On the first day of his murder trial in Redwood City, on September 7, 2018, Rodney Halbower stood up and shouted at the jury. "I am not guilty!" he called out. "I have never raped or murdered in my life!" When the prosecutor, Sean Gallagher, began his opening statement, Halbower interrupted again: "I wasn't here during that period of time." Gallagher told the jurors that was false. In early 1976, he said, Halbower had been living in San Bruno, a few miles from where two teenage girls had been abducted, raped and stabbed.
The girls were Veronica Cascio, 18, of Pacifica, and Paula Baxter, 17, of Millbrae. They were two of five young women and girls killed on the northern San Mateo County Peninsula between January and April 1976, a series that became known as the "Gypsy Hill" killings after a road in Pacifica where one of the bodies was found. For close to four decades no one was charged. Then a DNA sample taken from Halbower when he was moved into an Oregon prison in 2013 matched semen preserved from both girls. Eleven days after the trial opened, a jury convicted him of both murders after deliberating for a little more than an hour.
Halbower was tried only for those two deaths. He has been named as a suspect in others, including the killing of a university student in Reno, Nevada, for which a woman spent more than three decades in prison before DNA cleared her. Those other cases remain unproven against him, and one of the Peninsula deaths once counted in the series was later tried against a different man.
According to a 2015 Associated Press chronology drawn from court records, Rodney Lynn Halbower was born on June 27, 1948, in Wisconsin, and moved with his family a few years later to Muskegon, Michigan, where he grew up. His record began early. In 1964 he was briefly sent to an adult prison after violating juvenile probation for stealing a car. In 1965 he was convicted of breaking and entering and sentenced to five years; in 1970 he was convicted of robbery and sentenced to four years. He escaped from a Michigan prison in 1970, and fathered a daughter around that time. He was paroled in Michigan in 1975 and went to Nevada.
A 1987 psychiatric report prepared for an Oregon court, quoted by the AP at the time of his trial, described him as intelligent but with "a severe personality disorder, with a propensity toward criminal behavior," and said his "life is replete with poor impulse control, narcissism and a certain grandiosity." He earned a high school diploma in prison and had no other formal education. He took drafting classes and painted while incarcerated in Michigan, Nevada and Oregon, and, the report said, wanted to be a famous artist or rock-and-roll star. Court records showed that by 2018 he had spent most of the previous 53 years in prison or on the run.
At about 2:20 a.m. on November 27, 1975, according to the Nevada Supreme Court's 1977 opinion in his appeal, a woman who worked as a twenty-one dealer in downtown Reno finished her shift and set out to walk home. Halbower seized her, forced her at knifepoint into an alley and sexually assaulted her. She went to the police after he released her, and he was arrested. The AP chronology and the National Registry of Exonerations both say he was released on bail while the case was pending. The Registry states he was free on bond in February 1976.
A jury convicted him of forcible rape and two related sex offenses, and in May 1976 he was sentenced to life in prison in Nevada. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed those convictions in 1977. That conviction, and the months he was out on bail before it, matter to everything that followed: the Gypsy Hill killings fall inside those months.
Veronica Anne Cascio, called Ronnie, was 18 and a native of Pacifica, the coastal town just south of San Francisco. On January 7, 1976, she left her home in the Fairway neighborhood to walk to a bus stop at Bradford Way and Fairway Drive. According to the San Mateo Daily Journal's account of the trial evidence, she had packed an overnight bag for her first sleepover. A couple driving by later found the bag near the bus stop where investigators believe she was waiting when she was taken.
Her body was found the next day at the Sharp Park Golf Course, near a creek. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed many times; CBS News, citing the charging announcement, put the number of wounds at 30. The Pacifica Police Department took the case.
Tatiana Marie Blackwell, known as Tanya, was 14. On January 24, 1976, she left her home on Heathcliff Drive in Pacifica, reportedly to walk to a 7-Eleven on King Drive in South San Francisco. She did not come home. Her body was found months later, on June 6, off Gypsy Hill Road in Pacifica. That location gave the whole series its name.
No one has been charged in Tanya Blackwell's death. Halbower has been described in news reports as linked to it, but prosecutors never charged him with it. Her older brother, John Blackwell, drove 90 miles from Modesto to stand with the other families when Halbower was first brought to court in January 2015. "I feel happy for the families, and I feel some closure," he told reporters. "Some closure is better than no closure."
Paula Louise Baxter was 17 and a student at Capuchino High School in San Bruno. Fox News, reporting the 2015 charges, described her as a resident of the Broadmoor area. On the evening of February 4, 1976, she attended a rehearsal at the school, and friends last saw her leaving the parking lot. Early the next morning her bronze 1972 Chevrolet Vega station wagon was found parked on a nearby residential street.
Two days later her body was found hidden in brush behind the Latter Day Saints church on Ludeman Lane in Millbrae. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed and struck on the head with a chunk of concrete. The San Mateo County Sheriff's Office took the case, and the Millbrae police were involved from the start.
Steve Bischoff, a friend who found her body, spoke at the sentencing in 2018. He described Paula as "larger than life." Ron Caine, a retired Millbrae police sergeant who was the first investigator on her death, told NBC Bay Area he had worked long hours on it for four months without a break in the case.
Michelle Mitchell was 19, a student at the University of Nevada, Reno; AP reports describe her as a nursing student. At about 8:10 p.m. on February 24, 1976, her yellow Volkswagen Beetle broke down at Ninth Street and Evans Avenue, near the campus. She called her mother for a ride. A passerby helped push the car into a parking lot across from the university's agricultural building. When her mother arrived a few minutes later, Michelle was not there. Her body was found that night in the garage of a nearby house. She had been killed with a knife. A cigarette butt found near her body was kept as evidence.
In 1979 a psychiatric patient in Louisiana, Cathy Woods, told staff she had killed a girl named Michelle in Reno. On the strength of that statement she was convicted of the murder in 1980, and again at a retrial in 1985. Halbower has been named as a suspect in Mitchell's death by the Washoe County district attorney, but no charge against him in that case has been reported.
Carol Lee Booth, known as Beedy, was 26 and lived in South San Francisco. On March 15, 1976, she got off a bus at El Camino Real and Arroyo Street and set out to walk home. She often took a shortcut across an open area between Kaiser Hospital and Mission Road, near the old El Camino driving range. Her body was found there on May 4, hidden in the brush. The South San Francisco Police Department investigated. No one has been charged in her death.
Denise Lampe was 19. On April 1, 1976, after a shift at Macy's in the Serramonte shopping center in Daly City, she walked to her 1964 Ford Mustang, parked between Macy's and a Denny's. She was supposed to meet a friend and never arrived. Her body was found in the car that evening; she had been stabbed.
For decades her death was counted among the Gypsy Hill killings. But on April 1, 1976, Halbower was in jail in Nevada on the Reno rape charges, and when he was charged in 2015 District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said he had been ruled out in Lampe's death. In November 2017 prosecutors charged Leon Melvin Seymour, 71, a man with prior kidnapping and sexual assault convictions who was being held at Coalinga State Hospital, after a bloodstain on Lampe's jacket was tied to him. A San Mateo County jury convicted Seymour of her murder on October 27, 2023. Lampe's family and high school friends attended the trial. The Daily Journal reported that sentencing was set for December 1, 2023.
The Peninsula deaths were handled by four police agencies and the sheriff's office. Investigators noted similarities: the timing, the ages of the victims, and the way each had been taken while waiting at a bus stop or beside a car. No arrest followed.
One false lead ran for years. In 1989 Eileen Franklin, of Foster City, told authorities she had recovered a memory of her father, George Franklin, killing her childhood friend Susan Nason, 8, in 1969. George Franklin was convicted of that murder in 1990. Eileen later said she also remembered her father killing Veronica Cascio and Paula Baxter. Oxygen, reporting on a 2021 documentary about the Franklin case, says DNA tests in 1995 showed that a different man's profile was responsible for the Cascio and Baxter killings. Franklin's conviction in the Nason case was overturned in 1995; he was never retried and was released in 1996. He was never charged in any Gypsy Hill death.
According to the trial evidence reported by the San Mateo Daily Journal, a crime-lab scientist re-examining the scene evidence in 1996 linked the Cascio and Baxter cases to the same DNA profile. The profile matched no one on file.
The break came from Reno. In 2013 Cathy Woods, still in a Nevada prison, asked the Rocky Mountain Innocence Project for DNA testing. Testing that fall found nothing of hers on the evidence and developed a male DNA profile from the cigarette butt found near Michelle Mitchell's body.
Halbower, meanwhile, had a long road behind him. He escaped from the Nevada State Prison in Carson City in June 1977, and in July was arrested in Muskegon for kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter; Michigan dropped those charges in exchange for his return to Nevada. In 1977 he was also convicted of escape and sentenced as a habitual criminal to life without parole; the Nevada Supreme Court in 1980 sent that sentence back to the trial court for a hearing on whether two of the prior convictions it relied on could be counted. In December 1986 he escaped from the Carson City prison again with another inmate, stole a car and drove to Oregon. Within days he attacked a young woman in a parking lot as she was locking her car. An Oregon jury convicted him in March 1987, and he was returned to Nevada to finish his sentence there first. Reports describe the Oregon convictions differently: the AP chronology says rape and attempted murder; ABC7 News said attempted murder, assault and robbery.
In November 2013 Nevada paroled him and transferred him to Oregon State Prison to serve the Oregon sentence. Oregon took a DNA sample from him on arrival and submitted it to the national database. In July 2014, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, the FBI matched it to the profile from the Reno cigarette butt.
The FBI had already been working the Peninsula cases. On March 6, 2014, at a news conference outside the Redwood City courthouse, Gerald Bessette, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's San Francisco office, announced a task force named Gypsy Hill, made up of the FBI, the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office, the Daly City, Pacifica, South San Francisco and Reno police departments and the Washoe County Sheriff's Office. "We have reason to believe the deaths are linked," Bessette said, calling them "crimes of opportunity." The FBI said investigators were "confident all the crimes were committed by the same offender," citing forensic links, timing and method. Halbower's name was not given.
In September 2014 the San Mateo County Crime Lab, working with labs in Oregon and Washoe County, matched Halbower's DNA to the Cascio and Baxter evidence. Prosecutors later said the match was to semen preserved from both girls for decades. Gallagher told NBC Bay Area that Oregon authorities had contacted San Mateo County to say they had a person in custody who likely matched the two murders.
On January 22, 2015, Halbower, then 66, was brought from Oregon to the Redwood City jail. The San Mateo County District Attorney's office charged him with two counts of murder, with a special-circumstance allegation of murder during the course of a rape, for the deaths of Paula Baxter and Veronica Cascio. He was held without bail. At his first appearance he did not enter a plea, and a lawyer was appointed.
Wagstaffe explained why only two cases were charged. "We are not filing those charges. We have decided that we need to move forward," he said. "It is time to bring this man to justice for the murders that we can clearly prove at this point." Chief Deputy District Attorney Karen Guidotti said the DNA linking Halbower to both girls had been found on their bodies. San Mateo County Sheriff Greg Munks said Halbower "has an extensive history of violence and has been imprisoned in both Nevada and Oregon."
From the jail, Halbower gave a short interview to ABC7 News. He denied any part in the killings. "I don't know anything. No knowledge about this," he said. He questioned the evidence: "finding a cigarette butt and DNA from 30 years ago? Doesn't make any sense." He acknowledged the Oregon crime. "I'm confused," he said. "I just want some answers."
The case then stalled for more than three years. According to the California Court of Appeal's 2022 opinion, on March 3, 2015, his defense lawyer declared a doubt about his competence to stand trial, over Halbower's objection, and the criminal case was suspended. Two court-appointed experts disagreed in August 2015: Dr. Jeffrey Gould found him competent, and Dr. Robert Cassidy found him incompetent. A psychologist retained by the defense, Dr. Jeffrey Kline, examined him in early 2016 and concluded in an April 2016 report that he was incompetent.
The prosecution asked for a jury to decide the question. At that trial in June 2016, Gould testified that Halbower understood the charges and the roles of the people in the courtroom, that he saw no sign of psychosis, and that he found no psychiatric symptoms in 940 pages of records; he diagnosed a personality disorder that affected Halbower's relationship with his lawyer but not his competence. Cassidy described grandiose and paranoid thinking. Kline said Halbower could talk about trial matters in general but became delusional when he discussed his own case in detail. Halbower testified himself. He said he understood the proceedings, described his poor relationship with his appointed lawyer, John Halley, said he wanted to represent himself or have new counsel, and declined to answer most questions on cross-examination. The jury found him competent.
News reports at the time of the 2018 trial said that he had repeatedly fired his lawyers and demanded to represent himself, and the AP said a jury had found him competent "last year," meaning 2017. The appellate opinion, which is the court record, dates the competency verdict to June 2016. After a preliminary hearing he was held to answer, and prosecutors filed an information charging two counts of murder. Arming enhancements were dismissed on the prosecutor's motion before the jury deliberated.
The trial began on September 7, 2018, in San Mateo County Superior Court before Judge Mark Forcum, with Wagstaffe and Supervising Deputy District Attorney Sean Gallagher for the prosecution and Halley, a public defender, for Halbower. It opened with the outbursts. Halley moved for a mistrial; Forcum denied that motion and several more. "He doesn't get to set up his own mistrial," the judge said. Gallagher said he believed the outbursts were staged to force a mistrial and that he would talk over any more during his opening. Halbower then went quiet, and Forcum noted on the record that this suggested he "picks and chooses his spots."
Gallagher told the jurors that both girls had been abducted, raped and killed, and that DNA from semen found in each, preserved for decades, matched Halbower. He placed Halbower in San Bruno in early 1976. Halley argued that some of the DNA evidence had been mishandled. In his closing, according to the Daily Journal, he told the jury that the prosecution had never shown them the DNA analysis charts or had the scientists demonstrate their conclusions, and that at least two witnesses had admitted mistakes in the DNA work. "You can't do what I did with these witnesses and see for yourself whether they're saying things that are not true," he said. The defense also sought to put before the jury evidence that another car had been seen at one of the scenes; the judge excluded it, and Halley later named that ruling as an issue for appeal.
Retired Washoe County detective Allan Fox, who had worked the Reno case, followed the trial. "These cases keep you up at night," he told the Daily Journal.
The jury began deliberating at about 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 18, 2018, and returned its verdict about an hour and fifteen minutes later: guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. Wagstaffe said Halbower calmly congratulated Gallagher after the verdicts were read. "His day of reckoning is now," Gallagher said.
Because the crimes were committed in 1976, the court had to apply the sentencing law of that year. California's penalty of life without parole for multiple first-degree murders came into force in 1977, prosecutors explained, and the most severe sentence available for these killings was life with the possibility of parole. On October 10, 2018, Halbower, then 70, was sentenced to two life terms, to run concurrently. He interrupted the judge repeatedly during the hearing. The mothers of both girls spoke, though their words did not make the published accounts. The judge ordered that Halbower first be returned to Oregon to finish his sentence there, which reports described as more than 30 years, and then serve the California term. "He will never see the light of day again," Gallagher said.
Halley said he would appeal and that a different court-appointed lawyer would handle it. On appeal the case was narrowed to a single question: whether there was substantial evidence for the 2016 jury's finding that Halbower was competent to stand trial. In an unpublished opinion filed May 5, 2022, in People v. Halbower, No. A155724, the Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, Division Four, affirmed the judgment. Judge Desautels, sitting by assignment, wrote the opinion, with Presiding Justice Pollak and Justice Brown concurring.
The court held that the jury was entitled to credit Gould's testimony, that the evidence showed Halbower understood the proceedings, and that his refusal to cooperate with his lawyer did not prove he was unable to. The test, the court wrote, quoting earlier case law, "is competency to cooperate, not cooperation." It concluded that "the presumption of mental competence to stand trial was not rebutted." On July 13, 2022, the California Supreme Court denied Halbower's petition for review (No. S274642). With that, the convictions became final on direct appeal. No later challenge has been reported.
The DNA that led to Halbower also freed another person. Cathy Woods, born Anita Carter, had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was 11 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In February 1979 police in Shreveport, Louisiana, told Reno police that she had said she killed a girl named Michelle. Police later acknowledged that what she knew had all been in the press, and she could not say where the missing evidence was. She was convicted in 1980; the Nevada Supreme Court reversed that verdict in 1985, and she was convicted again the same year.
In September 2014, after the DNA results and the FBI's disclosure that the same profile matched the California murders, her conviction was vacated and she was released on September 11, 2014. On March 6, 2015, Washoe County District Attorney Chris Hicks announced that he would dismiss the charge. Halbower, he said, was considered a suspect, and his office and the Reno police were "dedicated to try and put a case together to hold the murderer of Michelle Mitchell accountable." Her public defender, Maizie Pusich, said: "It's a just result, I wish it were a long time ago." Woods later settled lawsuits with Washoe County and the city of Reno for $3 million each and received $2.85 million from the state of Nevada. She died on July 15, 2021.
Proven in court: Halbower raped and murdered Veronica Cascio and Paula Baxter in San Mateo County in 1976. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder in both deaths in 2018, and the conviction was affirmed and is final.
Suspected, never charged: the killing of Michelle Mitchell in Reno. DNA on a cigarette butt found near her body matched Halbower, the Washoe County district attorney named him as a suspect in 2015, and San Mateo prosecutors said in 2018 they hoped Nevada would pursue charges. Nevada has not been reported to have charged him.
Suspected, never charged: the deaths of Tanya Blackwell and Carol Lee Booth. The FBI said in 2014 that it believed one offender committed the Peninsula killings and the Reno killing. News reports have linked Halbower to Blackwell and Booth, and the AP's May 2015 chronology reported that cold-case detectives had matched genetic material from three murder scenes to his DNA. But no charge was brought in either case, and what evidence, if any, ties him to them has not been made public.
Excluded: Denise Lampe. Halbower was in a Nevada jail when she was killed, prosecutors said he had been ruled out, and Leon Seymour was convicted of her murder in 2023. The single-killer theory announced in 2014 therefore did not hold for all six deaths.
Not supported: Eileen Franklin's claim that her father killed Cascio and Baxter. DNA testing excluded him, and the 2018 verdict identified Halbower.
News reports often call Halbower the "Gypsy Hill Killer," and some describe him as responsible for six murders. Those counts come from early investigative theory, not from verdicts.
As of the California Supreme Court's order of July 13, 2022, Rodney Halbower stood convicted of the first-degree murders of Veronica Cascio and Paula Baxter, with his appeal exhausted. His sentence is two concurrent life terms under 1976 law. Under the October 2018 sentence, he was to serve the rest of his Oregon sentence before beginning the California term; ABC7 News reported in January 2015 that his earliest Oregon release date was in 2026. No charge has been reported in the killings of Tanya Blackwell, Carol Lee Booth or Michelle Mitchell.
June 27, 1948: Rodney Lynn Halbower born in Wisconsin; raised in Muskegon, Michigan.
1964-1970: Juvenile and adult convictions in Michigan for car theft, breaking and entering and robbery; escape from a Michigan prison in 1970.
1975: Paroled in Michigan; moves to Nevada.
November 27, 1975: Rapes a casino dealer at knifepoint in downtown Reno; arrested and released on bail.
January 7-8, 1976: Veronica Cascio, 18, disappears on her way to a bus stop in Pacifica; found at Sharp Park Golf Course.
January 24, 1976: Tanya Blackwell, 14, disappears in Pacifica (found off Gypsy Hill Road, June 6, 1976).
February 4-6, 1976: Paula Baxter, 17, disappears after a rehearsal at Capuchino High School; found behind a church on Ludeman Lane, Millbrae.
February 24, 1976: Michelle Mitchell, 19, killed in Reno.
March 15, 1976: Carol Lee Booth, 26, disappears in South San Francisco (found May 4, 1976).
April 1, 1976: Denise Lampe, 19, killed in Daly City while Halbower is in jail in Nevada.
May 1976: Halbower sentenced to life in Nevada for the Reno rape.
June 1977: Halbower escapes from the Carson City prison; recaptured in Michigan in July and returned to Nevada.
1980 and 1985: Cathy Woods convicted of Mitchell's murder, twice.
December 1986: Halbower escapes again; within days he attacks a woman in Oregon.
March 1987: Convicted in Oregon; returned to Nevada.
1995-1996: DNA testing excludes George Franklin and links the Cascio and Baxter evidence to one unknown man.
Fall 2013: Testing in the Woods case develops a male profile from the Reno cigarette butt.
November 2013: Halbower paroled in Nevada and moved to Oregon State Prison; DNA sample taken.
March 6, 2014: FBI announces the Gypsy Hill task force.
July and September 2014: DNA matches Halbower to the Reno evidence and to the Cascio and Baxter evidence.
September 11, 2014: Cathy Woods released.
January 22, 2015: Halbower charged in San Mateo County with the murders of Cascio and Baxter.
March 6, 2015: Charge against Woods dismissed.
June 2016: Jury finds Halbower competent to stand trial.
November 2017: Leon Seymour charged with Denise Lampe's murder.
September 7, 2018: Trial opens.
September 18, 2018: Halbower convicted of two counts of first-degree murder.
October 10, 2018: Sentenced to two concurrent life terms.
May 5, 2022: Court of Appeal affirms.
July 13, 2022: California Supreme Court denies review.
October 27, 2023: Seymour convicted of Lampe's murder.