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Oregon Inmate Rodney Halbower Charged With Two 1976 Gypsy Hill Murders

DNA tied Halbower, 66, to the killings of Paula Baxter, 17, and Veronica Cascio, 18, among six deaths of young women in California and Nevada that police had linked for decades.

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A long aisle of grey steel shelving packed with aging archive boxes and folders, one open box on a cart, under a single fluorescent tube. Not a real case archive.

Forty years after the killings, the man investigators had been chasing through DNA sat in a Redwood City courtroom and said nothing. On Thursday, January 22, 2015, the San Mateo County district attorney's office charged Rodney Halbower, 66, with two counts of murder during the course of rape, for the deaths of Paula Baxter, 17, and Veronica Anne Cascio, 18, in 1976. He had been brought down from Oregon, where he was serving a sentence for attempted murder, assault and robbery. His plea was set for the following Monday.

The two girls were among six young women whose killings police had long believed were connected, all of them between January and April 1976. Five were found in the suburbs just south of San Francisco, one of them near Gypsy Hill Road, which gave the case its name. The sixth was found in Reno. Cascio was found stabbed to death at the Sharp Park Golf Course in Pacifica in January. Baxter, a Millbrae girl, was found the next month in brush behind a church in Millbrae, stabbed and beaten with a concrete block.

For decades the files sat unsolved. What reopened them was a swab. When Halbower was moved from a Nevada prison to Oregon State Prison in November 2013, he gave a DNA sample. He had been paroled in Nevada after serving time for the 1975 rape of a blackjack dealer, committed two months before the body of a University of Nevada, Reno student, Michelle Mitchell, 19, was found. He had escaped from the Nevada prison in 1986 and gone on to commit a string of violent crimes in Oregon before he was caught again. Chief Deputy District Attorney Karen Guidotti said DNA evidence linking him to both killings had been found on Baxter and Cascio.

The FBI had already said, after a Gypsy Hill task force was formed to revisit the cases with DNA technology, that investigators were "confident all the crimes were committed by the same offender." Only two were charged. Halbower, asked about the killings in a jailhouse interview with KGO-TV, denied any part in them. "I'm confused, and I want some answers," he said. "I don't know anything. No knowledge about this."

The Reno case had already come apart in a different way. Cathy Woods had been convicted in 1980 of killing Mitchell and spent more than 30 years in a Nevada prison. Her public defender showed that DNA on a cigarette butt in the garage where Mitchell's body was found matched Halbower. Woods was granted a new trial and released on her own recognizance in September 2014.

In the courtroom that Thursday was John Blackwell, 56, who had driven 90 miles from Modesto. His sister Tanya, 14, was the girl found near Gypsy Hill Road, and no one had been charged in her death. He came anyway, he said, to stand with the other families. "I feel happy for the families, and I feel some closure," he told reporters. "Some closure is better than no closure."

In September 2018 a San Mateo County jury, after deliberating for little more than an hour, convicted Halbower of both murders, and in October he was sentenced to two concurrent life terms. His lawyer said he would appeal.

What this story covers. The charges, the six connected killings, the DNA sample of November 2013, Halbower's earlier record and escape, Guidotti's statement, the FBI quotation, the KGO interview, the Woods case and John Blackwell's words come from the Associated Press report of January 23, 2015, as published by the Las Vegas Sun. Where the bodies of Cascio and Baxter were found, how Baxter died, and the 2018 verdict and sentence come from the CBS San Francisco and Bay City News report of October 10, 2018. Halbower was charged with and convicted of only the murders of Paula Baxter and Veronica Cascio; the other Gypsy Hill deaths and the death of Michelle Mitchell are not his convictions, and one of them was later charged against another man. The image is an illustration of a records room, not a real case archive.

Sources