Between February 1972 and December 1973, girls and young women from Santa Rosa and from towns farther north were found dead in rural Sonoma County, California. The youngest were 12 and 13 years old. Several of them had last been seen hitchhiking, most of them along or near Highway 101, a corridor where, as the North Bay Bohemian later put it, young women had once thumbed rides without fear. By the summer of 1973 the county sheriff was telling television reporters that the deaths were as much a mystery to his department as to the public. The cases became known as the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders.
They are unsolved. No one has been charged with any of the deaths. Investigators, writers and documentary makers have put forward suspects over the decades, including the Zodiac, Ted Bundy and men who have since died, but none of those theories has been proved, and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office has kept the files open.
The names that recur in press lists of the case are those of seven girls and young women, together with one woman who has been missing since 1972 and one woman who has not been identified.
Maureen Sterling was 12 and Yvonne Lisa Weber was 13. Both were Santa Rosa girls, and the Sonoma Index-Tribune lists them as students at Slater Junior High. The North Bay Bohemian, writing in 2004, recalled that the two friends were sometimes known to hitchhike, as many young people in the county did.
Kim Wendy Allen was 19 and studying at Santa Rosa Junior College. MendoFever's account of the case describes her as an art major who worked at a natural food store in Larkspur, in Marin County, and who traveled between Marin and Santa Rosa.
Lori Lee Kursa was 13, an eighth-grader at Cook Junior High in Santa Rosa, according to the Index-Tribune.
Carolyn Nadine Davis was 15, according to MendoFever, and 14 in the Index-Tribune's list. She came from Shasta County, from a home near Anderson, and in the summer of 1973 was staying with her grandmother in Garberville, in southern Humboldt County.
Theresa Walsh was 23, a young mother from Miranda in southern Humboldt County and, in MendoFever's words, a native daughter of the region. She had a two-year-old son, who was in her mother's care while she was away, and she had separated from her husband.
Jeanette Kamahele, whose first name also appears as Jeannette, was born on February 10, 1952, according to the California Department of Justice, and the Sonoma Index-Tribune gives her age as 20 when she disappeared in April 1972. She has not been found.
The Index-Tribune's list also includes a young woman, described as about 19 and with auburn hair, whose name is not known.
On the evening of February 4, 1972, Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber went skating at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa. The two girls were last seen hitchhiking in Santa Rosa that night, according to MendoFever's account.
For most of that year their families had no answers. The girls were found in rural Sonoma County on December 28, 1972. The North Bay Bohemian, in its 2004 retelling, described the two as the first of the deaths that would later be grouped together.
A month after the girls vanished, on March 4, 1972, Kim Allen was hitchhiking from Larkspur north toward Santa Rosa. She was last seen near Highway 101 and was found the next day in Sonoma County.
About two weeks into the investigation, MendoFever reported, Sheriff Don Striepeke brought in Peter D. Barnett, a criminologist at the University of California, Berkeley, in the hope that academic help could move the case forward. What came of Barnett's work is not known.
On April 25, 1972, Jeanette Kamahele was last seen in Sonoma County. The California Department of Justice keeps her on its missing persons list and names the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office as the investigating agency. The Index-Tribune lists her among the women connected with the hitchhiker cases and notes that her remains have not been found. Her disappearance has not been formally tied to the deaths, and no one has been charged in connection with it.
Lori Kursa's mother reported her missing on November 11, 1972. MendoFever's account says she was later seen hitchhiking, on November 20. She was found in Sonoma County on December 14, 1972. The Bohemian's 2004 summary put the discovery of a 13-year-old girl in November 1972; the dates in MendoFever's chronology differ.
Carolyn Davis was last seen hitchhiking in Garberville on July 15, 1973. She was found in Sonoma County about sixteen days later, around July 31, according to MendoFever.
On August 1, 1973, the KPIX-TV reporter Ed Arnow interviewed Sheriff Striepeke about what the station called a spate of killings of young girls in Sonoma County, as new victims continued to be found. The sheriff's answer was brief. "It's a mystery to us too, Ed," he said. The footage, preserved in the Bay Area Television Archive at San Francisco State University, lasts just over a minute.
Theresa Walsh had been away from home that December. According to MendoFever, she had hitchhiked from Washington State to Los Angeles earlier in the month, and in Los Angeles she tried without success to arrange a ride north. She told her mother she was coming home for Christmas.
On December 22, 1973, friends dropped her off at Zuma Beach, in Southern California, where she planned to hitchhike north. She did not arrive for Christmas. She was found in Sonoma County on December 28, 1973. Her mother, not knowing that, reported her missing to the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office on December 31. She was identified in January 1974.
Her son was two years old. MendoFever, a Mendocino County news site, retold her story in a cold-case series built around the missing and murdered people of Humboldt County, with the stated aim of keeping the victims' stories alive.
The Sonoma County Sheriff's Office led the investigation into most of the deaths. Retired Sheriff's Detective John Hess, who helped lead the work and went to all of the scenes, told the North Bay Bohemian in 2004 that five or six detectives had worked the cases. Looking back, he was frank about the result. "It's all speculation," he said, adding that investigators "could never come up with anything definite."
Other agencies were drawn in as the victims' home towns spread across northern California. The Humboldt County Sheriff's Office took the missing persons report for Theresa Walsh and was notified when she was found in Sonoma County.
Sheriff Don Striepeke, whose dates the Bay Area Television Archive gives as 1929 to 1988, was the department's public voice on the cases in the television news of the time.
On April 25, 1975, Sheriff Striepeke held a press conference in Santa Rosa. Footage shot that day by KPIX-TV, with the reporter Bill Hillman, survives in the San Francisco State archive.
At least six or seven young women, he said, had been killed while hitchhiking around Santa Rosa in 1972 and 1973. He believed the Santa Rosa cases might be connected with 13 other unsolved killings in California and with others in western states. He had hired a psychologist to help draw up a composite sketch of the person investigators were looking for.
The North Bay Bohemian later described that press conference in more detail. According to its 2004 account, Striepeke and Sergeant Butch Carstedt named the Zodiac, the unidentified Bay Area killer, as the most likely suspect in a string of killings of young women across six western states, and they described the pattern of the cases on a map as a sideways letter Z. The Bohemian noted that the theory did not hold: by 2004, it said, the consensus within the sheriff's department was that the Zodiac had not been involved in the Santa Rosa deaths. The KPIX archive record likewise notes that the Zodiac theory was disputed at the time and was never proved or disproved.
No court has made any finding about who was responsible for any of the deaths, and no one has been charged. Over five decades, a number of names have been raised in public. Each remains a theory credited to the person or outlet that put it forward.
The Zodiac. Besides the 1975 press conference, the writer Robert Graysmith included the hitchhiker cases in his count of Zodiac killings in his book Zodiac Unmasked, in which he named Arthur Leigh Allen as the Zodiac, the Bohemian reported. Allen, who had died by the time the Bohemian wrote about him, was never charged with any killing. The Bohemian noted that DNA testing on a stamp from a Zodiac letter had not matched him, and that the amateur Zodiac researchers it profiled did not consider him a suspect in the hitchhiker deaths. The crime writer Michael Kelleher, co-author of a book on the Zodiac, told the paper he did not consider Allen a suspect.
Ted Bundy. Robert Keppel, who led the Seattle-area investigation of Bundy and later headed the Institute for Forensics at Sam Houston State University, told the Bohemian in 2004 that Bundy was a viable suspect for some of the Santa Rosa deaths. It was "definitely possible," he said, though he could not place Bundy on Northern California roads at the right times, and could not rule it out either. Mike Brown, a sheriff's lieutenant at the time of the Bundy inquiries who later retired as a captain, had told Kelleher that Bundy remained a suspect in two or three of the cases. Kelleher himself placed Bundy low on the list. A tip that Bundy had worked for an electronics company in Forestville, in Sonoma County, in 1972 remained unproven, the Bohemian reported, and Keppel said there was no evidence for it. Bundy was not charged with any death in Sonoma County.
Other names. MendoFever's account lists further men about whom investigators or writers have speculated over the years, including two men later convicted of killings in Los Angeles and a former Santa Rosa Junior College instructor who died in 1976. None of them has been charged in the Santa Rosa cases.
In early 2022 the case returned to the news by way of a different killing. Michelle Marie Veal was found dead in Sonoma County in 1996. In 2021 a detective in the sheriff's Violent Crimes unit, Adrian Anaya, reopened her file and sent a scraping of evidence to a private laboratory. In January 2022 the state Department of Justice reported a match in the national DNA database to Jack Alexander Bokin, ABC7 News reported. Bokin had died in a state prison medical facility in Vacaville on December 4, 2021, while serving a sentence of 231 years for kidnapping, attempted murder and other crimes in San Francisco, KPIX reported.
Speaking to ABC7 News, Detective John Barr said the breakthrough in the Veal case could help with other cold cases believed to be part of what he called the hitchhiker killings. Bokin, he said, "was in the proximity of Sonoma County during those times, so he's someone we will look at and investigate." No result of that review has been made public, and Bokin has not been linked by any agency to the 1972 and 1973 deaths.
In February 2024 the streaming service Max released The Truth About Jim, a four-part documentary series in which a woman investigates her late step-grandfather, Jim Mordecai, a former college football player who became a high school agriculture teacher and who died of cancer. Reviewing the series for Rolling Stone, Chris Vognar wrote that she gathers what he called an impressive amount of circumstantial evidence pointing toward Mordecai in the Santa Rosa deaths, and that a further attempt to connect him with the Zodiac was far less convincing. The review describes the Santa Rosa killer as still unidentified. Mordecai was not charged with any of the deaths, and the series' case against him is a family member's theory, not a finding by investigators.
The Bohemian, writing in 2004, called the identity of the person responsible "a matter of conjecture, not fact." The paper reported that the sheriff's department still considered the case open, though it had made little progress in recent years.
As of 2024, reviews of The Truth About Jim still described the person responsible as unidentified. The 1975 press conference's count of "at least six or seven" young women has not been settled, no court has heard any of the cases, and Jeanette Kamahele remains on the California Department of Justice's list of missing persons. The Index-Tribune, in a gallery of North Coast cold cases, summed up the competing theories by noting that there was no conclusive evidence for either the Zodiac or Bundy.
What the record does preserve is the sequence of losses: two friends from the same junior high school on a winter night in 1972; a college art student a month later; a 20-year-old woman who disappeared in April; an eighth-grader that winter; a 15-year-old girl the next summer; and a young mother on her way home for Christmas. Their families waited, in some cases for most of a year, for news. No one has been held to account for any of their deaths.
February 4, 1972: Maureen Sterling, 12, and Yvonne Lisa Weber, 13, leave the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa and are last seen hitchhiking that night.
March 4, 1972: Kim Wendy Allen, 19, a Santa Rosa Junior College student, is last seen hitchhiking from Larkspur toward Santa Rosa; she is found the next day in Sonoma County.
April 25, 1972: Jeanette Kamahele, 20, is last seen in Sonoma County; she remains missing.
November 11, 1972: Lori Lee Kursa, 13, is reported missing by her mother.
December 14, 1972: Lori Kursa is found in Sonoma County.
December 28, 1972: Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber are found in rural Sonoma County.
July 15, 1973: Carolyn Nadine Davis, 15, is last seen hitchhiking in Garberville.
About July 31, 1973: Carolyn Davis is found in Sonoma County.
August 1, 1973: Sheriff Striepeke tells KPIX-TV, "It's a mystery to us too, Ed."
December 22, 1973: Theresa Walsh, 23, sets out from Zuma Beach to hitchhike home to Humboldt County for Christmas.
December 28, 1973: Theresa Walsh is found in Sonoma County.
December 31, 1973: her mother reports her missing to the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office.
January 1974: Theresa Walsh is identified.
April 25, 1975: at a press conference in Santa Rosa, Sheriff Striepeke speaks of at least six or seven young women killed while hitchhiking in 1972 and 1973 and of possible links to other unsolved cases in California and the western states; the Zodiac is named as a possible suspect.
December 2004: the North Bay Bohemian reports that the sheriff's department still considers the case open; Robert Keppel calls Ted Bundy a possible suspect in some of the deaths.
December 4, 2021: Jack Alexander Bokin dies in prison.
February 2022: Sonoma County sheriff's detectives say Bokin, newly identified by DNA in a 1996 killing, is someone they will look at in connection with the hitchhiker cases.
February 15, 2024: Max releases The Truth About Jim, which puts forward a family member's theory about Jim Mordecai.
February 2024: the person responsible remains unidentified; no one has been charged.