Around nine on the night of February 4, 1972, two schoolgirls from Herbert Slater Middle School, Maureen Louise Sterling, twelve, and Yvonne Lisa Weber, thirteen, left the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa, California, and were last seen hitchhiking on Guerneville Road. Like most young people in the area then, they thumbed rides as a matter of course. The police took them for runaways. On December 28 their skeletons were found down a steep embankment off Franz Valley Road, with binding material in the brush nearby. The cause of death could not be determined. Sterling's mother identified a cross necklace and an earring as her daughter's.
They were the first of at least seven. Kim Wendy Allen, nineteen, an art student at Santa Rosa Junior College, was last seen hitchhiking north on Highway 101 near San Rafael at about 5:20 p.m. on March 4, 1972, carrying a large wooden soy barrel. She was found the next day in a creek bed off Enterprise Road, bound at the wrists and ankles, raped and slowly strangled with a cord. Lori Lee Kursa, thirteen, a habitual runaway, was found frozen on December 14, 1972, in a ravine off Calistoga Road with a broken neck; investigators thought she may have leapt or been pushed from a moving vehicle. A witness later described seeing two men push an impaired girl into a van nearby that month.
Carolyn Nadine Davis, fifteen, a runaway who had told her sister she had witnessed a double murder and feared for her life, was last seen hitchhiking south from Garberville on July 15, 1973. She was found on July 31 a few feet from where Sterling and Weber had lain, dead of strychnine. A pattern of sticks resembling an occult symbol lay on the road above her. Theresa Diane Smith Walsh, twenty-three, set out from Zuma Beach in Malibu on December 22, 1973, to hitchhike home to her mother and young son for Christmas. Six days later kayakers found her in Mark West Creek, hogtied with clothesline, sexually assaulted and strangled. In July 1979 the bones of a young woman, never identified, were found in a ravine off Calistoga Road near where Kursa was found, hogtied like Walsh and stuffed into a bag.
All the victims were found nude, with very little physical evidence, dumped near roads down steep embankments or in creek beds; the places where they were killed were never found. Police came to believe the killer interviewed his victims before killing them. Others may belong to the series. Jeannette Kamahele, twenty, a junior college student, was last seen on April 25, 1972, climbing into a faded brown Chevrolet pickup with a homemade wooden camper near the Cotati on-ramp of Highway 101, and was never found. A friend of Sterling and Weber recalled a tall, slender man at the ice rink who had asked the girls to smoke marijuana and who looked to her like Ted Bundy, and later like Jim Mordecai, the subject of a 2024 documentary. None of the suspects raised over more than fifty years has ever been charged.