John Arthur Getreu was convicted of killing three young women across eleven years and two countries. The first was Margaret Williams, a 15-year-old American girl living with her family at a U.S. Army post in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany, who died in a field after a dance in June 1963. A German juvenile court convicted Getreu, then 18, in 1964. He served less than six years and was sent home to the United States in 1969.
The other two were Leslie Marie Perlov and Janet Ann Taylor, both 21, who were strangled on Stanford University land in February 1973 and March 1974. Their cases went unsolved for more than four decades. Getreu was living a few miles away in Palo Alto at the time, working in hospital and security jobs and leading a Scout troop. His German record never entered any database California investigators searched.
In 2018 Santa Clara County sheriff's investigators sent DNA from under Leslie Perlov's fingernails for genetic genealogy analysis, traced it through his relatives to Getreu, then 74 and living in Hayward, and confirmed the match with a coffee cup he threw away. San Mateo County then matched his DNA to Janet Taylor's clothing. A jury convicted him of Taylor's murder in September 2021, and in January 2023 he pleaded guilty to Perlov's. He died in a California prison hospital in September 2023.
Getreu was born in Newark, Ohio, The Stanford Daily reported. His father was a U.S. Army officer, and as a teenager Getreu lived with his parents at the American military community in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany. The Williams family was stationed at the same base. Margaret's father was an Army chaplain, assigned to the 8th Infantry Division according to Palo Alto Online's 2018 report.
Little else about Getreu's early life is documented in reliable reporting. The Almanac described Margaret as his classmate, and ABC7 reported that she was the youngest daughter of the chaplain's family. Her brother Evan, who later became a pastor, was 7 years old in 1963.
Margaret Williams was 15 in June 1963, a high school student in the American community at Bad Kreuznach. Her family has spoken about her mainly through her brother Evan and her sister Marianne Stowers, who described the loss to ABC7 in 2021. Evan Williams said during the 2021 trial that he feels connected to other people who have lost someone to murder.
On June 9, 1963, Margaret attended a dance on the military base. Getreu offered to walk her home, ABC7 reported. She was found in a field. She had been beaten, strangled and raped, and she died there without regaining consciousness, according to the German records read in a California courtroom in 2021.
Getreu was arrested for the killing; Evan Williams remembered his father, the chaplain, telling him so. More than half a century later, San Mateo County sheriff's detective Gordon Currie obtained the German court file, ten volumes and more than 1,000 pages, and prosecutors read parts of it to a California jury.
According to those records, Getreu told German investigators that he had met Margaret at the dance and wanted to be alone with her, though he said he had not planned a sexual assault. He described hitting her to stop her from calling out and holding her mouth and throat until she lost consciousness. He then raped her and left, and later went back to the field. At his trial he told the court he was deeply sorry for her parents and would bring her back if he could, Palo Alto Online reported in 2018. Evan Williams said in 2021 that Getreu never showed remorse and had tried to blame and shame his sister at the 1964 trial.
Because Getreu was tried as a juvenile, the maximum sentence for a killing was 10 years. On July 13, 1964, the German court convicted him of rape with fatal consequences and imposed that maximum. The court records described in the 2021 trial show that he served five years and nine months. German officials judged that he was likely to lead a law-abiding life if sent to live with his parents in the United States. He was released on March 7, 1969, ordered to leave the country within 24 hours, and flew to the United States the next day, returning under probation supervision.
After his release Getreu lived for a time at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969 or 1970, according to testimony summarized by Palo Alto Online. In 1970 he married a coworker who was a single mother of a young daughter. The marriage lasted about eight years.
Before the wedding, his first wife testified in 2021, he told her that he had killed a girl in Germany. Nothing in his American life reflected that record. As The Almanac explained after his 2023 plea, a decades-old overseas conviction left no trace in any digital database. There was no sex offender registry to put him on: federal registration was enacted in 1994 and the national registry was set up in 1996.
From 1971 to 1975 the family lived in Palo Alto's Midtown neighborhood, at addresses off Loma Verde Avenue and on Alma Street, the Mountain View Voice reported. Getreu worked as a medical technician for Stanford and Mills hospitals; The Almanac and The Stanford Daily describe him as a cardiology technician at Stanford Hospital at the time of the killings. He also worked as a security guard. In August 1972, as a guard, he was credited with chasing off suspected arsonists at a plant in Redwood City; the three teenagers he described were never found. In 1974 he was working for California Plant Protection Services in Palo Alto, CBS San Francisco reported. With his wife, he led a Scout Explorer troop.
Leslie Perlov graduated from Stanford with honors in 1972 and had been accepted to law school at the University of Pennsylvania, ABC7 reported. Her father had died of cancer a few months before her death, and she lived with her widowed mother in Los Altos Hills. She worked as a clerk at the North County Law Library in Palo Alto. Her sister Diane described her as the smartest of the siblings and as a protective older sister.
On February 13, 1973, Leslie called her mother from the library to say she was driving home. She never arrived, and her mother reported her missing that day. Her orange 1972 Chevrolet Nova was found near a gate to an old quarry off Page Mill Road and Old Page Mill Road, with the keys gone. Friends thought she may have driven into the hills to find a scenic spot to paint for her mother. An off-duty officer later recalled seeing a young man with long blond hair near her car, talking to someone inside it; he was never identified.
Three days later, on February 16, her body was found under an oak tree in the open hills above campus, in the area now known as the Stanford Dish, between Page Mill Road and Junipero Serra Boulevard. A sheriff's deputy on horseback found her, KTVU reported. The medical examiner ruled that she had been strangled with a ligature: a scarf, knotted around her neck. Police said at the time that she had not been sexually assaulted, though her clothing had been disturbed; prosecutors later charged the killing as a murder committed during an attempted rape.
Investigators had no suspect and no motive. Over the years the case was linked in speculation to other deaths. Ted Bundy, who had taken a Stanford summer class in 1967, was considered in the 1970s because of similarities with his crimes. San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto suggested a connection to the so-called Death Angels killings. No one was charged.
Janet Taylor was 21, a sophomore at Canada College, and lived in La Honda in San Mateo County. She was the youngest of three children of Charles "Chuck" Taylor, an All-America guard at Stanford in the early 1940s who, as head coach, took Stanford's 1951 team to the Rose Bowl, and who served as the university's athletic director from 1963 to 1971, according to the College Football Hall of Fame.
Her family remembered her as someone who loved animals and cherished her friends, and who "lived life with enthusiasm and courage." Her sister described her as fun, outgoing, talkative, smart, strong and compassionate. A friend, James Schroeder, called her "a quiet force of nature," a serious student who loved being outdoors. Friends said she had trained in martial arts.
On March 24, 1974, her car was in the repair shop, and after visiting a friend in Palo Alto she set out to hitchhike home to La Honda to feed her puppy. The next morning, March 25, a delivery driver found her body in a ditch beside Sand Hill Road near Manzanita Way, west of Interstate 280, on Stanford land in San Mateo County. She had been beaten and strangled. The coroner found that she had not been raped, but police said the evidence pointed to a sexual motive; her pants were torn. Like Leslie Perlov, she was barefoot and her purse was missing.
Her body lay a few hundred yards to about a mile from where Leslie Perlov had been found 13 months earlier, depending on the account. Police looked at a possible link between the two deaths in 1974, but neither case moved forward. The Palo Alto Daily Post counted hers as one of five killings on or near the Stanford campus between 1972 and 1976.
In January 1975 Getreu attacked a teenage girl who belonged to the Explorer troop he led with his wife. She later testified that after a midnight movie outing she drove members of the troop home, that Getreu came back to her parents' house, and that he raped her while holding her by the throat and threatened to kill her if she made a sound. She told a friend and the friend's parents, and Getreu was arrested the same day.
He was charged with forcible rape but, in June 1975, pleaded guilty under a plea agreement to misdemeanor statutory rape. The court sentenced him to six months in county jail, a $200 fine and two years of probation, then suspended five months of the jail term. He served 30 days, on weekends. The woman, identified in court only as Diane Doe, testified against him in both of his California murder cases more than 40 years later.
His first marriage ended in 1977. His former wife and her daughter both testified in 2021 that Getreu had sexually abused the girl for years, from about age 6, and that the divorce followed. He was never charged over those allegations.
In October 1978 he married again; his second wife died in 2002. They had two children, including a son, Aaron. In the late 1970s Getreu moved back to Newark, Ohio, where he joined the Scouts again, and he returned to the Bay Area in the 1980s, The Stanford Daily reported.
In later years he lived in Hayward with his wife. The Mountain View Voice found acquaintances who remembered a kind neighbor who left Christmas presents for local children. He worked as a carpenter who loved woodworking, ran a business, led a Boy Scout troop and served as exalted ruler of the Elks lodge in Fremont. Others, including Evan Williams, suspected him for years. Williams told ABC7 that he contacted the FBI long before 2018 because he believed Getreu would kill again.
Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith, who in 1996 became California's first elected woman sheriff according to ABC7, had made the unsolved Stanford killings a priority. In November 2016 the sheriff's cold case investigators reopened the Perlov file. Sergeant Noe Cortez, encouraged partly by the spread of consumer ancestry websites, had the clippings from all ten of Leslie's fingernails tested.
Kevin Kellogg, a criminalist with the Santa Clara County District Attorney's crime laboratory, found DNA from Leslie and from an unknown man. He testified later that contact of that kind would normally have happened within a day of her death.
In July 2018 investigators sent the profile to Parabon NanoLabs, a company in Virginia. Parabon built a genealogy profile and searched a public genetic genealogy database, where relatives' DNA pointed toward Getreu. The method was the one used that April to identify Joseph James DeAngelo as the suspected Golden State Killer.
Detectives then followed Getreu and his wife. They collected disposable coffee cups he threw away, including one from a Kaiser Permanente pharmacy, the Mountain View Voice reported, and one from a coffee shop, according to ABC7. The laboratory compared a small identification segment of the DNA. On November 9, 2018, the county crime lab reported a match to the DNA under Leslie's right-hand fingernails, with a random match probability of about 1 in 65 septillion. For the left hand the figure was 1 in 10 billion.
On November 20, 2018, sheriff's investigators arrested Getreu at his home in Hayward and booked him into the Santa Clara County Main Jail in San Jose. He was charged with murder committed during an attempted rape and held without bail. Sheriff Smith said it was unfortunate he could not have been arrested 45 years earlier, but that justice felt very good. Sergeant Shannon Catalano said he did not believe Getreu ever expected to be linked to a 1973 case.
Diane Perlov told KTVU that she had waited 45 years for the call from investigators and was stunned when it came. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about Leslie in some way," she said.
After the arrest, Detective Cortez interviewed Getreu. Excerpts were later played or read at his San Mateo County trial, and The Almanac summarized them. Getreu repeatedly lied: he denied having any arrests, denied confessing in Germany and called the 1975 case only an accusation. He said he did not know Leslie Perlov and had never gone into the hills. Shown a photograph of her body, he said, "OK, I had involvement, but I don't remember it." Asked whether he had fantasized about killing or raping girls, he answered, "That's what it looks like." Without prompting, he brought up Arlis Perry as a "second girl," a case the detective had not raised. He said he had always expected to be caught and wondered why it took so long.
San Mateo County's sheriff's cold case team had reopened Janet Taylor's case (in 2017 according to ABC7, or 2018 according to the San Mateo County District Attorney) and worked with the Santa Clara County investigators on the Perlov case. With a warrant, investigators took a cheek swab from Getreu. Alice Hilker, a criminalist at the San Mateo County forensic laboratory, matched it to male DNA from the torn crotch area of Janet's green corduroy pants.
On May 16, 2019, San Mateo County announced that Getreu, already in custody, had been arrested and charged with Janet Taylor's murder. Bail in that case was set at $10 million. Her family thanked investigators for keeping the case alive for decades. He pleaded not guilty in June 2019.
In the Perlov case, Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Linda R. Clark held a preliminary hearing in early 2020. Diane Doe, the woman from the 1975 case, testified and described the rape. Kellogg gave the DNA evidence, and Cortez described the coffee cups and the cheek swab. Judge Clark found enough evidence to send Getreu to trial on murder, including murder with intent to commit rape. A judge in San Mateo County had already held him to answer in the Taylor case in December 2019.
By then Getreu was in poor health. He appeared in court in a wheelchair and was hearing impaired. In fall 2020, as jury selection for the Taylor trial was about to begin, he was hospitalized; doctors suspected a stroke or brain embolism, and the trial was put off.
His defense lawyer, John Halley, argued that the DNA evidence should be thrown out. He said people cannot help shedding DNA, so the legal idea that someone gives up privacy in things he throws away should not apply, and that testing the cup amounted to seizing a person's whole genome, a search requiring a warrant. He relied on the U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 cellphone-data ruling in Carpenter v. United States. The American Civil Liberties Union supported the argument in a letter to the California Supreme Court. The California Attorney General's office answered that the test looked only at a tiny noncoding portion of the DNA, less than one percent of the genome, and compared it to lifting a fingerprint from a windowsill.
San Mateo County Superior Court and the First District Court of Appeal rejected the motion. The defense petitioned the California Supreme Court in April 2021, and the trial, set to begin with jury selection on May 10, 2021, was halted while the court considered it. The California Supreme Court did not accept the argument, and the trial went ahead that summer.
The trial of People v. John Getreu opened in San Mateo County Superior Court on August 30, 2021, before a jury of eight men and four women. Deputy District Attorney Josh Stauffer prosecuted; Halley defended.
The case rested on the DNA from Janet's clothing, supported by evidence of a pattern. Evan Williams testified about his sister's death, and detective Currie and Stauffer took the jury through the German records. Diane Doe testified about 1975. Getreu's first wife testified about his admission before their marriage, and her daughter testified that Getreu drove her to school every day while the family lived with an aunt on Roberta Drive in Woodside, along the route where Janet's body was later found. Currie showed on a map that the spot was about two miles, roughly six minutes' drive, from that house. The jury also heard excerpts from the 2018 interview.
Halley questioned whether the DNA had been deposited in 1974 or later, through handling, and whether the pants had been torn in the attack at all, since the earliest reports did not mention the tear.
Closing arguments were heard on September 14, 2021. The jury deliberated for about an hour and found Getreu guilty of first-degree murder with infliction of great bodily injury. He showed no reaction. At sentencing, Stauffer called him "the definition of a serial killer."
Judge Robert Foiles sentenced Getreu on November 5, 2021, to life in prison and a $5,000 fine. Because the crime predated later sentencing laws, the term was seven years to life, the Santa Clara County District Attorney later noted. Getreu, 77, sat in a red jail jumpsuit wearing headphones. His son attended both the trial and the sentencing.
The judge called the crime evil and despicable. Diane Perlov told the court she still lived with the trauma of her sister's death and asked that Getreu never be paroled. Evan Williams spoke about his sister. Stauffer asked that the families' statements be placed in Getreu's probation file so that any future parole board would read them, and the judge agreed. According to the probation report, Getreu said he wanted to plead guilty in the Perlov case so the families could have some closure. Detective Currie compared Getreu's crimes to a speedboat leaving long wakes through people's lives and said he was glad Getreu was "finally out of gas."
Getreu's son, Aaron, told ABC7 that he had never seen any sign of violence in his father, had refused to speak with him since the arrest and wanted him to tell the truth. "DNA does not lie," he said.
On January 10, 2023, appearing by video, Getreu pleaded guilty in Santa Clara County Superior Court to the first-degree murder of Leslie Perlov. He was 78 and was being held at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, a state prison hospital, where he received dialysis. He chose a guilty plea rather than no contest.
Diane Perlov attended with her brother, Craig. She said she had not expected remorse and did not see any. She was moved that the judge read the charge aloud with her sister's name and that Getreu pleaded guilty without hesitation. She called the result "justice without peace." Evan Williams said he was glad of the plea and asked Getreu to come clean about any other killings.
Prosecutor Michel Amaral explained that the case fell under 1973 sentencing rules, which would make Getreu eligible for parole seven years after his arrest. San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said consecutive terms would double that, and both prosecutors said they doubted he would ever be released.
On April 27, 2023, Judge Hanley Chew sentenced Getreu to seven years to life, to run after the Taylor term. The District Attorney's office said he would not be eligible for parole until at least 2031. Leslie's brother and sister gave statements. District Attorney Jeff Rosen said the long ordeal was over, hoped the result would bring the families some peace, and added that he hoped never to have to say Getreu's name again. Getreu's DNA was added to the state database for comparison with unsolved rapes and killings.
Getreu died on September 22, 2023, at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton. He was 79. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said he died of natural causes, KTVU reported. He was serving two life terms.
At the time of his death, investigative journalist Grace Kahng, who had followed the case for years, told ABC7 that investigators were examining about a dozen other cases they believed might be his, and that his death might mean those cases would never be confirmed.
Two other Stanford cases are often mentioned alongside Getreu's.
Arlis Perry, 19, was stabbed to death inside Stanford Memorial Church in 1974. Getreu was never charged with or linked by evidence to her death. Her case was resolved separately: Santa Clara County investigators named Stephen Blake Crawford as the primary suspect, and he died by suicide on June 28, 2018, as deputies prepared to serve a search warrant, Palo Alto Online reported. Getreu raised Perry's name himself in his 2018 interview, and The Almanac stated plainly that he was not connected to her death.
Getreu's convictions do not cover the other killings on or near the campus in the 1970s, and no court has linked him to any of them.
Proven by final conviction: the rape and killing of Margaret Williams (German juvenile court, 1964); the first-degree murder of Janet Taylor (jury verdict, 2021; no appeal is reported in any source opened, and he died in 2023); the first-degree murder of Leslie Perlov (guilty plea, 2023); and misdemeanor statutory rape in 1975.
Alleged and never charged: years of sexual abuse of his former stepdaughter, described by her and her mother under oath in 2021. The Santa Clara County District Attorney said the trial heard evidence of abuse from 1970 to 1977.
Unproven: The Stanford Daily reported in 2023 that a woman accused Getreu of trying to kill her in 1969. No other source opened describes the allegation, and no charge is known. Grace Kahng's 2023 statement that investigators were looking at about a dozen other cases has not been followed by any public finding.
Details that vary between sources:
Margaret Williams's age: 15 in most reports (Santa Clara and San Mateo County prosecutors, ABC7, The Almanac); 16 in Palo Alto Online (2018) and ABC7 (2019).
Time served in Germany: five years and nine months (German records, 2021 testimony); about six years (ABC7, Almanac, Palo Alto Daily Post); five years (KTVU); paroled after two years (Palo Alto Online, 2018). The German records and the March 7, 1969, release date support the longer figure.
The date of Janet Taylor's death: last seen March 24, 1974, and found March 25 (The Almanac; San Mateo County District Attorney). Some reports give March 25 as the date of the killing.
The date Leslie Perlov was found: February 16, 1973, in most sources; February 17 in one Palo Alto Online report; ABC7 said search parties found her "the next day."
The scarf: blue (Palo Alto Online, 2018) or floral (prosecutors, 2023).
Leslie Perlov's job: a clerk at the North County Law Library in Palo Alto (Palo Alto Online, 2018); "Stanford law librarian" in The Stanford Daily and several broadcasters.
Chuck Taylor's role: several outlets called him Stanford's athletic director at the time of the killing; the College Football Hall of Fame shows he held that post from 1963 to 1971, so he was the former athletic director in 1974.
The 1975 victim's age: 18 (Palo Alto Online, 2020) or 17 (KRON4); The Stanford Daily called the troop a Girl Scout troop, while court testimony describes an Explorer Scout troop.
The year of the Taylor conviction: 2021 in court reporting; ABC7 (2023) said 2019 and the Santa Clara County District Attorney (2023) said 2022, both errors.
The Taylor sentence: "life" (The Almanac); "seven years to life" (Santa Clara County District Attorney); ABC7 had reported a possible 25 years to life before sentencing.
Newark, Ohio: John Arthur Getreu is born; his father is a U.S. Army officer.
Early 1960s: the family is stationed at Bad Kreuznach, West Germany.
June 9, 1963: Margaret Williams, 15, is raped and killed in a field after a dance on the base; Getreu, 18, is arrested.
July 13, 1964: a German juvenile court convicts him of rape with fatal consequences; 10 years.
March 7, 1969: released after five years and nine months; flies to the United States the next day.
1969 or 1970: moves to the San Francisco Bay Area after time at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
1970: marries a coworker with a young daughter.
1971 to 1975: lives in Midtown Palo Alto; works as a hospital technician and security guard.
February 13, 1973: Leslie Perlov, 21, disappears after work; found February 16 near the Stanford Dish.
March 24, 1974: Janet Taylor, 21, sets out to hitchhike home; found March 25 on Sand Hill Road.
October 1974: Arlis Perry is killed in Stanford Memorial Church (later attributed to Stephen Crawford, not Getreu).
January 1975: rapes an Explorer Scout; arrested the same day.
June 1975: pleads guilty to misdemeanor statutory rape; serves 30 days on weekends.
1977: divorce.
October 1978: second marriage; late 1970s in Newark, Ohio.
1980s: returns to the Bay Area; later lives in Hayward.
November 2016: Santa Clara County reopens the Perlov case; fingernail DNA tested.
July 2018: DNA profile sent to Parabon NanoLabs.
November 9, 2018: lab matches DNA from a discarded coffee cup.
November 20, 2018: arrested in Hayward for the Perlov murder.
May 16, 2019: charged with Janet Taylor's murder in San Mateo County.
December 2019: held to answer in the Taylor case.
Early 2020: held to answer in the Perlov case after a preliminary hearing.
Fall 2020: hospitalized; Taylor trial postponed.
April to May 2021: petition to the California Supreme Court over the DNA evidence; trial paused.
August 30, 2021: Taylor trial opens.
September 14, 2021: jury convicts him of first-degree murder.
November 5, 2021: sentenced to life.
January 10, 2023: pleads guilty to the murder of Leslie Perlov.
April 27, 2023: sentenced to a consecutive seven years to life.
September 22, 2023: dies of natural causes at the California Health Care Facility, Stockton, aged 79.