Grand Junction Police Department records related to the July 25, 1975 murder of Linda Benson and her five-year-old daughter, Kelly Ketchum. Their murders were only a small part of a much larger and ongoing crime spree in Grand Junction, CO that seemed to target individuals that knew too much about the region’s narcotics activities linked to corrupt law enforcement such as former police chief Ben Meyers. It was said that one of Linda’s neighbors reported to seeing a man that matched Ted Bundy’s description around the complex right before the murder took place.
The apartment complex where Linda and her daughter lived when they were murdered.
Background:Karen Merle Levy was born on October 28, 1954 to Bertram and Sylvia (nee Neifield) Levy in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Bertram Elliott Levy was born on June 17, 1927 in Camden NJ and Sylvia was born on May 29, 1929 in Pennsylvania. After graduating from Camdem High School in 1944, Mr. Levy went on to serve in WWII, and upon returning home married Sylvia in the summer of 1950; the couple went on to have three children together: Karen, Eric, and Richard. Bertram was the chairman of the board for Parts Distributors Incorporated in Cherry Hill, and according to the 1950 census, Mrs. Levy’s profession was listed as ‘a secretary at a sweater manufacturer.’ According to her father, before she was killed Karen had recently made a ‘prayer shall’ for her brother, Rick, and she ‘was very creative, good at cooking and sewing. Not a great student.’ He went on to say that ‘she enrolled in home economics at Syracuse University, so you can imagine what kind of girl she was. And there were some who felt she was very pretty, and that’s how I felt too.’
Syracuse University: After graduating from Cherry Hill East High School in 1972, Karen went on to attend Syracuse University, majoring in Home Economics. According to Karen’s family, her hobbies included bowling, reading, and riding her bike, and those that knew her well said that she possessed a lot of ‘old-fashioned qualities’ and really excelled at cooking and sewing. At the time of her death she was working on making an afghan and had it with her when she left for New Jersey. Ms. Levy stood at 5 feet tall even, weighed between 100 to 105 pounds, and wore her dark brown hair at her shoulders; she also had brown eyes and wore gold-rimmed, ‘granny-type’ glasses.
At the time of her murder Karen was in a long-distance relationship with a young man named Gary Lieberman, who transferred to Cherry Hill East High School in the beginning of their junior year in 1970. Lieberman’s name came immediately after hers in their school’s yearbook, and because of that a part of me wonders if they were brought together for semi-logistical reasons. After graduating high school he went on to attend Monmouth College, located in West Long Branch, New Jersey.
In her daughters first few months away from home, Mrs. Levy said that she ‘couldn’t keep her in writing paper, she wrote to us and her grandmother and her friends all the time. She called home more than once a week.‘ The Levy’s saw Karen for the last time roughly three weeks before she disappeared, during parents weekend on October 28, 1972, which also happened to be her 18th birthday. At that time Karen shared with them her plans of borrowing one of her brothers cars to go and visit Gary the weekend of November 10, 1972, but he wound up needing it. So, she did what many other young students at SU did at the time: she posted a three-by-five index card on a bulletin board on campus that said ‘ride wanted’ that contained her name, contact information, and final destination. Mrs. Levy said that ‘she told her friends he sounded strange over the phone and asked them to come along with her to meet him. The man looked alright and she took the ride.’
Monmouth College: On November 9, 1972 a ‘non-student’ and self-proclaimed ‘businessman*’ from Livingston, NJ calling himself ‘Bill Lacey’ reached out to Levy by phone and agreed to take her to Monmouth College, and the two made plans to meet at the Upstate Medical Center near campus at 6 PM the following day (*one report said he claimed to be a ‘traveling salesman’). Levy was accompanied by her friend Paula Lippin and her boyfriend Mitchell Sakofs, and they were able to confirm that she did meet up with an individual that introduced himself as Bill Lacey and was last seen walking away from them in his company. She was last seen wearing a navy blue peacoat, blue bell bottom ‘dungarees,’ a multi-colored V-neck vest, and brown shoes; she was carrying with her a blue knapsack and told Gary she was due to arrive at around 11 PM.
Disappearance: When Karen never arrived at Monmouth police were immediately notified and she was officially listed as a ‘missing person’ due to the fact they had no solid evidence that she had been abducted or was forced into ‘Bill Lacey’s’ car. After they felt that her case wasn’t being taken seriously enough, the Levy’s hired two New Jersey private investigators to assist, including one named John Begley, who brought her disappearance to the attention of the Albany Branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on November 13, 1972. Also on the same date, Sylvia Levy reached out to the Newark Division of the FBI, and on November 14th the Identification Division was asked to release a missing persons notice. About her daughter, Mrs. Levy said ‘she loved college and she had no family problems. She was going to visit her boyfriend and she had a birthday present for him. Why would anyone assume she was a runaway?’ She also said that in the initial stages of her daughter’s disappearance things were mishandled by the Syracuse police department, who she said didn’t have the resources to make a thorough investigation. She also charged the department with ‘cynicism and callousness in not conducting a prompt probe of Karen’s disappearance, and that no one lifted a finger for days, and those days were crucial, because they would not believe in the honesty and the sincerity and goodness of our child.’ About the delay in the initial stages of the case, Sylvia said ‘you see the attitude of the authorities is: if you’re young and you disappear, you ran off. They besmith the kids as a group. And the moral of the story is: don’t be young.’
Three policing jurisdictions were investigating Levy’s case: University Police, local Syracuse law enforcement, and the NYS Troopers, and in the early parts of the investigation at least twelve detectives were assigned to work full time on the case. In the first few days after she disappeared investigators focused their search efforts on Sennett, NY after they received multiple reports on November 11th that a man was seen carrying what seemed to be an unconscious woman to his car. One of the women that reported the incident said she was driving on an isolated road when she saw a car parked next to a field and a man walking towards it while carrying a woman that appeared to be unconscious that was dressed in a blue coat and jeans. Unfortunately, nothing came of this.
Investigators combed the general Central New York area and expanded their search into New Jersey, but came up with nothing. Syracuse police conducted over 500 interviews over the course of the investigation and tracked down anyone and everyone that was confirmed to be in the area when Levy was last seen. They also investigated all locals that were named Bill Lacey (or had variations of the name) and spoke with other young women that requested rides in the same method as Levy and whether or not they had any strange encounters with a man that matched his description. Additionally, detectives checked out local newspapers looking for advertisements that were posted by men offering rides in the same time frame that Levy vanished.
Every single tip that investigators received regarding the disappearance of Karen Levy was looked into, and many of the leads were related to the bulletin boards on Syracuse University’s campus. Additionally, NYS Police used helicopters, airplanes, and dogs in their search efforts, and conducted foot searches all over the two most likely routes of travel from SU to Monmouth College, combing through long stretches of highways and secluded ‘lovers’ lanes’… but to no avail. Because Levy’s friend and her boyfriend were able to get a good look at ‘Bill Lacey,’ a sketch artist was able to come up with a composite drawing of him, which was shared all over New York state. According to them, the man looked like ‘half the guys in the country’ aside from his left eye, which was either crossed or unable to completely focus.
At the request of the Syracuse PD, the Albany Branch of the FBI (most likely as a cooperative measure, as they weren’t officially involved) conducted investigations regarding Levy’s disappearance in Oklahoma City, New York City, Chicago, Memphis, Charlotte, Newark, Dallas, Honolulu, and Detroit, which helped eliminate suspects.Because Ms. Levy left with Lacey voluntarily and of her own free will there was no violation of the Federal Kidnaping Statute., therefore the FBI didn’t ‘officially’ join in on the investigation. Despite this, Mr. and Mrs. Levy felt their daughter would never leave on her own with a stranger, and her father commented that: ‘it’s just not consistent with her or her nature to disappear purposefully,’ and about the possibility that someone may have taken his Karen he said that he had ‘no feeling toward that man who has abducted her, I can’t feel vindictive. We just want her home safe and sound. We don’t have any Thanksgiving plan, hopefully we will celebrate Karen’s safe return.’
The Levy’s knew that their daughter would never voluntarily go anywhere with a strange man that she didn’t know. and immediately knew that something sinister had happened to her. In December 1972 they posted a $2,500 reward for any information that lead to the return of their daughter (it was never redeemed), and paid for thousands of missing persons fliersthat contained a picture of Karen on it along with the police composite sketch of ‘Bill Lacey’ as well as both of their complete physical descriptions.
Police tracked down a few young men that matched Bill Lacey’s description, and all of them were brought in for questioning and were released. One of the suspects was identified by both of Levy’s friends from a photograph, however when it came to a line-up they said they were only ‘uncertain’ it was him. After a long, in-depth interrogation the man passed a lie‐detector test, and was able to come up with an alibi for his whereabouts on November 10, 1972.
‘Bill Lacey:’ According to Karen’s friends, she had shared that she was slightly suspicious of the man that would be driving her to New Jersey after a weird conversations they had over the telephone the day before she vanished, as they were dotted with ‘hippie-type’ phrases such as ‘bummer’ and he seemed vague in his knowledge about the distance to Gary’s college. They were all surprised when ’Bill Lacey’ showed up dressed as a clean-cut businessman, wearing a grey suit with a vest, his brown hair cut short and parted neatly on the right; they also said that he was between 20 to 25 years old, roughly six feet tall, and told them that he was from Cleveland.
Detectives went to Upstate Medical Center where Lacey said he delivered medical supplies to, and spoke with members of their staff, and they said they had never heard of him. They also learned that two other coeds that were looking for rides were also contacted by a man named ‘Bill Lacey:’ one girl needed to get to Philadelphia and the other one to Boston, and in each case Lacey told them that he made weekly deliveries to their city. The girl in Philadelphia got spooked after she asked for a phone number and he simply hung up on her, and the one from Boston said when she told him that she wanted a friend to come with her he suddenly said that he needed to leave earlier than he originally anticipated and hung up on her.
One of the last people to talk to Karen during the final hours of her life was Gary, who had driven to Syracuse University the weekend prior to attend a rock concert on campus, and when he left Monday morning they had agreed to talk on the phone the following Thursday about her possibly coming to visit him the following weekend. He said that: ‘she said there was something fishy about the guy who offered her a ride. She said a lot of girls on her floor didn’t think she should take the ride.’ When she asked him what she should do, Lieberman thought about it briefly then said he ‘couldn’t make that decision. I told her I wanted to see her, but didn’t want her to take any unnecessary risk.’ He said that in response to this, she said they would ‘leave it that I’m coming down unless I give you a call.’ But he never heard from her again after that.
According to her high school friends Sherry Frepow and Michele Goldstein, who both went to attend Monmouth College with Gary, Karen had always bummed rides with friends on previous visits, and according to Frepow, ‘she never took rides with strangers, but she really wanted to come down that weekend. She was coming for Gary’s and my birthday. She mentioned over the phone the night before that the guy was kind of weird because he wasn’t charging her any money, and he seemed wrong about the time it took to get here. I didn’t want to think anything about it. You just never think that something like this could happen.’
After Karen talked to her boyfriend she spoke with her parents, and Mr. Levy said that: ‘she called all excited about getting a ride. She gave no details.’ Mr. Levy described Karen as ‘steady and reliable,’ and if anything, she was ‘too trustworthy,’ and that attending school at Syracuse University was the first time that she was ever away from home. According to them, she always called us and the call on Thursday was ‘nothing out of the ordinary and barely mentioned who she was getting a ride with, and she certainly didn’t tell us about her doubts of taking a ride with that man.’ About the individual, Bertram Levy said that ‘they described him later as a neat looking man, well dressed. Not a beatnik. Not a hippie in dungarees. Karen would never have accepted a ride with one of those.’ To this, Mrs. Levy shook her head and said ‘Oh, maybe she would have. We don’t know, we just don’t know.’
In a document I found that included a great deal of information related to the Levy case titled, ‘Hearings before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary House of Representatives, Record Session, HR 4191 and HR 8722, Amendments to the Federal Kidnapping Statute, dated February 27, 1974 and April 10, 1974’ (which was obviously compiled before the apprehension of John E. Harris): ‘The Syracuse University Police Department’s initial report listed the only person who accompanied Karen to meet ‘Bill Lacey’ on November 10, as Amy Krackovitz, Karen’s roommate. However, two people, not one, accompanied Karen, and Amy Krackovitz was not one of them. Similarly, the report listed the suspected abductor as one ‘Charles Lacey,’ and the University Police has devoted some time and effort in preparing a preliminary background report on a ‘Charles Lacey’ for their initial report. However, Karen Levy’s abductor had identified himself as ‘Bill Lacey’ not ‘Charles,’ and again precious time was lost. In fact, it was not until two days after Karen’s disappearance that the Syracuse University Police Department mapped a coordinated plan of investigation. Yet, even after mapping the plan, it was not until the afternoon of November 13, when at the suggestion of the Levys’ private detective that the Syracuse University Police Department went to the ride boards to check for fingerprints on Karen’s ride notices, which were the tab type requiring anyone removing a tab with Karen’s phone number on it to touch the notice.’
Ted of the West Coast?’: Months ticked by, then eventually years, and Levy’s homicide remained unsolved. By the summer of 1974 the murders in Seattle had started, and the infamous ‘Ted of the West Coast’ had begun his reign of terror throughout the Pacific Northwest. Briefly, in the summer of 1974 it was speculated that the crazed killer had made his way to New York state and had something to do with the disappearance of Karen Levy, however that theory quickly was tossed out when her real killer was apprehended that fall. At the time of Levy’s disappearance in November 1972 Bundy was employed at Seattle’s Department of Law & Justice Planning (he was there from September 1972 to January 1973) and was in his first semester of law school at The University of Puget Sound in Tacoma. He was in a committed relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer and was living at the Rogers Rooming House on 12th Avenue in Seattle’s University District.
Murder: According to an anonymous member of the Syracuse Police Department’s criminal investigation division, in late October 1974 ‘it was a confession to a friend by the suspect that finally helped to break the case.** Syracuse Deputy Police Chief John Dillon said that he got a tip from a friend of twenty-four-year-old John E. Harris of Cicero, NY who shared with him that he tried to stab thirty-four-year old Richard Bellinger with an ice pick on March 26, 1974, and that he killed Karen Levy. Bellinger was the business agent for John’s wife of a year-and-a-half Donna Lee Harris, who according to detectives was ‘a 21‐year‐old go‐go dancer.’ Unfortunately he told police that he didn’t get a good look at his attacker and wouldn’t be able to recognize him. Harris, who by that time had grown a big bushy beard, told investigators that Levy had gotten ‘hysterical’ when he attacked her and he killed her to ‘shut her up.’ During the interrogation his wife sat beside him, softly coaxing her husband to ‘tell them everything. If you did anything wrong, tell them.’ At that time he also volunteered that at the age of sixteen he had been arrested for rape and spent five years inside a reformatory. ** I have seen varying reports as to how police learned about the identity of John Harris: a different source says that while in jail in 1973 John’s brother Paul shared with another inmate what his brother had done to Levy, and that was eventually passed on to NYS investigators who arrested Harris as a result. Another article said that Paul told his girlfriend who told a friend who told another friend who eventually came forward and told law enforcement.
On Saturday, October 26, 1974 John E. Harris led investigators to the body of Karen Merle Levy in a shallow grave at his POE of five years: Ley Creek Sewage Treatment Plant in Salina, NY: she had been found underneath four feet of landfill and had been stabbed and strangled with a nylon stocking, which was still cinched around her neck. Detectives working the case theorized that Harris had hit Levy over the head with a shovel then dragged her to the landfill, where he strangled and buried her. Also at the scene investigators found a ring with Karen’s initials engraved on it, a medallion that had ‘keep holy the Commandments’ inscribed on it, and a set of keys, one of which fit the lock to her one-time dorm room. A 100% positive identification was made after a forensic dentist was brought in to examine Levy’s skeletal remains and according to Deputy Chief Dillon, the preliminary investigation had shown that Levy was killed less than an hour after she was last seen.After Karen’s body was discovered, Mr. Levy said that they could now ‘pick up our lives now and try to live a halfway normal life. We were hoping, wishing for a miracle, but did not truly expect it.’ According to Ken Levy, ‘for two years they didn’t give up hope, there was no closure for two years, when Karen’s body was finally recovered the family felt enormous relief, followed with sadness.’
According to an article published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 17, 1975, John Harris implicated his brother Paul for the murder of Karen Levy in a series of letters,and claimed that he was with him that night in November 1972 when he picked her up and said that he was the killer, not him. Paul denied having anything to do with killing the young coed and after multiple interrogations and lie detector tests he was eventually cleared of any wrong-doing. In an article published in The Post-Standard on September 13, 1975, Paul said that he didn’t think his brother acted alone and that he thought ‘there was someone with him or someone forcing him to do it.’ When asked why he thought this, he said that John was ‘into some pretty heavy stuff’ and was ‘involved with gambling and the sale of drugs, as well as taking pictures of nude models: ‘John would pick the models up, sometimes from Syracuse University, and take them to a photo shoot where he would wait until the photographer was finished. Sometimes he would actually pose with her.’
Paul went on to say that John was involved with a group he dubbed ‘The Utica Bunch,’ and was ‘in this for the money, and maybe a little for the girls.’ When asked why he would want to blame him for the murder, Paul said he was asking himself the same thing and that ‘something happened in his mind. His memory is gone. Either he is trying to grasp onto the only escape left or it has just become a game for him. He probably doesn’t know I didn’t do that. I didn’t tell police. I just told my girlfriend who told somebody who told somebody. The police finally got wind of it.’ Paul Harris was a bartender by trade but after charges were dismissed he volunteered in an interview that he was thinking about leaving the area, saying the murder had ‘ruined his reputation’ and that he was at ‘the point where I might have to leave Syracuse. At least twice, enemies of John’s have actually tried to kill me.’ He also said that in November 1974 he was shot at while walking down Clinton Street, and in the beginning of September 1975 someone had tried to run him off the road on Route 81 by approaching him at an angle that ‘could only have been an attempt to get me.’ He also said that on one occasion a woman threw a drink in his face.
After Harris was held without bail, police records showed that in 1966 he was arrested on a rape charge and served five years in Coxsackie Reformatory. Pretrial proceedings began on November 1, 1974, and he was indicted on two counts of murder, along with additional charges of first‐degree rape and first‐degree sexual abuse. Additionally, John Harris was charged with attempted murder and possession of a dangerous weapon in relation to his crimes against Richard Bellinger.
Judge Gale ruled that Harris was unable to stand trial on December 23, 1974 and ordered him be sent to the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center on January 9, 1975, where he spent three months being evaluated. Although center professionals determined that he was capable of standing trial for Karen’s murder, two psychiatrists (one of them being the Head of the County’s Mental Health Department) said that he has ‘deteriorated steadily’ since his arrest. According to Chief Assistant District Attorney John Shannon, Harris was ‘capable of understanding the nature of the charges against him and assisting his attorneys in the defense of this case.’
At the sanity hearing, a psychiatrist from Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center testified that the defendant told him that he was able to trick two separate doctors into believing that he was insane: ‘he (Harris) told me that when he was in his cell, he was told by the other inmates to keep looking at the floor. They told him to blink and mumble.’ At the hearing Harris took the stand and said that he didn’t know what his rights were when he gave the NYS Troopers a written confession, which was reportedly ‘peculiar and false.’ In it, he said that he drove her to the treatment plant and ‘asked her for a kiss,’ and when she refused he strangled her, and then ‘hit her and she hit me with her purse. So I knocked her out. She tried to claw my face so I hit her several times in the head. I thought she was unconscious. I took her out of the car and carried her on the lawn. I removed her jacket. The grass was wet so I rubbed her arm on the grass and splashed a mud puddle. She wouldn’t wake up. I started to cry. I walked around her, hoping she was all right.’ He said when he realized she was dead he stuffed her remains in an incinerator, and turned her all except her skull and bones. With a crowbar he crushed the bones to dust, and put them in a truck and buried ‘some place in Skaneateles.’
During his trial, Harris testified that he was ‘tired and sick’ when he spoke with police after his initial arrest, and that ‘when police asked him to sign the statement, he said, ‘shouldn’t I have a lawyer?” In response, they said, ‘if you don’t sign it, you’re going to be here all night until you do.’ He went on to say that during the interrogation he ‘had an upset stomach, and I was nervous and tired’ and that at one point a screaming match broke out between him and an investigator. He also claimed that the signature on the confession was forged and not his, which went nowhere. After Levy’s murder between November 1972 and October 1974 police had two separate (unrelated) interactions with Harris: one time he was pulled over for ‘failure to use his direction signal,’ and after he told the NYS Trooper he was ‘tired of being harassed by the fuzz’ they brought him into a nearby police station, questioned him for an hour, and was eventually issued a citation.
To the surprise of everyone, on July 25, 1975 Harris plead guilty to the rape and murder of Karen Levy because he was ‘tired of waiting for all the court actions to end.’ Under the terms of a plea bargain that was approved by the Levy family, he accepted a twenty year to life prison term for the murder, and began the sentence September 12, 1975. In an emotional interview with reporters, Harris said that he just wanted ‘to do my time and go home and lead a decent life.’ Mr. Levy said that he agreed with the plea bargain because ‘it gave them the best justice they were capable of getting at that point without having to go through a trial’ and that he ‘would prefer never to come face to face with Harris. That’s not going to bring Karen back. But it’s not like we’ve washed our hands of the thing.’ Harris was initially housed at Auburn Correctional Facility and after bouncing over a few prisons he was briefly moved to Clinton Correctional before going to Orleans Correctional Facility in 1992.
In September 1979 Harris attempted to appeal his conviction based on ‘arguments that he didn’t knowingly waive his right to remain silent or have his attorney present when he was questioned by police,’ and that he didn’t knowingly waive his right to a jury trial when he pleaded guilty. It was ultimately denied. In August of 2000 Harris was up for parole for the fourth time, but was denied due to the fact that he still ‘posed an imminent threat to community safety’ and was ‘incompatible with the welfare and safety of the community.’ According to an article published in The Post-Standard on August 6, 2000, he was cited (meaning he received a formal warning for violating rules/regulations) six times for breaking prison rules, including harassment, assaulting a prison guard, and property damage.
By 1999 Harris had completely changed his story again: in an article published in The Post-Standard on August 7, 2000, in an April 1999 interview with LE he said that he accepted responsibility for Karen’s death, however claimed he wasn’t the one that killed her. He went on to elaborate that he (along with some companions that he refused to name) planned on using Levy to transport drugs from Syracuse to New Jersey and their plan was to slip them into her luggage then blame her if they were stopped by law enforcement: ‘that way if we got stopped and frisked by the cops, it’s in their stuff, and we could write it off.’ He claimed it was ‘by chance’ that he met Karen and it was only the two of them in the car when they stopped for food at a Motel 7 on Seventh North Street just over the city line in Salina.
While Karen was inside the motel a second vehicle pulled up and they said they put the drugs in her bags, which were still in the car, but she noticed that ‘something was wrong’ and got upset. The men pulled Harris aside and as they were talking one of them ‘stabbed her in the stomach’ and he ‘just saw her fall to the floor. And I just… the feeling I got I almost vomited.’ The friends told him that he had to ‘get rid of her,’ and he had to ‘dump her body somewhere.’ He said that he ‘pulled her out of the car. She just reached up to me and said don’t let them hurt me anymore.’ When asked by investigators why he didn’t drop her off at a hospital, he said he was afraid because he was an ex-con that had ‘served time for grand larceny in 1967,’ and he ‘didn’t want to get in anymore trouble,’ and he ‘just ended up burying the girl. It was bothering me very much, in fact, it made me very emotional. I’d come home and I’d be very emotional with my wife. We’d start arguing over the littlest things. ‘Cuz it always drew back to me about Miss Levy. Most times I would have nightmares and I’d wake up.’ During that 1999 interview Harris also claimed that the incident ‘still haunted him,’ and that sometimes he would read newspaper clippings about the case over and over again: ‘and when I’m done reading the stories I just think I’m responsible for her death.’
About his release being denied Harris said that ‘it’s not that cut and dry.’ … ‘It leads people into thinking I’m actually guilty of this murder.’ If released Harris said that he wasn’t trying to fit into society and wasn’t interested in making friends with his neighbors: ‘I don’t wanna blend in with society, I wanna stay away from society. I just wanna be a recluse someplace. I just wanna go off by myself. I’m tired of people, and I’m tired of crap. I’ve put up with it for twenty-five-years, I just wanna be able to think and breathe.’
According to an article published in The Post Standard on August 7, 2000, while in prison Harris served as a ‘facilitator’ in ‘Network,’ a self-help, behavioral modification program at the prison and served as the program’s ‘institutional clerk’ and went to ‘victim awareness programs.’ About being up for parole so many times, he said that ‘it’s like it doesn’t matter what I do, what I accomplish, how much I give (the parole board) what I’m suppose to give them. they still rubber stamp me. They give me the same answer on every parole denial.’ From prison, Harris had some words for the Levy family: ‘no matter how much time passes, I’ll never get over it. But at the same time, of course her family will never get over it… So what can you tell them? Of course I’m sorry. I’m immensely, immensely sorry. But what good is that gonna do anybody? I can’t bring her back, I can’t undo what has already been done.’ Sadly I learned in a Facebook post made by Rick Levy in July 2022 that Harris’s parole had been approved and he was released from prison shortly after.
After Levy’s disappearance students at Syracuse University continued to use ‘the bulletin board method’ as a way of old-fashioned ‘ride-sharing,’ and there was no noticeable decline in the amount of students that stood around, bumming rides. One 17-year-old Syracuse University student said that she was ‘just a little more choosy,’ and that her ‘new attitude’ was based not so much on the disappearance of Karen Levy but more because the last time she had accepted a ride from a stranger, the person had raped her.
Strangely enough, Karen Levy is not the only young woman from New York state that Bundy was (briefly) suspected of killing: on November 2, 1974 Katherine Kolodziej disappeared after a night out at The Vault Tavern in Cobleskill, NY. The 17-year-old from Ronkonkoma was a freshman majoring in Equestrienne Studies at SUNY Cobleskill, and less than four weeks later on November 28, 1974 her remains were found on a rock wall on nearby McDonald Road in Richmondville, NY. It was reported that a yellow VW Beetle was seen driving away from the tavern on the evening Kathy was last seen alive, however at the time she was killed Bundy was placed on the phone in Salt Lake City (per the ‘1992 TB Multiagency Investigative Report’).
Mr. and Mrs. Levy were married for forty-six years when Bertram passed away at the age of 69 on October 12, 1996 in Union Township, NJ. According to his obituary, Mr. Levy worked at his job for fifty-four years, was a member and former president of the board of Temple Beth Shalom in Cherry Hill, a past VP and treasurer of the Jewish Geriatric Home, and a member of the Mizpah-Haddon Heights Lodge 191 Free and Accepted Masons. Sylvia Levy passed away on July 16, 2020 at the age of 91. I reached out to Rich Levy after I saw a post he made on Facebook asking that people reach out to the parole board on his family’s behalf regarding Harris being up for release, but I completely misread his tone and he seemed incredibly reluctant to speak to me due to the fact that it was too painful to talk about, so I dropped it. Because of that I didn’t include any details or pictures about his, Eric’s, or Gary Leiberman’s lives, past or present.
Karen Levy’s senior picture from the 1972 Cherry Hill East High School yearbook.Karen Levy.Another picture of Karen Levy taken from The Daily News on April 14, 1973.Karen Levy’s senior year accomplishments that were published in the 1972 Cherry Hill East High School yearbook; as you can see, her one time love Gary Lieberman is immediately after her. The missing persons flier for Karen Levy that was published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 10, 1972.A note from Syracuse police to Seattle detectives A picture of Karen’s ring after her remains were discovered. A picture of the key found with Karen’s remains.A search crew looking for the remains of Karen Levy.A picture of Mr. and Mrs. Levy published in The Daily Register on October 29, 1974.Bertram and Sylvia Levy holding a framed portrait of Karen, picture taken from The Star-Ledger on March 10, 1974.A letter regarding the Levy case from the Syracuse Chief of Police, possibly in relation to the Bundy case, courtesy of the King County Sheriffs Department.A log from a reward calls book from the Ted investigation that mentions Bill Lacy, courtesy of the King County Sheriffs Department.A second log from a reward calls book from the Ted investigation that mentions Bill Lacy, courtesy of the King County Sheriffs Department.Karen’s parents house, where she lived between semesters at Syracuse University, located at 507 Tearose Lane in Cherry Hill, NJ.An article about Karen before her brutal murder published by The Courier-Post on November 17, 1971.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Asbury Park Press on November 22, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in TheThe Democrat and Chronicle on November 24, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on November 29, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Courier-Post on November 29, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on November 30, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Asbury Park Press on December 3, 1972.Part one of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 3, 1972.Part two of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 3, 1972.Part one of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on December 3, 1972.Part two of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on December 3, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published by The Daily Register on December 4, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published by The Times Leader on December 4, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Daily Register on December 4, 1972.Part one of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 6, 1972.Part two of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 6, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Asbury Park Press on December 7, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Mercury on December 8, 1972.Part one of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 8, 1972.Part two of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 8, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Intelligencer Journal on December 8, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 10, 1972.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Gloucester County Times on Dec 12, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on Dec 19, 1972An article mentioning Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on December 31, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Finger Lakes Times on January 10, 1973.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on January 18, 1973.An article about a reward in relation to the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Gloucester County Times on January 27, 1973.An article a reward in relation to the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Daily Register on January 29, 1973.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Daily Register on April 11, 1973.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Daily News on April 14, 1973.An article about the murder of Joan D’Allessandro that mentions Karen Levy published in The News on April 24, 1973.Part one of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Star-Ledger on May 13, 1973.Part two of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Star-Ledger on May 13, 1973.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Star-Ledger on July 21, 1973.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Asbury Park Press on November 11, 1973.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Press of Atlantic City in December 12, 1973.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Press of Atlantic City on December 12, 1973.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Finger Lakes Times on August 11, 1973. An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Star-Ledger on February 28, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on March 3, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Star-Ledger on March 10, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Courier-Post on March 11, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Lansing State Journal on March 14, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Finger Lakes Times on March 18, 1974.Part one of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Journal Herald on March 19, 1974.Part two of an article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Journal Herald on March 19, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Huntsville Times on March 21, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Albany Democrat-Herald on April 2, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Star-Ledger on June 6, 1974.An article about the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The News Tribune on July 31, 1974.An article about ‘Ted of the West’ possibly having ties to the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on August 5, 1974.An article about ‘Ted of the West’ possibly being related to the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on August 18, 1974.An article about ‘Ted of the West’ possibly being related to the disappearance of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-American on August 18, 1974.An article about the discovery of the remains of Karen Levy published in The Spokesman-Review on October 27, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on October 27, 1974.An article about the discovery of the remains of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on October 27, 1974.An article about the discovery of the remains of Karen Levy published in The Asbury Park Press on October 28, 1974.An article about the discovery of the remains of Karen Levy published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on October 28, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Courier-Post on October 28, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Ashbury Park Press on October 28, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on October 28, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Daily Register on October 29, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Star-Ledger on October 29, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on October 29, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Daily Sentinel on October 29, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Daily Sentinel on October 29, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on October 31, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Star-Ledger on October 31, 1974.An article about the discovery of the remains of Karen Levy published in The Buffalo News on October 31, 1974.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on November 20, 1974.An article about John Harris being found competent to stand trial published in The Daily Record on December 12, 1974.An article about John Harris being sent to a psychiatric center for evaluation published in The Democrat and Chronicle on January 9, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Daily News on February 2, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on March 28, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on April 14, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on July 17, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on July 18, 1975.A newspaper article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on July 28, 1975.A newspaper blurb about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Gloucester County Times on July 29, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on July 29, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Daily Messenger on July 29, 1975.An article about John Harris and the murder of Karen Levy published in The News on July 30, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 12, 1975.An article about John Harris in relation to th4e murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on September 13, 1975.A newspaper article about John Harris published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 13, 1975.The first part of an article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 15, 1975.Part two of an article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 15, 1975.An article about John Harris being sentenced for the murder of Karen Levy published in The Daily Messenger on September 16, 1975An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on September 16, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on September 16, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 17, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 24, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on October 2, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on October 2, 1975.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on October 3, 1975.An article about John Harris appealing his conviction for the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on December 12, 1977.An article about the possible appeal of John Harris published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 9, 1979.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on October 28, 1979.An article mentioning Karen Levy published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on July 22, 1996.An article mentioning the murder of Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on November 6, 1999.An article about the murder of Karen Levy published in The Daily News on August 30, 1987.An article about the Ley Creek Sewage Plant that mentions Karen Levy published in The Post-Standard on October 26, 1999.An article about John Harris being up for parole published in The Post-Standard on August 6, 2000.Part one of a newspaper article about John Harris being up for parole published in The Post-Standard on August 7, 2000.Part two of a newspaper article about John Harris being up for parole published in The Post-Standard on August 7, 2000.A general route from Syracuse University to Monmouth College in New Jersey.John E. Harris A picture of Johns parents home, in Cicero, NY; at the time of Karen’s murder he lived in a house across the street with his wife, Donna.Part one of a newspaper article about John Harris and his family published in The Courier-Post on October 28, 1974.Part two of a newspaper article about John Harris and his family published in The Courier-Post on October 28, 1974.A newspaper blurb about Donna Lee Harris being granted a divorce that was published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on July 3, 1975.A blurb in the paper mentioning John and Donna Harris’ divorce published in The Post-Standard on July 3, 1975Mr. Levy’s WWII draft card. The announcement of Mr. and Mrs. Levy’s engagement that was published in The Courier-Post on May 18, 1950.Mr. Levy’s obituary published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on October 13, 1996.Mr. Levy’s obituary published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on October 14, 1996.A post on a Facebook page for the ‘Cherry Hill East Class of 1974 Reunion Page’ regarding John E. Harris being up for parole. A Facebook post made by Karen’s brother Rick Levy about John Harris being up or parole.A comment on the above Facebook post about the outcome of John E. Harris’ parole hearing made by Karen’s brother Rick Levy about John Harris being up or parole.A picture of John E. Harris after his arrest published in The Syracuse Herald-Journal on September 12, 1975.A picture of Mr. Levy along with members of Syracuse law enforcement that was published in The Asbury Park Press on November 22, 1972.A picture of Mr. and Mrs. Levy that was published in The Star-Ledger on October 29, 1974.A picture of Mrs. Levy sitting on Karen’s bed.Gary Lieberman’s senior year picture in the 1972 Cherry Hill East High School yearbook.Kathy Kolodziej.Where Bundy was in November of 1972; I know it’s moot at this point as we all know Bundy had nothing to do with the disappearance of Karen Levy, but as this is a blog about him I feel that this needs to be here.A possible route that Bundy could have taken from the Rogers Rooming House in Seattle to Syracuse University.
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 MaureenLouise 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 andhemorrhage 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, andCarolyn 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 of her 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 Kamahelewas 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 ofMarch2025 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 Trimbleof 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 Gidleywas 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 PlumbersHallin 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 Creekin Redding; her clothes were recovered nearby, and she had beenstabbed 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, 1969the 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 isTed 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 JimMordecai 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 wifewent 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 JosephNaso 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
Yvonne Weber, who went missing on February 4th, 1972 with her friend Maureen Sterling and was last seen getting into a car in front of the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. Her body was found on December 26th, 1973 at the bottom of an embankment on the west side of Franz Valley Road roughly 2.7 miles from the intersection with Porter Creek Road.
Sterling’s obituary published in The Press Democrat on January 5, 1973.The only two pieces of evidence that LE released in relation to the murders of Sterling and Weber: a single filigree type drop earring w beads and a basket weave mixed metal cross attached to a gold chain necklace. Photo courtesy of ‘Sonoma County: Missing and Murdered WordPress’ page.Part one of an article about the murder of Sterling and Weber published in The Press Democrat on January 3, 1973.Part two of an article about the murder of Sterling and Weber published in The Press Democrat on January 3, 1973.Part one of an article about the funerals of Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber published in The Press Democrat on January 3, 1973.Part two of an article about the funerals of Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber published in The Press Democrat on January 3, 1973.Kim Allen, who went missing on March 4th, 1972 hitchhiking from her job in Larkspur in Marin County to her home in Santa Rosa. Her remains were found on March 5th, 1972 at the bottom of an embankment on the north side of Enterprise Road. She had been strangled.
An obituary for Lori Lee Kursa published in The Press Democrat on December 19, 1972.An article about the murder of Kori Kursa published in The Press Democrat on December 27, 1972.An article about Lori Kursa clipped from The Press Democrat on February 6, 1973. Kursa was last seen on November 20th, 1972 with her mother at U-Save Market ; her remains were found on December 14th, 1972 roughly 20′-30′ down an embankment on the western side of Calistoga Road. She died due to extreme trauma, and her first and second cervical vertebra were dislocated and her spinal cord had been compressed.Carolyn Davis, who went missing on July 15th, 1973 and was last seen hitchhiking on the on ramp of Highway 101 in Garberville, California. Her remains were recovered on July 31st, 1973 less than ten feet away from where Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber were found; she died from strychnine poisoning.
An article about the murder of Carolyn Davis published by The Press Democrat on August 16, 1973.The Sonoma West Times and News on August 23, 1973.The following symbol was left in sticks next to Santa Rosa Serial Killer victim, Carolyn Davis. Some think it was left by the Zodiac Killer.Theresa Walsh, who has been missing since December 22nd, 1973 when she was last seen hitchhiking north on Highway 101 to Maranda, California. Her body was recovered a few days later on December 28 found submerged under a log in Mark West Creek .I have seen her name also spelled ‘Terese,’ however ‘Theresa’ is what is on her death certificate.
An article about the Santa Rosa Jane Doe, who as of March 2025 still remains unidentified. An article about the thwarted abduction of Lisa Smith published in The Novato Advance on March 31, 1971.Jeannette Kamahele, who was last seen on April 25th, 1972 hitchhiking north on Highway 101 and was going from her residence to Santa Rosa Junior College. Her remains have never been recovered.Jeannette Kamahele.Jeannette Kamahele.An article about the disappearance of Jeanette Kamahele published in The Rohnert Park Cotati Clarion on May 2, 1972.An article about the disappearance of Jeanette published in The Press Democrat on April 28, 1972.
Kerry Ann Graham.Francine Trimble.An article about Francine Trimble and Kerry Ann Graham published in The Sacramento Bee on February 4, 2016.An article about Francine Trimble and Kerry Ann Graham published in The Fresno Bee on February 4, 2016.Rosa Vasquez.An article about the murder of Rosa Vasquez published by The Oakland Tribune on June 1, 1973.An article about the murder of Yvonne Quilantang published by The Oakland Tribune on June 15, 1973.An article about the murder of Yvonne Quilantang published by The San Francisco Examiner on June 24, 1973.An article about the murder of Angela Thomas published by The Oakland Tribune on July 5, 1973.An article about the murder of Angela Thomas published by The San Francisco Examiner on July 6, 1973.Angela Thomas’s obituary published in The Austin American on July 7, 1973.A picture of Nancy Gidley taken from The Idaho Statesman published on July 18, 1973.An article about the murder of Nancy Patricia Gidley published by The Idaho Statesman on July 18, 1973.An article about the murder of Nancy Gidley published by The Martinez News-Gazette on July 19, 1973.An article about the murder of Nancy Feusi published by The Sacramento Bee on August 9, 1973.An article about Nancy Feusi’s daughter being charged with the torture of her daughter published by The Corvallis Gazette-Times on February 11, 2011.An article about the murder of Laura O’Dell published by The San Francisco Examiner on November 7, 1973.An article about the murder of Brenda Merchant published by The Sacramento Bee on February 2, 1974.An article about the murder of Brenda Kaye Merchant published by The Colusa Sun-Herald on February 4, 1974.An article about the murder of Donna Marie Braun published by The Californian on October 1, 1974.An article about the murder of Kathy Sosic The Press Democrat on December 4, 1969.An article about the murder of Elaine Davis published by The Martinez News-Gazette on December 5, 1969.An article about the murder of Leona LaRell Roberts published by The Sacramento Bee on December 12, 1969.An article about the murder of Marie Antoinette Anstey published by The Berkeley Gazette on April 1, 1970.An article about the murder of Cosette Ellison published by The Concord Transcript on March 25, 1970.A general article about the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders published in The Press Democrat on January 10, 1973.An article mentioning a man from Camarillo being arrested for the rape of a seventeen year old that is possibly related to the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders published in The Press Democrat on May 11, 1973.A general article about the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders published by The Ventura County Star on July 17, 1973.A general article about the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders published by The Morning Union on July 17, 1973.A general article about the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders published in The Press Democrat on September 13, 1973.A general article about the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders published by The San Francisco Examiner on April 25, 1975.
Bundy’s whereabouts in the early part of 1972 according to the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992.’Bundy’s whereabouts in 1972 according to the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992.’Bundy’s whereabouts in the early part of 1973 according to the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992.’Bundy’s whereabouts in 1973 according to the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992.’Arthur Leigh Allen.Fred Manalli.Jim Mordecai.Philip Joseph Hughes Jr.NasoRobert Kibbe.Kenneth Bianchi.Angelo Buono.Joaquin Cordova.Jackie Rae Hovarter.A book about Byron Avion titled ‘Suspect Zero,’ written by Michael D. Kelleher
Alma Jean ‘Jeannie’ was born on October 12, 1943 to Oren and Orphey ‘Pearl’ Reynolds in Peoria, IL. Mr. Reynolds was born in 1920 and her mother Pearl was born on December 30, 1926 in St. Louis, MO. She was divorced from Thomas Barra and the couple had two children together: at the time of her death their daughter was four and their son was nine. Mr. Barra was born on February 12, 1930 in Johnson, IL and was quite a bit younger than his wife. It appears that Alma spent most of her life in Illinois but after splitting with her husband she took her children and relocated to Portland, Oregon. She was a petite woman, and stood at 5’1” tall and at the time of her murder weighed a mere ninety pounds; she dyed her strawberry blonde hair black and wore it at her shoulders.
Alma was seen earlier in the day around her apartment building before eventually leaving her kids with a babysitter, telling her that she would return at 11:30 later that evening, but when she failed to return home her sitter reported her as missing to local law enforcement. The twenty-eight year old was last seen leaving the Copper Penny Tavern in the company of an unknown gentleman driving southbound on 92nd Avenue between 11 and 11:30 PM on March 23, 1972. There’s some discrepancy as to what she was last wearing: according to the Clackamas County Sheriff’s website, she was dressed in a white sweater, turtleneck, maroon vest and pants, but according to an article published in The Oregon Daily Journal, she had been wearing a green pantsuit with a vest that was adorned with gold buttons on the side. Barra’s remains were discovered by two sixteen year olds out hiking, Joseph Venini and Lawrence Staub (one report said they were actually out riding their bikes) in an area that contained a heavy amount of brush near Lincoln Memorial Park Cemetery, roughly forty feet off of Mount Scott Boulevard.
One-time Multnomah County Medical Examiner Dr. Larry V. Lewman said that Barra died of strangulation and had what appeared to be nylon stockings cinched around her neck; she was nude from the waist down but showed no sign of sexual assault. Lieutenant Vern White with the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Department said there were signs of a struggle at the scene, and the victim put up quite a fight before she was finally subdued. There was a fifteen foot diameter around the remains that were ‘torn up,’ and investigators noted that moss, fern, hazel, and blackberry vines were all damaged during the attack. Some of her clothes were removed and were found scattered around the crime scene, and one of her shoes was found nearby on the side of the road; the other was found discarded in some nearby brush; missing from the area entirely was Barra’s black patent leather purse. After a positive identification was made her apartment was searched for clues, but investigators came up with nothing.
Alma Barra is one of over a dozen women that were either murdered or went missing in the state of Oregon in the early to mid 1970’s, and at the risk of being redundant (because I have written about them in all of my other pieces) I’m only going to gloss over all but one. I’ll only really dig into the new young woman that I recently learned about.
Thirty-four year old Barbara Katherine Pushman-Cunningham was discovered strangled to death in her Eugene apartment by her mother on May 25, 1971. On March 22, 1972 Fay Ellen Robinson was found dead in her bed in her downtown apartment in Portland, and later that same year on June 16 the badly decomposed remains of Geneva Joy Martin were found face down in a ‘woody, roadside ditch’ by a local farmer. Also in June 1972 the remains of sixteen year old Beverly May Jenkins were discovered just off the I-5 roughly ten miles outside of Cottage Grove; she had been strangled to death. On July 11th, 1973 Susan Ann Wickersham was abducted out of Bend, Oregon, and her remains were discovered on January 20th, 1976. On August 23, 1973 Gayle Elizabeth LeClair failed to come in for her scheduled shift at the Eugene Municipal Library, and when her supervisor went to her house to check on her she was found to be deceased as a result of multiple stab wounds.
In my opinion, there’s three cases that took place in mid to late 1973 that all fit very neatly into TB’s MO: Rita Lorraine Jolly, Vicki Lynn Hollar, and Suzanne Rae Seay-Justis. I know Ted only confessed to two additional Oregon murders aside from Roberta Kathleen Parks, but we all know he didn’t tell the truth very often… Seventeen year old Rita Lorraine Jolly left her family home in West Linn at around 7:15 PM on June 29, 1973 to go for a routine walk, and was seen for the last time a few hours later between 8:30 and 9:00 PM. Not even two months later on August 20, 1973 twenty-four-year-old seamstress Vicki Lynn Hollar was last seen getting into her black 1965 Volkswagen Beetle after leaving The Bon Marche in Eugene at 5:00 PM; neither her nor her vehicle have ever been recovered. Suzanne Rae Seay-Justis was last heard from on November 5, 1973 after she called her mother from outside the Memorial Coliseum in Portland.
Personally, I feel Bundy is most likely responsible for the murder of Rita Jolly and Sue Justis, and where Hollar looks exactly like most of his other victims I’ve never heard of him disposing of a vehicle before. We know he had a history of car theft, but did he really have the means to dispose of an entire vehicle? I do want to note that most of the major bodies of water surrounding Eugene were dredged in the years following Vicki’s disappearance, and her VW remains unaccounted for to this day.
While writing this piece I learned the identity of another young woman that was killed in the state of Oregon in the mid 1970’s: Camille Karen Covet-Foss. On October 17th, 1975, Ms. Covet-Foss was last seen alive leaving her job at Sears-Roebuck in Washington Square at 5 PM to drop off a check at the bank. The twenty-five year old was married but had no kids yet, and had been employed with Sears for seven years, and had only come to the store from the main branch in Portland about three months prior to her murder (she was the stores head cashier). Later that same day at roughly 9:30 PM a security guard for the Southwest Portland-area shopping center named Claudia Shaw found Camille‘s body inside her light olive 1969 Chevrolet Impala, which was parked outside of the building where she worked.
Oregon state ME Dr. William Brady said Camille was shot twice: a bullet grazed one of her thumbs before penetrating her neck, and the other hit her chest. The wounds were inflicted by a large-caliber handgun that was fired at close range (either a .38 or 357-magnum revolver); Dr. Brady also said she also had been beaten in the face. Detectives said nothing appeared to be missing from the car, including the bank deposit.
As I mentioned earlier, most of the women I write about from Oregon were most likely not victims of Ted Bundy, and that includes Ms. Covet-Foss… but, because this is a blog about him I do feel the need to mention that we know he wasn’t responsible for her death, as he was just beginning his legal troubles in Utah and was tied up at the time.
Alma’s ex-husband Thomas died at the age of 67 on January 11, 1998 in Johnson City, IL; according to his obituary, he was a Korean war veteran and served in the US Army as a Specialist 3rd Class. Alma’s mother Pearl Richardson passed away at the age of 96 in Branson, MO on August 17, 2023. She loved being a mom and a grandmother, and loved to shop, bowl, and fish, but her greatest love was her Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Despite my best efforts I was unable to find any information about Ms. Barra’s children, but I quickly realized there is most likely a reason for that and stopped. If I made any mistakes in my research or if anyone from her family that comes across this would like to reach out to me directly, my contact information is on my home page.
Alma.Alma, photo courtesy of Amber Geye.Alma, photo courtesy of Amber Geye.A newspaper article about the murder of Alma Barra published in The Oregon Daily Journal on March 27, 1972.A newspaper article about the murder of Alma Barra published in The Oregon Daily Journal on March 27, 1972.A newspaper article about the murder of Alma Barra published in The Capital Journal on March 28, 1972.A newspaper article about the murder of Alma Barra published in The Corvallis Gazette-Times on March 28, 1972.A newspaper article about Alma Barra published in The Capital Journal on March 28, 1972.A newspaper article about the murder of Alma Barra published in The Oregon Daily Journal on March 29, 1972.A newspaper article about the murder of Alma Barra published in The Oregon Daily Journal on March 29, 1972.A newspaper article that mentions the murder of Alma Barra published in The The Oregonian on January 25, 1983.Barra’s name in the list of deaths in Oregon state.An want-ad for a bar maid at the Copper Penny Tavern published in The Oregonian on August 13, 1971.Tom Barra’s grave stone.Alma’s ex-husbands obituary.Ted’s whereabouts in the middle of October 1975 according to the 1992 TB FBI Multiagency Investigative Report.Alma’s mother, Pearl.
Fay Ellen Robinson was born on October 7, 1948 to Thomas Harvey and Alice Susan (nee Prentiss) in Portland, Oregon.Thomas Harvey Robinson Jr. was born on September 29, 1912 in Corsicana, TX, and Alice was born on September 15, 1916 in Oregon. Mr. Robinson graduated from Oregon State University in 1935 with a degree in electrical engineering,** and he had a long and successful career with The Bonneville Power Administration. The couple were married on September 6, 1938, in Longview, WA and had three children together: Fay, Patricia (b. 1943), and Randolph (b. 1946). Fay was a 1966 graduate of Tigard High School, where she excelled at academics and was a member of National Honor Society; she was also in her schools play group, Spanish Club, and Ski Club. Robinson went on to attend the University of Oregon, and after graduating in 1970 she moved to Eugene and got a job with the State Public Welfare Division. At the time of Fay’s murder her sister Patricia lived across the street from her.
At around 7 AM on Wednesday, March 22, 1972 Fay Ellen Robinson was found dead in her bed in her downtown apartment. According to former Lane County Public Attorney Robert Naslund, a friend and coworker named Samuel Owens made the gruesome discovery and had stopped by to give her a ride to work. She was fully clothed, dressed in pants and a sweater, and suffered from stab wounds in her neck and upper chest. According to police, Robinson’s apartment was located alongside an east-west alley located off Oak Street, and her neighbors said they heard her return home the night before at around 10 PM but didn’t hear anything unusual after that.
Fay’s boss and the manager of the Welfare Division David Kuhns said that Robinson had been an intake worker at the department’s office building since January, and said she was ‘a very quiet, serious type of person and very interested in her job. I have no idea why someone would want to harm her.’ According to reports, Robinson was a ‘rather gregarious person with a number of friends, and they’re being questioned by police,’ and in an article published in The Eugene Register-Guard, no motive had been established and police were at a loss for who would want to hurt her. Her autopsy was performed later in the same day she was discovered, and showed that she suffered from multiple stab wounds to her upper chest and neck.
According to the ‘TB MultiAgency Report 1992,’ Bundy’s whereabouts are mostly unaccounted for in early 1972. At the time Ms. Robinson was murdered Ted was living in Seattle at the Rogers Rooming House on 12th Avenue, and was in the middle ofa long term relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer. He was in the final semester of his undergraduate psychology degree from the University of Washington, and was getting ready to start an internship at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in June (he also started at the Seattle Crime Commission around the same time).
As I’ve said in multiple other articles, its Bundy canon that the serial murderer began killing in early January 1974 with his brutal attack on fellow University of Washington student Karen Sparks (I can only assume he thought she was dead when he left her). But during his confessions before his execution he hinted to Dr. Robert Keppel that he may have started as early as 1972 with a young girl in Seattle (but of course didn’t elaborate any further than that). But… I’ve also read that he confessed to a different person that he began killing in 1969 in the Jersey Shore, and yet another that suggests 1971.
In the 2.5+ years that I’ve spent writing this blog I seem to stumble upon a new victim from Oregon every few months, and there’ve been quite a few cases of young women in the area with fates similar to Robinsons. The first one that jumped out at me is Alma Jean ‘Jeannie’ Barra, who was last seen leaving the Copper Penny Tavern in Portland the day after Fay was killed on March 23, 1972. The 28-year-old was last seen between 11 and 11:30 PM wearing a white sweater, turtleneck, maroon vest and pants and was in the company of an unknown male driving southbound on 92nd Avenue. Three days later Ms. Barra’s body was found roughly 40 feet off of Mount Scott Boulevard in an area of heavy brush of the Willamette National Cemetery in Happy Valley, OR.
In my opinion, there’s three murders that took place in mid to late 1973 that all fit very neatly into TB’s MO:Rita Lorraine Jolly, Vicki Lynn Hollar, and Suzanne Rae Seay-Justis. I know Ted only confessed to two additional Oregon murders aside from Roberta Kathleen Parks, but we all know he didn’t tell the truth very often… Seventeen year old Rita Lorraine Jolly left her family home on Horton Road in West Linn at around 7:15 PM on June 29, 1973 to go for a routine walk, and was last seen a few hours later sometime between 8:30 and 9:00 PM walking uphill on Sunset Avenue. She has never been heard from again.
24-year old Vicki Lynn Hollar was last seen getting into her black 1965 Volkswagen Beetle (with Illinois plates and the running boards removed) in a parking lot at 8th Avenue and Washington Street in Eugene at 5:00 PM on August 20, 1973. She and her supervisor walked together to their respective vehicles after work and that was the last time Hollar was ever seen alive; additionally, her Beetle has never been recovered.
Suzanne Rae Seay-Justis was last heard from on November 5, 1973 after she called her mother from outside the Memorial Coliseum in Portland. During the call, Justis said that she would return to Eugene the following day to pick up her son from school. Law enforcement recovered her vehicle left behind near her residence, and it was reported that she frequently hitchhiked to get around. Sue’s mother reserved a room for her for the night at a nearby hotel, but it was never used, and she never arrived home the following day. For reasons that are unknown, a missing persons report wasn’t filed for Justis until 1989.
According to an article published in The Oregonian on February 22, 1989, investigators in Oregon were looking into murders that Bundy could have been linked to far before 1972: a student at the University of Oregon, Janet Lynn Shanahan was married and worked PT at a credit union when her remains were found stuffed in the trunk of her car on April 23, 1969. Her vehicle and remains were found in West Eugene by her husband, who reported her missing two days before her body was recovered; according to the medical examiner, she had been raped and strangled. On May 24, 1971 thirty-four Barbara Katherine Cunningham was found deceased in her West Eighth Ave apartment; she had also been raped and strangled.
Gayle Elizabeth LeClair, who was found deceased in a similar manner that’s almost identical to that of Robinson. LeClair was a clerk/typist at the Eugene Municipal Library, and she was found stabbed in her rental house by her supervisor on August 23, 1973 after she failed to come in for her scheduled shift at 10:30 AM.Gayle had a date with a known acquaintance the night before, and the pair went to a drive-in movie then back to her apartment for a nightcap. She was last seen alive by him at 1:30 AM, and after a conversation with detectives the young man was quickly cleared as a suspect.
At roughly 1 PM on June 16, 1972 the badly decomposed remains ofGeneva Joy Martin were found face down in a ‘woody, roadside ditch’ by Frank Miller, a local farmer. Martin wasonly wearing a coat and shoes, and her hair was caked with dried mud and sediment. She remained unidentified for roughly ten days,and because of the advanced level of decomposition police were unable to pinpoint her cause of death, but it’s suspected she had fallen in with a bad crowd and was dabbling in substance abuse. Also in June 1972 the remains of sixteen year old Beverly May Jenkins were found just off the I-5 roughly ten miles outside of Cottage Grove; she had been strangled to death.
On July 9, 1973 the remains of Laurie Lee Canaday were recovered on the pavement at the intersection of Southeast Scott Street and McLoughlin Blvd in Milwaukee, OR. According to LE, she was a frequent hitchhiker and was on her way home from work when she was abducted. Fifteen year old Alison Lynn Caufman’s nude remains were found on June 20, 1973 after she was dumped down a 30 foot long embankment near the Northeast Marine Drive near Blue Lake Park. She told her parents that she had plans of going to a BBQ, but LE later learned that there was no get-together at the address she had given them; an autopsy showed that she had died from strangulation and been sexually assaulted.
Deborah Lee Tomlinson disappeared on her sixteenth birthday along with an unnamed friend on October 15, 1973 from Creswell, OR.Creswell is an incredibly small town with only one high school, and the reported population according to the 1970 census was a mere 1,199 (it went up to 5,031 people in 2010). Called Debby by family and friends, Tomlinson had brown eyes, was 5’5”, weighed 140 pounds, and had golden brown hair she wore at her shoulders; she had a ring of moles around her neck. Not even a week later Virginia Erickson vanished without a trace on October 21, 1973 out of Sweet Home, OR. Earlier in the day that she disappeared, Erickson told her oldest daughter: ‘Rachel, if I’m not here when you get home, you feed the kids and take care of them,’ which she then did, and her dad stayed home with their mom to ‘go on a hunting trip.’ After the service was over Rachel and her younger siblings returned to an empty house, and no trace of Virginia has been seen since.
According to an article published by The Sunday Oregonian on December 7, 1975, in March 1974 the remains of seventeen year old Caroletta Spencer were discovered on a road in Sauvie Island; she suffered from multiple gunshot wounds. On the evening of March 1, 1975 the remains of twenty-two year old Margo Nerine Ascencio/Castro were found in a room at the El Don Motel on West 6th Avenue. She had been brutally attacked and died as the result of multiple stab wounds, which she had all over her body. Detectives quickly learned that at one time Ascencio had ties to the Hessian Motorcycle Club, and her murder remains unsolved. Cecelia Louise Hostetler* was twenty seven when she was reported missing out of Eugene in 1975 (even though local LE could find no record of her in their files), and was last seen leaving her POE. It’s speculated that she had plans to hitchhike home using the I-5 and her remains have never been recovered.
I think the next two girls can be quickly debunked as TB victims, as he was in prison when they were both killed. Tina Marie Mingus was only 16 years old when her body was found in Salem, OR in October 1975, and Floy Joy Bennet (who went by Jeanne) was 37 (and obviously a bit out of Bundy’s preferred age range) when she vanished in February 1978.What’s strange is I couldn’t find any more information about any of these women out there on the interwebs. It’s almost as if they never existed.
Fay’s sister Patricia died from pneumonia at the age of 64 on May 2, 2008 in Beaverton, WA.Thomas Robinson passed away from heart failure on February 21, 2003 in Silverdale, Washington. He retired from an eventful career as an electrical engineer in 1973 and was a member of the Tri County Gun Club in Sherwood, Oregon. Mrs. Robinson died at the age of 93 on January 31, 2010 in Bremerton, WA.As of December 2024 the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson remains unsolved.
* I would like to thank a reader going by the handle ‘BG’ for this. I left the old (and obviously incorrect) information about Cecelia Hostetler in the article because it was what was reported on at the time. But she eventually turned up and died at the age of 74 in a nursing home, and it was most likely an errant missing persons report that was relayed to the news, and when she was found the police likely didn’t have a file on her because she was an adult, and the public was never updated on her case.
** A big big thank you to Fay’s brother Randy for helping me correct some inconsistencies. I really appreciate you.
This is Fay’s sophomore year photo from the 1964 Tigard High School yearbook (it looks like they don’t do individual pictures aside from the senior class).Fay in a group picture from Ski Club taken from the 1964 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in the a picture for Mother’s Tea in the 1964 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in a group photo from the play ‘Once Upon a Midnight’ taken from the 1964 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in a group picture for Spanish Club taken from the 1964 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in the NHS in the 1964 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay’s senior picture from the 1966 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in a group photo for Ski Club from the 1966 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in a group photo for IRL Club from the 1966 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in a group photo for the Tigrettes from the 1966 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in a group picture for the Tigrettes taken from the 1966 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in a picture for the Tigrettes from the 1966 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay in a group picture for NHS taken from the 1966 Tigard High School yearbook.Fay Ell Robinson in the Death Index for Oregon, 1898-2008.An article about the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Eugene Register-Guard on March 22, 1972.An article about the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Oregon Daily Journal on March 23, 1972.An article about the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Capital Journal on March 23, 1972.An article about the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Eugene Register-Guard on March 23, 1972.An article about the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Eugene Register-Guard on March 22, 1972.An article about the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Statesman Journal on March 23, 1972.An article about the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Albany Democrat-Herald on March 23, 1972.Fay Ellen Robinson’s obituary published in The Oregonian on March 25, 1972.An article about a Eugene woman that killed her husband that mentions the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Eugene Register-Guard Apr 4, 1972.An article about the murder of Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Eugene Register-Guard on September 10, 1973.An article about unsolved murders in Lane County that mentions Fay Ellen Robinson published in The Eugene Register-Guard on April 16, 1978.The first part of an article mentioning Robinson’s murder published in The Eugene Register-Guard on April 16, 1978.The second part of an article mentioning Robinson’s murder published in The Eugene Register-Guard on April 16, 1978.An article about Bundy’s possible Oregon victims that mentions Fay Robinson published in barbThomas, Alice, and Fay’s gravestone, which is located in Cor 201, Niche 200 at the River View Cemetery in Portland, OR.Fay’s mother’s birth certificate. Fay’s parent’s wedding announcement published in The Corvallis Gazette-Times on August 9, 1938.Mr. and Mrs. Robinson’s record of marriage.Thomas H. Robinson’s WWII draft card.Fay and the rest of her family listed in the 1950 US census.Patricia Robinsons senior picture from the 1961 Tigard High School yearbook.A picture of Randy Robinson from the 1964 Tigard High School yearbook.Mr. Robinson’s obituary, published in The Sun on February 21, 2003.Patricia Robinson-Gardner’s obituary published in The Sunday Oregonian on May 11, 2008.Teds whereabouts in early 1972 according to the ‘1992 TB FBI Multiagency Report.’ Rita Lorraine Jolly, who disappeared out of her West Linn neighborhood at 7:15 PM on June 29, 1973 after leaving to go for a walk.Justis was last heard from on November 5, 1973 after she called her mother from outside the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, OR.Vicki Lynn Hollar, who disappeared from Eugene, OR on August 20, 1973. Alma Jean Barra, who was last seen leaving the Copper Penny Tavern in Portland between 11 and 11:30 PM on March 23, 1972A newspaper article about the strangulation death of Janet Lynn Shanahan published in The Oregon Daily Journal on April 24, 1969.A newspaper article about the strangulation death of Barbara Katherine Cunningham published in The Oregon Daily Journal on May 27, 1971.Gayle Elizabeth LeClair, who was found deceased in her Eugene apartment on August 23, 1972.The gravestone of Geneva Joy Martin, who was found deceased on the side of the road in Eugene by a local farmer in July 1972. A newspaper article about the death of Laurie Canaday published in The Oregon Journal on July 9, 1973.A newspaper article about the strangulation death of Alison Caufman published in The Sunday Oregonian on June 24, 1973.Deborah Lee Tomlinson disappeared out of Creswell, OR with an unidentified girlfriend on her sixteenth birthday on October 15, 1973.Virginia Erickson, a resident of Sweet Home, OR that has been missing since October 21, 1973. An article about Floy Joy ‘Jeanne’ Bennet published in The Bulletin on March 2, 1988.An article about the homicide of Margo Nerine Castro published in The Greater Oregon on March 7, 1975.
Geneva Joy Martin was born on November 16, 1952 to Robert Eugene and Florence (nee Boldt) Martin in Hastings, MI. Mr. Martin was born on August 7, 1930 and Florence was born on March 16, 1914 in Hutchinson, Minnesota; her occupation is listed as ‘secretary’ in her ‘geni’ profile, and the couple had two daughters but eventually divorced. In 1942 Florence moved her family to Anchorage, Alaska, where she would eventually get remarried to a man named Maurice Green, who worked for the state railroad. The couple would have two daughters together: Lynella Faith (Grant) and Madelon Grace (Mottet). Aside from a DOB and where she was born I couldn’t find any more details about Ms. Martins childhood.
At some point before her death Geneva married Harvey ‘Stormy’ Nelson Irvin … or, at least that’s what it says on her tombstone. I could find no record of their nuptials anywhere and he isn’t mentioned once in any articles about her aside from the fact that she used his last name on occasion ‘as an alias…’ I did, however, find four other marriage certificates for Mr. Irvin on Ancestry. The couple had a daughter named Daphnia Joy that was two months old when nineteen year old Geneva was found deceased, and in the year prior to her disappearance she briefly lived in Seattle and the Eugene/Springfield, OR area. Harvey was born on February 15, 1950, and after Geneva was killed he wasn’t single for very long: he married Patricia Connelly less than three years later on May 22, 1975 in Reno, Nevada.
At roughly 1 PM on June 16, 1972 the remains of a decomposed, ‘partially clad young woman’ were found face down in a ‘woody, roadside ditch’ by Frank Miller, a local farmer. She was only wearing a coat and shoes, and her hair was caked with dried mud and sediment; she remained unidentified for roughly ten days while detectives searched for clues. At the scene investigators made a plaster cast of where the victim was found in the ditch in hopes to further aid in the investigation… and this is where not having a background in policing/criminology/forensics hurts me because I didn’t know that was a thing. Looking into it, ‘casting’ is when experts preserve impressions from crime scenes (for example larger, 3D impressions such as tire marks or footprints). The process works almost the same way an orthodontist makes a mold of a patient’s teeth, and forensic experts and LE use an array of materials to help create the ‘casts.’
The young victim was taken to Eugene’s Sacred Heart Hospital, where specialists from the Oregon Crime Laboratory got to work on identifying her. According to (retired) Linn County DA Jackson Frost, they were able to tell that she was in the ditch for ‘about three days, but definitely not a week,’ and were immediately able to determine that she was no older than 25. Thanks in part to an advanced stage of facial decomp, it took thirteen days and $162 worth of long distance phone calls to Alaska (where Martin received care) before dental experts were able to make a near positive identification; a sister living in Colorado helped make an absolute positive ID. Despite an autopsy as well as ‘all kinds of lab tests,’ investigatorswere never able to pinpoint Martin’s exact cause of death due to her having ‘no violent wounds;’ I also found no mention of sexual assault. In the beginning of the investigation medical examiners thought they detected drugs in her system however it was later determined that the advanced state of decomp produced a chemical that masked the presence of narcotics. Despite there being 150 pages worth of notes in Martins case file, there is next to no information out there on her.
In the end of an article published in The Greater Oregon on June 30, 1972, DA Frost commented that ‘the young woman apparently was living under circumstances where she might not want to use her true name, thus the alias.’ In an article published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 28, 1973, Frost said that Martin was a known drug user and had recently been in treatment for ‘drug related mental problems’ in Eugene. At the time of her death detectives learned she had been living in Eugene for several months and a week before she was last seen had cashed her monthly welfare check then quietly slipped out of sight; it was the last time she was seen alive.
At the time Geneva was murdered Ted Bundy was living in Seattle at the Rogers Rooming House on 12th Avenue, and was in the middle ofa long term relationship with Elizabeth Kloepfer. He had just finished his undergraduate psychology degree from the University of Washington and was getting ready for his first (unsuccessful) attempt at law school at the University of Puget Sound (which he began the following year). At the time Ted was interning as a counselor at Harborview Mental Health Center in Seattle (he was only there from June to September 1972), and according to the ‘TB MultiAgency Report 1992,’ Bundy was mostly in Seattle the week before she was found dead but made a trip to San Francisco on June 13 and stayed until the 15th; his whereabouts are then unaccounted for until June 18 when he bought gas in Seattle. As I’ve said in multiple other articles, its Bundy cannon that the serial murderer began killing in early January 1974 with his brutal attack of fellow University of Washington student Karen Sparks in her basement apartment, but during his confessions before his execution he hinted to Dr. Robert Keppel that he may have started as early as 1972 with a young girl in Seattle (but of course didn’t elaborate further than that).
I didn’t know Bundy was ever actually suspected in any additional Oregon murders on top of Roberta Parks (for sure) and (possibly) Vicki Hollar/Rita Jolly/Sue Justis, but according to an article published by The Eugene Register-Guard on February 24, 1989, Martin was at one time considered a possible victim of his as well as Beverly May Jenkins, Allison Lynn Caufman, Laurie Lee Canaday, Tina Marie Mingus, and Floy Jean Bennet. Now, I am in no way saying these women are really possible victims of Ted Bundy, I’m just saying they were in the very least in the correct place at the right (or wrong) time (well sort of, as some if the dates are completely off). Sixteen year old Beverly May Jenkins was from Roseburg, OR and in June 1972 her remains were found just off the I-5 roughly ten miles outside of Cottage Grove; she had been strangled to death. Fifteen year old Portland native Allison Lynn Caufman died as a result of head injuries after being shoved from a car moving at a high rate of speed in July 1973. I think the last two girls can be quickly debunked, as Bundy was in prison when both victims were killed. Tina Marie Mingus was only 16 years old when her body was found in Salem, OR in October 1975, and Flow Joy Bennet was 37 (and obviously a bit out of Bundy’s preferred age range) when she vanished in February 1978. What’s strange is I couldn’t find any more information about any of these women out there. It’s almost as if they never existed.
But there’s more dead and missing women, on top of that article. Twenty year old Faye Ellen Robinson was found deceased from multiple stab wounds in the upper part of her body in March 23, 1972. Like most Bundy victims, she was educated and had a good job working in county government: she graduated from the University of Oregon in 1970 and was employed by the Lane County Welfare Department. Also on March 23 Alma Jean Barra was last seen after leaving the Copper Penny Tavern in the company of an unknown man driving southbound on 92nd Avenue between 11 and 11:30 PM. The 28-year-old’s body was found in an area of heavy brush of the Willamette National Cemetery, roughly forty feet off of Mount Scott Boulevard; she had been strangled and showed no signs of sexual assault. Next is 17 year old Susan Wickersham, who disappeared from Bend, OR on July 11, 1973 after dropping off the family car at her mom’s POE after joyriding around town with a gf (some conflicting reports say she was at a party). Wickershams remains were found on January 20, 1976 and her skull had a bullet hole behind the right ear with no exit wound. Gayle LeClair was murdered in her rental house on August 23, 1973; a clerk/typist at the Eugene Municipal Library, she had been found by her supervisor stabbed to death after she failed to come in for her scheduled shift. Lastly, Deborah Lee Tomlinson vanished without a trace after running away from Creswell, OR with an unnamed friend on her sixteenth birthday on October 15, 1973.
I tried my hardest to find some sort of link between Ms. Martin and any other victims from the area, but not having a cause of death makes it really hard to compare. What I (personally) think happened: she met up with some undesirable friends and together they used some illegal substances, then Geneva overdosed and they panicked then got rid of her body in the most convenient and easiest way they could think of. I mean, to me it sounds plausible that they dumped her on the side of the road (possibly in the middle of the night) because they got scared and didn’t want to be held responsible for her death. In 1972 ‘Good Samaritan’ laws didn’t exist, so if anyone was present when she died then most likely they would have been held responsible in some capacity.
After the death of her mother Daphnia was sent to live with relatives out of state. Per the Green family’s myheritage site, she got married and had a son. Harvey went on to marry (and divorce) numerous times and had four more children; he passed away on February 3, 2007 at the age of 56. Geneva’s father passed away at the age of 84 in 2014 in Garibaldi, OR, and Mrs. Green died January 13, 1994 at the age of 79 due to a smoking related illness. Both of her half-sisters have led incredibly remarkable lives: Dr. Lynella Faith Grant is a psychologist, statistician, lawyer, personnel director, inventor, marketer, publisher, and author; Dr. Madelon Green-Mottet got her PhD in Fisheries from the University of Washington in Seattle and taught classes on aquaculture at a small college in Sitka, Alaska.
Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.Some information related to the death of Geneva Joy Martin, courtesy of the King County Sheriff’s Department.The grave stone of Geneva Joy Martin. She is buried in plot 21 at The Mulkey Cemetery in Eugene, Oregon.The family history of Ms. Martin according to myheritage.com.An article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Statesman Journal on June 17, 1972.An article about Martin’s body being discovered (but unidentified), published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 17, 1972.An article about the murder of Joseph N. Zaloom that mentions Geneva Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 19, 1972.A picture from an article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 19, 1972.An article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Statesman Journal on June 20, 1972.An article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 20, 1972.An article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Corvallis Gazette-Times on June 20, 1972.An article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Corvallis Gazette-Times on June 21, 1972.An article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 22, 1972.Part one of an article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Times on June 22, 1972.Part two of an article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Times on June 22, 1972.An article mentioning Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 24, 1972.An article mentioning Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 26, 1972.An article about the identification of Geneva Joy Martin-Irvin’s remains published by The Corvallis Gazette-Times on June 29, 1972.An article about the death of Geneva Joy Martin-Irvin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 29, 1972.Part one of an article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published by The Times on June 29, 1972.Part two of an article about the discovery of Martin’s remains published The Times on June 29, 1972.An article about the death of Geneva Joy Martin-Irvin published by The Spokesman-Review on June 30, 1972.An article about the positive identification of Geneva Joy Martin-Irvin’s remains published by The Capital Journal on June 30, 1972.An article about the positive ID of Geneva Joy Martin’s remains published by The Statesman Journal on June 30, 1972.An article about the death of Geneva Joy Martin published by The Greater Oregon on June 30, 1972.An article about the death of Geneva Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on July 6, 1972.An article about the death of Geneva Joy Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on July 26, 1972.An article mentioning the death of Geneva Joy Martin-Irvin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on August 29, 1972.An article mentioning the death of Geneva Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on September 14, 1972.An article about the death of Geneva Joy Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on December 26, 1972.An article mentioning the death of Geneva Joy Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on June 28, 1973.An article mentioning the death of Geneva Martin published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on July 19, 1978.Part one of an article about potential Bundy victims out of Oregon published after his execution from The Eugene Register-Guard on February 24, 1989.Part two of an article about potential Bundy victims out of Oregon published after his execution from The Eugene Register-Guard on February 24, 1989.Bundy’s whereabouts the week before Geneva was found murdered according to the ‘TB Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992.’An article about a burglary performed by Geneva’s ‘husband’ published in The Eugene Register-Guard on November 8, 1969.A newspaper blurb about a burglary performed by Geneva’s ‘husband’ published in The Eugene Register-Guard on January 27, 1973.A newspaper blurb about Geneva’s ‘husband’ published in The Eugene Register-Guard on March 6, 1973.An article about Harvey Irvin having another baby with his new wife published by The Albany Democrat-Herald on July 10, 1975.An article about Geneva’s ‘husband’ driving with a suspended license published in The Lebanon Express on April 12, 1976.Harvey Irvin and Lorie Ann William’s marriage certificate from 2001.Harvey Irvin’s obituary published in The Kansas City Star on February 3, 2007.Mrs. Green’s obituary.Madelon Green Mottet from the 1963 West Anchorage High School yearbook.Dr. Madelon Green Mottet, PhD.Dr. Madelon Mottet’s bio on her Amazon page.
I’ve really been enjoying writing about the unconfirmed Bundy victims lately: so far I’ve done Lisa Wick/Lonnie Trumbull (the Seattle flight attendants who were attacked in their Queen Anne Hill basement apartment), Brenda Joy Baker, Katherine Kolodziej and Sotria Kritsonis (I wrote a short article briefly discussing the disappearance of Ann Marie Burr but she deserves her own full piece*). Last spring when I was in Seattle I debated on whether or not I was going to actually follow through with my lifelong dream of starting a blog or once again take the easy way out and just post my pictures as I took them. I was genuinely nervous about putting out unimaginative, run of the mill content that’s been written about a thousand times before. So, I started digging even further into the Bundy verse, beyond the confirmed victims (such as GeorgeannHawkins) and commonly discussed places (like the Rogers Rooming House on 12th Ave in Seattle).’ So, I started looking into Ted’s unconfirmed victims. His places of employment. The former dorm building he kept a key for after moving out so he could go back and sleep there (he at one time had a room on the 4th floor in the South Tower of McMahon Hall at the University of Washington). The brick with Mr. and Mrs. Bundy’s names on it at the University of Puget Sound (where she was employed for many years as a secretary). I’m going to Utah in November and Colorado in December (I have the time off work) but I’m putting Florida off until last because it’s the state that scares me the most… Margaret Bowman‘s crime scene photos will forever haunt me.
I ran into a lot of snags in my research of May-Hardy, and unfortunately it’s becoming a consistent issue with the unconfirmed victims: I’m finding that if the woman is not directly related to Bundy there’s little or next to no information out there on them. Even simply figuring out Kerry’s exact date of birth took quite a bit of effort, and I’d like to thank my husband for allowing me to use one of his credit cards so I could sign up for another free trial of Ancestry. I was able to find some neat things on Kerry May-Hardy that I hadn’t seen anywhere else: before my discoveries I found exactly ONE picture of her on the internet (along with her composite sketch after her skeletal remains were found). I ran into this lack of information issue with BrendaBaker, the Seattle flight attendants (Lonnie Trumbull and Lisa Wick), and to an extent KathyKolodziej (I say this because I was in contact with the detective working the case as well as her cousin which helped make it a little more personal for me… plus there was a fair amount of information about her on Reddit message boards). I do want to add that after I really got digging on Kerry I found a bit more information that I was expecting… BUT at the same time there wasn’t a single YouTube video or Reddit thread on her and the small amount of information I found didn’t compare to the information you can find about (for example) Georgann Hawkins or Lynda Ann Healy. None of the unconfirmed victims got the attention that they deserved… for example, there’s next to NO information out there about the murder of 14 year-old Brenda Joy Baker and I think that’s a real shame. AND to be truthful I was struggling to find interesting facts about Brenda Ball and she was one of Ted’s more widely known Seattle victims (hers was the first skull found on Taylor Mountain). I think I read somewhere that there were 18,000 murders that occurred in 1972 across the US. It’s too bad you had to have been murdered by a serial killer to deserve any recognition for the case.
Kerry M. May-Hardy was born on April 3, 1950 in Seattle, Washington to Donald and Sheila (most recently Olson) Hardy; she had an older brother named Kenneth, two younger half-sisters (Carlee and Barbra), and a half-brother (Ed). According to a June 2011 article from the Vancouver Sun, Kerry’s parents were only married for a few years before they divorced in 1960. Sheila remarried Carol Olson the following year and Donald married Yvonne Lathrop on December 7, 1956. Mrs. Olsen described her daughter as a ‘free spirit,’ and the first person that popped in my head after I read that was Donna Gail Manson, who’s been called the same thing (and I could see it for myself looking at her pictures). Hardy grew up in the Capitol Hill district of Seattle and attended Lincoln High School in Seattle before dropping out her senior year. In a 2021 interview with ‘hi: I’m Ted’ blogger Tiffany Jean, Ken Hardy said that his sister ‘had hair like a brand new copper penny, and one of those personalities that you instantly liked her. Very friendly and outgoing, but engaging too, and when she started to talk, it didn’t matter where you came from, you wanted to listen to what she had to say.’ After graduating from high school in 1967 Ken went to serve in the Vietnam War; he came home to Seattle two years later in 1969. At that time his younger sister had left school a year early and adopted a ‘free and easy flower child way of living in the Seattle music scene.’ Hardy commented that, ‘I was the older one, so she took a back seat the whole time we were growing up, and all our friends would say, ‘oh yeah, that’s Ken’s little sister.’ But when I got back home, all of a sudden it was, ‘oh you’re Kerry’s brother!’ She really jumped out because her personality was so attractive.’
After a short courtship, Kerry Hardy married James May in a ceremony at the Central Lutheran Church in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle on May 15, 1971; at the time he was studying to be a court transcriber. Although the Hardy-Olsen clan didn’t know him very well, they immediately disliked Kerry’s new husband. Mrs. Olsen commented that ‘He wasn’t a very outgoing person. I just know she was very much in love.’ Ken on the other hand didn’t mind being more truthful, saying that his new brother-in-law ‘was a jerk, and they were always arguing.’ He also said that only six months into his little sisters brand new marriage ‘a friend of ours found out that James was beating up on her and so he got him up against a wall one night when James was alone. Warned him that if he ever did that again, he’d kill him.’ The newlyweds separated shortly after that incident, and Kerry left him and stayed with friends. It is speculated but unconfirmed that Mr. May eventually remarried and relocated to Hawaii.
Ken said that the first time he remembered that his sister was missing his ‘parents and m younger siblings were going on a family trip out of town, and Kerry was supposed to go over and help pack some clothes for my youngest sister, who has Down’s Syndrome, but she never showed up.’ Sheila said the phone calls and visits from her daughter stopped abruptly about a week before the family was supposed to leave on vacation to Minnesota. She also said that while away she ‘made frequent phone calls home during the trip to see if anyone had heard from her (Vancouver Sun, 2011).’ When the family got home in late June 1972 there still was no word from Kerry. In the time they were gone James May never thought to report his wife as missing to the police (although he did claim he didn’t see her since they separated). After calling every one of her daughters friends she could think of, Mrs. Olson went to the Seattle Police Department to report her as missing a week after returning home from vacation, however she was turned away because ‘her husband would have to report.’ She went right home and had James May do that. After he was done she immediately made a second call back to the police to file her own report, I’m assuming because there was now another (MALE) one on file? Unfortunately nothing ever came of either report and no one ever came forward to volunteer anything helpful regarding Kerry’s disappearance.
Ken Hardy commented that ‘because of the separation of her marriage, they didn’t pay that much attention to it at first, because they figured she just went off somewhere.’ The news media never reported on her disappearance, and not a single time was her name ever mentioned in the news. Weeks then months passed by, and Sheila kept contacting law enforcement over and over again, begging them to do more work on her daughter’s case. Eventually one of the officers got irritated and barked, ‘Mrs. Olson, your daughter is not dead!’ then hung up. As the years passed by with no news or resolution, Kerry mom said of her daughter: ‘I knew she was dead. … she would have called.’ Sheila described herself as ‘a mess’ the year after her daughter vanished but thankfully she was able to get herself together for the sake of her other children. She said at the time surrounding her daughter’s disappearance the thought never crossed her mind that Ted Bundy could have been Kerry’s killer.
Mrs. Olson said that her daughter, ‘knew all these people and they knew her: she was amazed, one time when, walking down the street, her daughter stopped to talk at length to a woman in a mink coat and then to a hippie down the block.’ The evening before Kerry disappeared she spent the night at a girlfriends house in the Woodland Park area of Seattle and from there (per a note she left behind) was going to a second girlfriends house roughly ten miles away on Beacon Hill. Years into the investigation Seattle cold case detective MikeClestnski said that at some point it was reported she was last seen alive hitchhiking around the Woodland Park area on June 13, 1972 (a day after what was initially reported).
At some point in October 1974 Seattle law enforcement compared Kerry’s dental records against the teeth of two skulls that were discovered in Dole Valley near Vancouver, Washington. One of the bodies was immediately identified as Carol Valenzuela and after quite a few years the second was determined to be MarthaMorrison; it is strongly speculated that both girls were victims of Warren Leslie Forrest. It is unknown if there was any additional investigative work done related to Hardy’s case at the time and unfortunately the original documents related to her case file have been destroyed (why?). According to Ken, the Seattle Police Department didn’t seem overly concerned in conducting a thorough investigation into his sisters case, and they did not keep in contact with the Hardy/Olson family at all after she disappeared. With no sightings of the young flower child and no one coming forward with information Kerry’s case quickly went cold. This absolutely broke her parents’ hearts. Ken shared with Tiffany Jean a terribly sad story: ‘one day my stepdad calls up and has me come over to the house. I was a single parent then, with two young kids. My stepdad said that he was really worried about my mom and that they would get my truck fixed up and take care of my kids if I went out looking for my sister. At first I thought it was a good idea, but reality sunk in immediately. I looked at him and said, that sounds great, but where do you want me to start? New York, Florida, southern California, you know? I kept having talks with my mom about it, but there just wasn’t anything to do.’
A drug bust in Seattle’s Fremont District in 1974 helped give the family hope: according to Ken, Kerry’s estranged husband was involved in dealing drugs, however ‘he just kind of walked through the middle of this huge mess and nobody touched him… so our feeling at that point was that Kerry had probably turned state’s evidence on the drug situation and made a deal for her husband, because she still loved him. Like maybe my sister had made a deal which led to this huge bust under the condition that he didn’t get touched, you know? That’s what it seemed like.’ But as more and more time passed by this ideal scenario seemed less and less probable. ‘She wouldn’t have stayed away that long, even in witness protection, because we were close.
It didn’t take long before the Hardy/Olson clan began to suspect that somehow James May was involved in Kerry’s disappearance. Ken said that ‘James said that he’d tried to contact several mutual friends that she would have been in contact with, looking for her. We found out that that was a lie. He never contacted anybody. One time he came over to my parents’ house when I was there, and my stepdad was so pissed at him that he wouldn’t even allow him inside. When we confronted him about her disappearance, he just acted totally ignorant.‘I haven’t talked to her since she left.’ That’s all he would say. That and ‘I don’t know.’’ After a few years passed by Ken ran into his former brother-in-law at a coffee house in Seattle’s University District. ‘James was sitting at the bar, and he jumped off his stool when he saw me. He came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Ken, how ya doin?’ and boom, he hit me in the arm. I just kind of turned sideways and elbowed him in the side of the head. Laid him out on the floor and walked out.’
Ken thinks that at some point in the week before the family was supposed to leave for Minnesota James and Kerry met up and the visit turned violent: ‘I kind of assumed, knowing her as I did, that eventually she was going to think about either getting a divorce or reconciling with her husband. And I don’t know if the attempt to do one or the other of those two things got them together. I just don’t know.’ At the time Kerry vanished she wasn’t sure how she wanted to move forward with her life. Ken commented that she was still wearing her wedding ring and that ‘she wore it all the time. Getting married, even at her young age… it was an important thing for her.’ Eventually James May moved away from Seattle, and his former in-laws lost contact with him completely. Ken said that ‘all we had was speculation, no evidence.’
Over time the Hardy/Olson clan came to realize that their sweet Kerry was never coming back to them. Mrs. Olson said that ‘at some point I knew Kerry was dead. She would have called.’ Years then eventually decades passed by without any word from investigators. It wasn’t until 2004 when the King County Medical Examiner gathered DNA samples from Sheila Olson with hopes to maybe help link Kerry to one of the unidentified bodies found during the Green River Killer investigation. Sadly none were a match to her Kerry. She remained missing for six more years.
Now I know what you’re thinking? Jessica, who is this young lady and why have we never heard of her before (I know the ‘hi: I’m Ted’ page did a Patreon piece for a $3 monthly fee but I’m not sure how many people subscribe… at the completion of my article I’ve stumbled upon a few other noteworthy sources as well)?** So where’s the Bundy related evidence related to Kerry May-Hardy and is it believable? First off, Kerry’s murder took place in mid-1972… even a fledgling Bundyphile knows that his first ‘official victim’ was KarenSparks in early January 1974 (as my own personal side, note I think Bundy killed Ann Marie Burr when he was 14 and I think he’s been killing ever since then but that’s my opinion and I understand not everyone agrees with me). Aside from Hardy fitting his typical victim profile, what I think jumped out at me the most is the fact that her mother told law enforcement she thinks roughly two years before Kerry vanished she lived above a crisis clinic in Seattle’s University District (however she isn’t completely certain). Again, most Bundy aficionado’s know that he met AnnRulewhen she volunteered and he was a PT work study at the Seattle Crisis Clinic in 1971. However, Sheila Olson’s timeline alleges that her daughter lived there in 1970 and Bundy worked there in 1971, so this information doesn’t quite add up. When Kerry supposedly lived above the crisis center Bundy was employed for an Attorney Messenger and Process Service in Seattle as a file clerk and courier; he was employed there from September 1969 to May 1970 when he was fired for ‘unjustifiable absences’ (he claimed to have been babysitting Molly, Liz’s daughter). Job #2 in 1970 for Mr. Bundy lasted from June 5 to December 31, 1971 where he was a delivery driver for Pedline Supply Company, a family owned medical supply company. He quit the job at the end of 1971 when the office moved to another part of Seattle. However it is worth noting that while Hardy was alive and in Capitol Hill Bundy was just 2-4 miles away the entire time, living at the Rogers Rooming House on 12th Avenue in Seattle’s University District. Kerry was also close friends with CathySwindler, daughter of Herb Swindler who was employed at one time as the Head of Homicide for the Seattle Police Department and he happened to work the Georgeann Hawkins and Lynda Ann Healy investigations. Strangely enough, Cathy briefly went out with Bundy (she wasn’t aware he was still dating Elizabeth Kloepfer while seeing her). It’s speculated she introduced Kerry (who was a high school friend) to Ted while they were student interns together at Harborview Medical Center (where he coincidentally interned from June 1972 until September 1972, which is consistent with the date of Kathy’s disappearance on June 12, 1972). Physically, I think Kerry’s appearance would have been striking and memorable to Bundy: she was slender and beautiful, with long copper hair parted down the middle. … What if he stalked then approached her as she was attempting to thumb a ride and lured her into his car? Despite all this, at this time there is no actual evidence linking Ted to Hardy’s murder. Tiffany Jean points out that ‘the potential for a previous social connection is enticing. Perhaps Cathy introduced her to Ted while they were a couple, or ran into her around town while out on a date. Physically, Kerry’s appearance would have been striking and memorable. What if Ted had approached a hitchhiking Kerry a few years after dating Cathy, and lured her into his girlfriend’s car with that famous veneer of charm? ‘Hi Kerry, I’m Ted! Remember me? We met through Cathy, do you need a ride somewhere?’ Of course, without Cathy’s confirmation, this entire scenario is pure speculation, and could merely be an eerie coincidence.’
The Crisis Clinic was first located in an office close to Seattle University (which was located on 12th Street) before relocating to an old Victorian style house in Capitol Hill. AnnRule and the night supervisor at the time Bundy worked there claimed that there were no other tenants in either building due to the confidential nature of the work done and the records present on site. So if Kerry did live above a Crisis Center it must have been at a different one than the one Ted worked at. Whether or not Hardy lived somewhere close to the Crisis Clinic is under investigation at this time (per an article written in mid-2011). At the end of the day, Sheila Olson strongly feels that Bundy isn’t responsible for the murder of her daughter: ‘I just don’t… a mothers feeling.’ Ken thinks that James May seems like a far likelier suspect instead of the serial killer. At the end of their 2021 interview Ken shared with Tiffany Jean that he was ‘pretty sure, I’m pretty confident in my assumption… I think you can rule the Bundy thing out.’ Unfortunately there is no direct evidence of May’s involvement, only suspicious context. According to Ken, Kerry’s remains were close to property that the May family owned and was even dug up with machines owned by the family. A records search pretty much confirms that story: James May’s father did in fact own a large amount of land in the Kittitas County area. Perhaps what is most incriminatory is Mr. Hardy’s allegation that he was physically abusive to his sister, and as most true crime fans are aware, when a wife disappears under mysterious circumstances her husband is usually the first suspect. In her article, Tiffany Jean comments that ‘circumstantial and character evidence are always difficult to prosecute. In the case of James May, the sum value of these circumstances, while compelling to laymen, probably would not hold up in court. Without any telltale trauma to her bones, her body itself offers no clues. A third possibility, that Kerry’s murder was a random attack by an unidentified perpetrator, also remains. Sadly, without DNA evidence to analyze, and short of a confession, it seems unlikely that Kerry Hardy-May’s murder will ever officially be solved.’
Former Kittitas County Sheriff Andrea Blume said as of 2011 that detectives are still looking into the case and are ‘looking at all possibilities;’ the Seattle Police are also working with the Sheriffs on the case. I want to mention that the original missing persons file from 1972 was somehow ‘destroyed’ (that’s all the Vancouver Sun article said with no further explanation… that sounds oddly sinister). What’s interesting to me is there’s not one but TWO Seattle based serial killers that have been investigated for Hardy’s murder: the second was none other than ‘The Riverman’ himself, Gary Ridgway. In 2004, King County Sheriffs requested (and were granted) Kerry’s mothers DNA to compare it to that of the Green River Killer case and Ridgway was eventually ruled out as a killer. After Kerry’s family came forward to law enforcement that they felt the composite sketch was similar to hers, the familial DNA sample from 2004 was sent off to the University of North Texas. Kittitas County Undersheriff Clayton Myers said the DNA sample was sent to the Center for Human Remains at UNT where it was entered into a national DNA database: ‘the database would search all the human remain samples there for a match.’
Kerry May-Hardy’s disappearance remained a mystery until September 6, 2010: while digging at a construction site machinery disturbed her remains about five miles from Interstate-90 near the Suncadia Resort (a golf club) in Roslyn, Washington. Her body was uncovered when a backhoe operator digging a waterline ditch came across her remains; at first, the operator noticed her clothing mixed in with the dirt. This site is in fairly close proximity to where Ted Bundy hunted AND lived (in fact, it’s only about 5 miles away from one of his dump sites that was discovered three years after Kerry vanished). She was found in a shallow grave less than two feet below the earth’s surface (to be exact, the depth ranged from 18 to 24 inches) and her skeleton was clad in a blue-colored, long-sleeved shirt with pink buttoned cuffs and a 14-carat gold ring on her left finger, roughly a size 5-6. According to the autopsy, the woman had been dead for at least twenty years, but possibly as long as fifty. No cause of death could be determined from the remains.In a KIRO-TV article published March 22, 2011, Kittitas Sheriff’s department said of the discovery: ‘she had fairly straight teeth with extensive dental work.’ Bundy often left his victims bodies sans clothes so if this was indeed one of his victims perhaps he was in the midst of either perfecting his technique or was too inebriated and sloppy to have remembered to do it? Ted certainly was familiar with the rural portion of I-90 east of Seattle where Kerry was discovered. In early 1974 he drove down that highway many times to get to his ‘dumping grounds’ at Taylor Mountain and Issaquah. He traveled two hours further east that April to abduct SusanRancourt, a confirmed victim that attended Central Washington College in Ellensburg, WA. The Suncadia Resort is located about halfway between the Taylor Mountain gravesite (where Rancourt’s skull was found) and the college. Much like Bundy’s Taylor other two gravesites, Kerry’s burial place was wooded and remote, yards away from a gravel side road off the interstate. In 1989, Bundy described burying Colorado victim JulieCunningham in a similar location, saying he would get on the highway and just drive until he found an isolated place to turn off: “I found a side road, a dirt road, turned off onto it and drove maybe a quarter mile off the road.” He made similar declarations about Utah victims Debra Kent and Nancy Wilcox.
Kerry gravesite was roughly 100 yards away from a minor gravel road off the highway that had been around before the conversion. Law enforcement began careful excavation of the body the very afternoon it was found. Two tents were set up: one related to the excavation site, the other for processing. In addition to the Sheriff’s Department combing the area, two archaeologists from Central Washington University were also on site to help recover and preserve remains, bits of clothing, and any other evidence that was found. It took two full days to remove the entire skeleton. Law enforcement said Kittitas County didn’t have any unsolved cases involving missing women around that time, therefore they felt the victim was an outsider not from the area. One time Kittitas County Undersheriff ClaytonMyers said, ‘we have a team of investigators who are working locally and with neighboring counties for missing adult females. It’s a little too early to tell which ones are in the ballpark because we are still struggling with our time frame.’ At the time of Kerry’s disappearance in 1972 the area was isolated, heavily wooded, and used for logging, and it’s worth noting that Bundy often left his victims in remote, wooded locations (such as Taylor Mountain and the Issaquah dump site).
A report regarding the excavation of the body states that it didn’t take investigators long to realize the remains were probably moved there at one point and it wasn’t the original dumpsite (meaning it couldn’t have been Bundy since he was put to death in early 1989). It took law enforcement until the following March to determine that the young victim’s estimated date of death was determined to be sometime in between 1960 and 1990. It was further determined the young girl was between 5’4” and 5’10,” tall and was between 19 and 40 years old (I feel like date of death, height and weight range are all surprisingly broad), and had a large amount of expensive dental work done. At first it was speculated that she was possibly of Hispanic ethnicity however it was eventually determined she was not. Forensic experts entered the victims dental records into a national database and surprisingly there were no hits.
Local Kittitas County law enforcement from where the body was discovered found no female missing persons cases that took place in the county that were consistent with the found remains; because of this police felt that the victim wasn’t from the area. A facial reconstruction image was generated from the remains by forensic artist Natalie Murry in conjunction with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office in hopes that the victim would be identified. Oddly enough, Kerry’s family members did contact law enforcement after they saw the composite drawing and told them that they felt it looked like her. Jeff Norwood (Kerry’s younger sister Carlees husband) said that ‘my wife and my mother-in-law both looked at it and said, ‘Yes, that’s Kerry’’ … ‘when you put her picture up to it. It was Kerry.’ They immediately went to law enforcement to tell them their thoughts. The King County Medical Examiner’s Office used DNA from the 2004 sample they took from Kerry’s mother and compared it to DNA extracted from a bone sample that was sent to the University of North Texas’ Center for Human Remains for genetic testing.
On June 1, 2011 the remains were officially determined to be a match for Kerry May-Hardy. It was announced to the public two days later in a statement by The Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office in conjunction with Dr. Kathy Taylor of the King County Medical Examiner’s Office. On June 6, 2011 Seattle’s KOMO-TV News spoke with Kittitas Undersheriff Clayton Meyers who said investigators were still looking into the possibility that Hardy’s murder could have been related to Ted Bundy: ‘We’ll look into everything’ … ‘we’ll be working with the Seattle and King County investigators who are responsible for those Bundy cases. We don’t have anything at this point, it’s very early.’ Olson said she was almost ecstatic when it was determined that her daughter’s remains were finally identified, saying ‘I don’t care if they find who did it or not. My daughter is going to be home by the end of the week and that’s all I care for.’ Hardy’s sister CarleeNorwood was only 9 years old when her sister disappeared in 1972, however she said that none of the family ever forgot her. She told Seattle based news station KIRO-TV Channel 7 that: ‘she was fun… she was my sister…. she was very close with our whole family, with everybody.’ She went on to say the family never gave up hope that Kerry would come home to them, but that discovery in 2006 did nothing but confirm her worst fears: ‘you always hope, you never give up hope.’ … ‘realistically, I think we knew. My mom did. We all knew. But you just want that closure.’
A dailyrecordnews.com article written by Mary Swift mentions that Rick Norwood was the designated ‘Hardy-Olsen family spokesperson’ for the case, and regarding his sister-in-laws murder commented that: ‘we kind of knew then… we were shocked. We were shocked and also relieved … We’re relieved that Kerry’s been found and we are able to finish the grieving process. She had been gone almost 40 years.’ … ‘We are just now going through the process of dealing with this. At some point, we’ll probably have some kind of service but that has not been totally decided. Kerry’s remains have not been released yet. It’s now a criminal investigation. We don’t know what’s going to happen.’ Norwood never met his sister in law, however he said loved ones described her as ‘a loving family person who cared about the family very much. She was quite a bit older than my wife. She cared for and doted on my wife.’ Lastly Norwood praised the police department, saying ‘we’re grateful to the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office and Detective Blume for all that they’ve done.’ … ‘They’ve been very wonderful with this family and helping us through this process.’
Ms. Olson was 80 years old in 2011 when her daughter’s remains were discovered, and after they were found the Hardy-Olsen family held a celebration of life in her honor. Since Kerry’s disappearance she has fallen out of touch with James May (who remarried in 1992). Sheila said she held onto one thought after being told her daughter was finally found after so many years: ‘welcome home.’ Per Legacy.com she passed away on December 9, 2015.
Bundy’s attorney PollyNelson claimed her client confessed to her that he attacked and killed a young lady in her apartment building then took her body back into the woods. Was this Kerry May-Hardy? Or one of his many other victims? Obviously her body was moved to where it was found at some point after the golf club was constructed in 2002 but… maybe it wasn’t the original killer who moved it. Maybe a big wig at the golf club who didn’t want to deal with an expensive construction project screeching to a halt stumbled upon the corpse, panicked and moved it (for whatever reason, maybe they didn’t want to deal with the police)… well, that doesn’t make sense, why would they allow a construction team to dig there in 2006? Law enforcement questioned Bundy before he was put to death in January 1989 and he claimed to know nothing about her disappearance.
As of July 2023 Kerry’s case remains unsolved. Ken Hardy still remembers and misses his sister. He grew emotional as he spoke of her, saying that ‘she was musically and artistically talented. Whatever she had decided to do in her life, it would have been cool and she would’ve been recognized for it. I often wonder, how would my life have been different, if Kerry was still here?’ Both of Kerry’s parents passed away before her case was solved: Mr. Hardy died on January 11, 1989 at the age of 59 in Federal Way, Washington; Mrs. Olsen passed on December 9, 2015. The case is being actively investigated by the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Office. If anyone has any information regarding Kerry May-Hardy in 1972, they are asked to contact Detective Andrea Blume at 509-962-7069.
**Edit one: I did eventually write a full piece on Ann Marie (and it took FOREVER).
**Edit two: The piece recently became available at no cost, which allowed me to update this article with new information.
Kerry’s yearbook picture from 1967.A color version of Kerry May-Hardy. Photo courtesy of ‘hi: I’m Ted.”Kerry May-Hardy in her 1966 yearbook picture at Lincoln High School in Seattle, Washington. Photo courtesy of Classmates.com.The Hardy family in the 1950 census.The marriage certificate of Kerry May-Hardy and James May. Photo courtesy of Legacy.Kerry’s death certificate.Kerry May-Hardy’s Obituary courtesy of The Seattle Times.A facial reconstruction image that was generated from the remains by forensic artist Natalie Murry of ID Forensic Art in conjunction with the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.Seattle Police Departments notes for October 15, 1974 mentioning May-Hardy. Photo courtesy of ‘hi: I’m Ted.’The gold wedding band and button found in Kerry’s grave. Photo courtesy of the Kittitas County/’hi: I’m Ted.’The Victorian mansion on Capitol Hill, later converted into the Crisis Clinic where Ted and Anne worked, pictured in 1937. Photo courtesy of ‘hi: I’m Ted.’The second location of the Seattle Crisis Clinic, located on the second story.Kittitas County and the King County Medical Examiner excavating Kerry’s gravesite in 2010. Photo courtesy of ‘hi: I’m Ted.’A Kittitas County detective consults with King County Medical Examiner Kathy Taylor in 2010. Photo courtesy of ‘hi: I’m Ted.’A photo of Kerry May-Hardy’s mother, Sheila M. Olson. Photo courtesy of Legacy. Ms. Olson passed away peacefully at the age of 85 surrounded by family on December 9, 2015. Sheila Olson in 2012. Photo courtesy of Ken Hardy/’hi: I’m Ted.’Ken Hardy.Kerry’s brother Ken Hardy in 1967. Photo courtesy Ken Hardy/’hi: I’m Ted.’Ken Hardy with his kids around 1975. Photo courtesy of Ken Hardy/’hi: I’m Ted.’Ken Hardy’s marriage certificate.An article about Kerry published by The Spokesman-Review on June 04, 2011.
I won’t lie, the two Washington victims I have left to write about (Denise Naslund and Brenda Ball) are also the ones I know the least about, and the thought of doing another deep dive is incredibly overwhelming to me and I’ve been putting it off. So, I’m going to do one more unconfirmed abduction that strangely enough wasn’t discussed for the first time until February 2018. To be honest, of ALL the unusual spots I made a point of seeing during my time in Seattle, perhaps the strangest and most boring one was the bus stop where Sotria Kritsonis was allegedly abducted from, located at the intersection of Rainier Ave South and South Orcas South. If you don’t recognize the name of this victim don’t worry: much like Rhonda Stapely, Ms. Kritsonis held onto her experience for a very large portion of her life. It wasn’t until 2018 when she finally opened up and walked KIRO-7 reporter Dave Wagner through what happened to her that snowy winter day in early 1972.
Finding this site in Seattle was a bit of a challenge for me. It took a fair amount of internet sleuthing to figure it out, but with some time and effort I pulled it off. I must have driven around for a solid two hours searching for it too… When I finally was able to find it, a very curious but polite gentleman watching me from across the street seemed genuinely baffled as to why I was so interested in taking pictures of an old, run down bus stop. He kept offering to give me directions to where I was trying to go and couldn’t quite seem to grasp that was my intended destination. And now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure this was my VERY last Bundy-location I visited and I doubt he would have been able to properly understand why I was so excited: I was DONE!
Sotria Linda Kritsonis was born on April 29, 1949 in Bellevue, WA. In early 1972, the twenty two year old student was waiting in the cold for a city bus to arrive and take her to school. After about an hour of waiting a VW Bug pulled up alongside of her, and the handsome young driver politely asked if she was waiting for a bus. After sharing that he didn’t see a bus coming for miles, he asked if she would like a ride to school. Sotria didn’t think for a second that this friendly stranger would do her any harm in the middle of the day so she happily accepted his offer to get out of the brutal Seattle cold and into a warm car: ‘he goes, ‘I’ve come down Rainier Avenue and that’s a long way and there’s no bus in sight. Would you like a ride?’’ The little tan Bug immediately started driving south on I-5 toward Tukwila, which was the opposite direction of where she told him her school was located (in Renton). Sotria became increasingly concerned when he began reaching under the seats: ‘he just started yelling at me, ‘why did you take this ride? Why did you even think about taking this ride? You’re never going to make it to school.’ It was then that Kritsonis considered jumping out of the vehicle but when she reached for where the door handle should have been she realized it was missing: ‘He said, ‘don’t even think about that. You’re not making it. I told you that before.’ Despite sobbing and pleading with him to let her go, her assailant continued to yell at her to shut up and stop screaming.
It was then that Sotria said Bundy made a strange request that made her realize he’d seen her before: ‘‘take your hat off.’ And I said, ‘what do you mean, take my hat off? What for?’’ … ‘I took my hat off and he saw that something was different about me.’ Just the week prior, she cut her once long brown hair up to her shoulders. Her abductor looked at her as though he was somehow aware of this change: ‘He goes, ‘Why did you cut your hair?’’ … ‘I keep thinking, did he stalk me? Did he see me somewhere?’ … ‘Was he waiting for me, or was he watching me?’ Kritsonis felt that he must have followed her previously, in a way marking her as his next victim. It’s widely speculated that Bundy had a preference for slim, long haired brunettes, and up until about a week before she would have been his ideal victim. After aimlessly driving around for about an hour, the man eventually dumped Sotria off in front of her college, saying she was ‘lucky’ as he threw her onto the sidewalk. She never filed a police report and only told her family about what happened: ‘I didn’t talk about it, because I was a little bit embarrassed.’ It wasn’t until about a year and a half later when she saw Bundy on the news that Kritsonis realized who exactly her abductor had been: ‘I knew 100 percent that was the guy.’ … ‘I’m more than lucky. I just thank God I’m alive, every day.’
Perhaps my biggest issue with Ms. Kritsonis’ story (aside from the part about Ted not liking her new hairdo) is her account of the missing door handle. Most Bundy scholars firmly believe that the passengers door in the serial killers car was completely intact and undisturbed, which is obvious when you study the story of an actual confirmed escapee like Carol DaRonch, who never once mentioned a missing handle (and she obviously was able to use it to get away from her attacker). It’s also worth mentioning that DaRonch was abducted on November 8, 1974, which is after Sotria claimed her abduction occurred. Now, let’s really think about this: I don’t think Bundy would have done something so outlandish like taken the door handle off his vehicle when he was trying to pass as a normal, everyday law student. Also, if Ted drove Liz or Molly around I’m sure they would have been alarmed if the car’s door handle mysteriously disappeared. Personally, I think she stole this detail from Rhonda Stapley, who most likely got her serial killers mixed up: it was Ed Kemper who jacked up the passengers side door handle, often shoving something inside it (usually a tube of chapstick), preventing it from opening on the inside, essentially trapping the victim inside his deathwagon.
I’m only briefly touching on Ms. Stapley as I haven’t been to Utah yet and am not super well versed with her story. I do want to mention how similar it is to what happened to Sotria: both started at a bus stop and were able to escape their attacker. In 2016, Ms. Stapley shared her story with KUTV-2 out of Salt Lake City, telling them: ‘I was waiting for a city bus downtown by Liberty Park. A tan Volkswagen came by and offered me a ride and I got in.’ … ‘Instead of taking me back up to campus where he told me he was going to take me, we ended up in Big Cottonwood Canyon, and I was assaulted. I didn’t tell anyone for 40 years. I felt shame.’ Stapley claimed that on October 11, 1974,Bundy noticed her waiting at a bus stop in Utah and asked if she’d like a ride to her college campus. Instead, he took her to a deserted canyon, where he brutally raped and assaulted her for hours. Additionally, he strangled her multiple times to the brink of death then revived her: ‘he did that several times.’ … ‘Revive me and choke me again.’ Rhonda made her escape when Bundy turned his back on her and she bolted: ‘I was able to run. And then I tripped and fell into a mountain river that swept me away from my attacker and saved my life.’ She then hiked 10 miles back to her dormitory at the University of Utah and kept the secret to herself until 2016, when she published her book, ‘I Survived Ted Bundy: The Attack, Escape & PTSD that Changed My Life.’ About the attack, she said: ‘I bathed and just decided never to tell anybody.’ … ‘I was afraid that people would treat me differently if they knew what happened. I wanted to put it behind me and get on with my life, pretend it never happened.’ Now, I do NOT want to victim doubt or shame, I don’t know what happened to Rhonda and there’s only two people (maybe three) in the entire world that do: Ted, Rhonda, and the potential assailant if it wasn’t Bundy. I feel one of the most important things worth mentioning is, like Kritsonis, Rhonda claimed the passengers side door of the VW Beetle had no inside handle, and that’s why she couldn’t escape.
While doing research for this article I stumbled upon a piece written by Shane Lambert titled, ‘Bundy, His Timeline, and Sotria Kritsonis: Filling in a Gap,’ published on January 6, 2021. In it, he dissects Sotria’s story and claims based largely on information found in the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Team Report 1992,’ which has been described as ‘exhaustive documentation of Bundy’s activities… in the hopes that his suspected participation in crimes other than those he confessed to can be clarified’ (from the report’s ‘Director’s Comments’). Not only does it contain important events related to Ted’s murders (for example the time and places of where he was when he killed his confirmed victims), but it also includes normal, everyday events, like what supermarket he did his grocery shopping at and where he bought gas. Lambert comments that the news piece done by KIRO-7 is not entirely accurate because it doesn’t give complete information; for example, the exact date of Kritsonis’ encounter isn’t given as well as the address where the abduction occurred. But, in a way I sort of get that: Bundy was a hot topic at the time the story was on the news and people were clamoring for any information related to him. Plus, in a way it was just a fluff piece for a local news station, not a scholarly journal article that required every single minute detail. I mean, let’s say the story is true. It doesn’t help that it happened over 45 years ago, and the memory doesn’t usually improve with time. However, the general time frame in question was given (winter of 1972) and the location can be found (obviously, as I was able to go there). Now, did it occur in early 1972 or late 1972? Living in Buffalo I am well aware you can have snow at two completely different times of the year: beginning (January, February, and March), and end (October, November, December). Lambert feels (and I agree) that the alleged abduction most likely occurred in early 1972 because Kritsonis says she was 22 at the time and at the end of the year she would have been 23. Thus, the time frame in question is January to March of 1972, and there’s no information provided during that time period in the ‘TB Multi agency Report 1992.’ It shows an entry for Bundy on New Year’s Eve in 1971 then nothing until April 15th, 1972. The encounter between Bundy and Kritsonis appears to be somewhere in that period of time and if we take her story to be true, then it shows that he was active during this period.
I’m not going to talk about everything Lambert discussed in his article (you can read it yourself, I’ll include the link at the end) but another important thing I want to touch on is that the news piece says that Kritsonis saw Bundy on television a year and a half after her botched kidnapping. If this is true, and she did in fact see him on the news in 1973, then what was it related to? Ted didn’t get arrested until August 1975, seeing him on TV before then makes absolutely no sense. I mean, we all know about how Bundy posed as a college student during 1972’s election and that he secretly traveled with Governor’s Dan Evans Democratic opponent monitoring their campaign activities. That did make the news in August of 1973 and could have been when Sotria claims she saw, but I doubt it.
Like Lambert, I don’t believe this woman’s story, however I disagree with his timeline on when Bundy started killing: he thinks it was in 1974, however I feel the murders started years earlier and Lynda Ann Healy wasn’t his first victim (although I think he thought he killed Karen Sparks). Just my personal opinion, I guess I’ll elaborate more at a different time. I also did not read the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992’ so I can’t comment much on that either (in fact I didn’t know it existed until now). Lambert also pointed out that it was a coincidence a good amount of the victims had long dark hair parted down the middle, as it was the style at the time (I can attest to this, in a picture from 1974 my Mom is a dead ringer for Kathy Parks). However, not all of his victims had brown hair:Lynette Culvers hair was light blonde, and little Kim Leach had dirty blonde locks (both girls were coincidentally only 12 years old by the way, and were also Bundy’s youngest confirmed victims). It’s also worth mentioning that the only victim Ted admitted to letting go was a woman in Seattle who claimed she had a child waiting for her at home.
I do want to touch on another unconfirmed escaped victim briefly, just because I want to ‘share the wealth of Bundy-knowledge,’ so to speak. When I was in Seattle I didn’t sleep very well being away from my new husband so I spent many late nights going down the true crime rabbit hole, so to speak. One of the WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEIRDEST things I discovered was a book written by another supposed living victim named Sara A. Survivor. The review on Amazon says, ‘Reconstructing Sara is not a ‘story.’ It is testimony. Anyone thinking of buying the book and expecting some dramatic recounting of events that reads like a story is going to be disappointed. Sara does not have the ability to do that even though she writes for a living. Her mind simply can’t function that way due to the severe trauma she sustained while under the control of Ted Bundy.’ In a nutshell, this woman claims to have been repeatedly raped and assaulted by Ted Bundy; she also alleges that Bob Keppel mocked victims and destroyed important evidence related to the Bundy case. About the author, Amazon says, ‘Sara A Survivor is a pseudonym for the actual victim of Ted Bundy. She is writing the book under a pseudonym to protect her identity as she continues to move through the healing process as a survivor and tries to rebuild her life. The impact of the kidnappings and ‘relationship’ with Ted developed through intimidation, stalking, rape and coercion, lasted nearly a lifetime. The memory loss of the events of that time period for so many decades delayed the healing; but she was lucky in that she survived. What happened to Sara may help others in similar situations.’ I don’t want to get too off topic but this is something worth looking into (if just because she’s a wacko and this is entertaining) and there’s a wealth of information on her website despite the book being out of print. Per Amazon, ‘Reconstructing Sara is being taken out of circulation to be rewritten by a professional writer with new areas of information added. The original version will be available to professionals only upon request. Reconstructing Sara is not a story, it is a testimony.’ Maybe I’ll do a separate piece on this at a later point in time (after I do my research), but I do want to comment that I couldn’t find a copy of this book ANYWHERE and I tried looking in some pretty unconventional spots. I got nada. So, the search continues.
I am good friends with Erin Banks, and before I even went to Seattle I remember being surprised when I stumbled upon her write-up on this victim, because I never heard about her. At the end of Ms. Banks article on her wonderfully written blog ‘The Crimepiper” was a comment left by Ms. Kritsonis’s brother defending his sister, saying something along the lines of ‘you didn’t see the look on her face that day she saw him on the news…’ I don’t know. I guess a part of me kind of gets it: he believes her, and wants to defend his sister, who he loves and wants to protect.
Now, keep in mind this is my personal opinion. Take this information and please formulate your own thoughts. I feel perhaps Ms. Kritsonis was briefly kidnapped by a man in a VW Bug (it was after all a very popular car at the time), but I don’t think it was Ted Bundy who did it. It just makes no sense to me, especially when she claims she saw him on TV only a year and a half later in 1973. Also, I don’t think her new haircut would have stopped him either, not when she was already in his vehicle, unable to escape. And why would he randomly ask her to take her hat off? It’s almost as if Kritsonis was searching for excuses that Bundy didn’t assault and take her life. That paired with the obvious door handle lie just doesn’t add up.
Kritsonis’ sophomore year picture from the 1965 Franklin High School yearbook.A photo of Kritsonis in the 1970’s, courtesy of KIRO-7.A photo of Sotria Kritsonis with her brown hair cut short, courtesy of KIRO-7.A close-up of Kritsonis’ short haircut Sotria Kritsonis in 2018, walking the route of her abduction with KIRO-7 reporter Dave Wagner.A photo of Kritsonis as she give an interview to KIRO-7 reporter Dave Wagner, courtesy of KIRO-7.A more current photo of Sotria Kritsonis, courtesy of Facebook.A more current photo of Sotria Kritsonis, courtesy of Facebook.A more current photo of Sotria Kritsonis, courtesy of Facebook.TB’s whereabouts in early 1972 according to the ‘Ted Bundy Multiagency Investigative Team Report 1992.’An article mentioning Bundy before his 1975 arrest published by The Tri-City Herald on May 17, 1973.An article mentioning Bundy spying on Dan Evans Democratic opponent before his 1975 arrest published by The Olympian on August 29, 1973. An older shot of the bus stop where Sotria Kritsonis said she was kidnapped from by Ted Bundy in 1972.A current shot of the scene across the street from where Sotria Kritsonis claims she was abducted from, 2022.A current shot of the scene across the street from where Sotria Kritsonis claims she was abducted from, 2022.A current shot of the scene across the street from where Sotria Kritsonis claims she was abducted from, 2022.A current shot of the scene across the street from where Sotria Kritsonis claims she was abducted from, 2022.A current shot of the scene across the street from where Sotria Kritsonis claims she was abducted from, 2022.A current shot of the scene across the street from where Sotria Kritsonis claims she was abducted from, 2022.A current shot of the scene across the street from where Sotria Kritsonis claims she was abducted from, 2022.A current shot of the scene across the street from where Sotria Kritsonis claims she was abducted from, 2022.It’s worth noting that the water levels at the time Stapley claims she was assaulted in the canyon were checked by some dedicated Bundy researchers and they came to the conclusion that they weren’t high enough to have swept her away.‘I said, ‘My name is Rhonda, and I’m a first-year pharmacy student.’ And he said, ‘My name is Ted, and I’m a first-year law student. It didn’t seem scary or wrong. He just seemed like a fellow college student,” said Stapley. ‘There was nothing alarming at all about him.’A more current photo of Ms. Rhonda Stapley, who claims she was sexually assaulted by Bundy in 1975 but didn’t come forward with her story until 2016. ‘I thought he was going to kiss me & instead he said I’m going to kill you. And then he started strangling me.’‘She was an innocent Mormon girl. He was America’s most notorious serial killer. When their paths crossed on a quiet autumn afternoon, he planned to kill her. But this victim had an incredible will to survive and would live to tell her story nearly three decades after he met death in a Florida electric chair. Ted Bundy brutally attacked Rhonda Stapley in a secluded Utah canyon in 1974. She miraculously escaped and hid her dark secret until now. This compelling real story of triumph over tragedy is both shocking and inspiring and told with the true courage of a victim turned survivor (foreword by Ann Rule).’Sara A. Survivor, at the age of 17. Photo courtesy of reconstructingsara.com.Sara with the 1972 Daffodil Princesses, photo courtesy of Facebook.Here is a picture of the inside passengers side door of Bundy’s VW Beetle. You can clearly see the door handle is in perfect condition on the car. Today, Bundy’s tan 1968 VW Beetle is among the star attractions at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.Edmund Emil Kemper III is an American serial killer who murdered six college students before murdering his mother and her best friend from September 1972 to April 1973, following his parole for murdering his paternal grandparents.On the outside it seemed a harmless ride to the next destination, but inside was a murderous trap: Ed Kemper’s car was a used yellow 1969 Ford Galaxie 500 with a black interior and hardtop. He bought it with the money he received after suing a female driver after he broke his left arm in a motorcycle accident. Not long after he got the Ford Galaxie, he crashed it, causing some damage to the left rear fender. Kemper roughly patched the rear bumper and light himself and it was in this condition when he was arrested. While driving around, he noticed a large number of young women hitchhiking, and began storing plastic bags, knives, blankets, and handcuffs in his car. He then began picking up girls and peacefully letting them go, and according to Kemper, he picked up around 150 hitchhikers before he began acting on his homicidal sexual urges, which he called his ‘little zapples.’ As a side note, the first thing that popped in my head after reading about this was BTK’s ‘factor X,’ which he described as the internal, insatiable drive to kill that he does not comprehend.Heres an interesting tidbit: while in prison, Ed Kemper voiced many audio books, including Star Wars and Flowers in the Attic.Ed Kempers deathwagon. He often jammed a foreign object (usually a chapstick tube) in the passengers side door handle so his victim couldn’t escape. Rhonda Stapley most likely confused her serial killers when she concocted her story in 2016.A photo of Clarnell State after she was killed by her son, Edward Kemper on April 21, 1973.Aside from having to travel to court a few days here and there, after the attack DaRonch said, ‘My life continued normally.’ … ‘I was able to detach myself from an event that could have ruined my life.’ … ‘It may not be a reasonable solution for everyone, but it is how I have been able to move on.’ Aside from an incident right after the attempted kidnapping, when a magazine-seller approached her car in a grocery store parking lot, DaRonch has expressed that she’s experienced no fear regarding the attempted kidnapping has lingered in her. However, she grew ‘more cautious around strangers, more aware of my surroundings and less trusting,’ however she didn’t allow Bundy to take up space in her head. Bundy’s periodic trials were only pauses in her return to normalcy, including night classes and weekends away to the lake with her boyfriend. DaRonch went on to earn a degree in business management and has long worked in the telecommunications industry, where she met Michael, her current partner of over 15 years. They live together in a suburb of Salt Lake City, the same place she was living with her parents when Bundy first approached her. ‘Even reliving it now, I’m not entirely comfortable.’ … ‘I enjoy my anonymity, when I have it. I also realize that it is an important story to tell, and if someone can benefit in a positive way from it, then that’s what I want.’
Another Bundy Blog. 