Between February 1972 and July 1973 at least seven teenage girls and young women disappeared while hitchhiking in and around Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and were found on remote hillsides and embankments in Sonoma County. Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber, both twelve or thirteen, disappeared together from an ice rink in February 1972. Kim Wendy Allen, Lori Kursa, Carolyn Davis, Theresa Walsh and Jeannette Kamahele followed. Most were found undressed, some with their bodies arranged, and several had been strangled.
Hitchhiking in northern California in 1972 was ordinary and universal among young people, which is what made the corridor along Highway 101 what it was for a period of about eighteen months.
The case has been attached over the years to Ted Bundy, who was in the region at times, to the Zodiac, and to a series of local suspects, none of it established. In 2021 investigators announced that DNA had connected one of the deaths, Jeannette Kamahele's, to a separate offender, and other cases have been re-examined for genetic genealogy since.
It remains, as a series, unsolved. Whether all seven were the work of one man has never been settled, and several investigators have doubted it.