the alias, ‘Deyo.’ By 1975 ‘Deyo’ was spending time on New Mexico’s death row, having been convicted for a crime that was almost identical to the hitchhiking crimes. He was believed to have been in Sonoma County when at least some of the crimes were carried out, but it’s unknown what kind of connection there may be if any. Speaking to The Press Democrat, Sonoma County Sheriff’s captain Jim Caufield would state the following about the suspect: ‘he could be out man in some of these, but he won’t talk to us. It’s essentially possible they’ll send him to the gas chamber and we’ll never know if he’s the man, in fact, it’s possible out killer is dead or locked up somewhere else on other charges.’
True crime writer Gray George strongly suspected that serial killer Jackie Ray Hovarter was responsible for the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders. Hovarter was a long-haul trucker that routinely drove throughout the northern part of California, and he was convicted of kidnapping, raping, and killing 16-year-old Diana Walsh from Willits, CA in August of 1984. He raped a second girl from Fortuna a few months later in December and tried to kill her by shooting her in the head, but she survived; she testified at his trial and helped put him behind bars. George feels that he could be a strong suspect in the murders of Francine Trimble and Kerry Graham.
Another name I came across in my research was an individual named Byron Avion, who was described as ‘an odd, portly man that was admittedly obsessed with the Zodiac Killer.’ He had other eccentricities as well, not the least of which was his ‘large collection of cardboard boxes, carefully stacked and tied shut with white nylon rope.’ However, the only place I came across a possible link was one source: a book titled ‘Suspect Zero,’ published on May 15, 2003 and written by Michael D Kelleher. I didn’t read the book so I didn’t learn much about this individual.
Works Cited:
Best, Joseph. ‘Jim Mordecai and the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders.’ (Fenruary 29, 2024). Taken on March 8, 2025 from Medium.com
Fagan, Kevin. ‘Ted Bundy a suspect in Sonoma County cold cases.’ (July 7, 2011). Taken March 8, 2025 from sfgate.com
Hamilton, Francis. ‘Sonoma County Missing and Murdered.’ (September 11, 2019). Taken March 8, 2025 from sonomacountymissingandmurdered.wordpress.com
March, Lisa. ‘Adventurous Shasta County Teen Last Seen in Garberville: An Unsolved Cold Case.’ (May 16, 2022). Taken March 8, 2025 from kymkemp.com
Romano, Tricia. ‘The Case of the Double Initial Murders: An Odd History.’ Taken March 13, 2025 from crimelibrary.com
‘Serial Killer Database: HUGHES, Philip Joseph Jr.’ Taken March 13, 2025 from skdb.fandom.com
The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders. (March 21, 2020). Taken March 8, 2025 from killerqueenspodcast.com/the-santa-rosa-hitchhiker-murders/
Unresolved. ‘The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders.’ Taken March 8, 2025 from https://unresolved.me
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