9 min readMay 24, 2021

The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders

Between 1972 and 1973 Santa Rosa, California experienced the killings of seven women whose murders have never been solved. All of the victims were found nude in rural areas near steep embankments or creek beds near roads. An eighth probable victim disappeared and her body has never been located. All of the victims were known to hitchhike, a popular mode of transportation during that time. These murders became known as the SANTA ROSA HITCHHIKER MURDERS.

The so-called Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders have been linked to other crimes that occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Where the facts have been distorted to meet the criteria of the particular murderer thought to have committed them, most notably the Zodiac Killer and Ted Bundy. These murders remain unsolved.

Known collectively as the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders, this string of unsolved murders continues to haunt the minds of the Golden State’s cold case investigators. Was the killer an infamous butcher like Ted Bundy or the Zodiac Killer, or was he just another no-name sadist who eluded justice thanks to cunning and a whole lot of good luck?

Victims

Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber

Name: Yvonne Weber
DOB: 01/29/1959
Missing since: February 4th, 1972
Last seen: with Maureen Sterling, getting into a car in front of the Redwood Empire Ice Arena.
Date body was found: December 26th, 1973
Location of the body: found down an embankment on the west side of Franz Valley Road 2.7 miles from the intersection with Porter Creek Road.
Cause of Death: Unknown
Evidence at Scene: One (1) gold chained necklace with a cross. One (1) earing

Name: Maureen Sterling
DOB: 02/18/1959
Missing since: February 4th, 1972
Last seen: with Yvonne Weber, getting into a car in front of the Redwood Empire Ice Arena.
Date body was found: December 26th, 1973
Location of the body: found down an embankment on the west side of Franz Valley Road 2.7 miles from the intersection with Porter Creek Road.
Cause of Death: Unknown
Evidence at Scene: One (1) gold chained necklace with a cross. One (1) earing

Maureen Louise Sterling, 12, and Yvonne Lisa Weber, 13, both Herbert Slater Middle School students, disappeared around 9 p.m. on February 4, 1972, after visiting the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. Both girls, like other young people in that era, often hitchhiked. They were last seen hitchhiking on Guerneville Road, northwest of Santa Rosa. Their bodies were found on December 28, 1972, 2.2 miles (3.5 km) north of Porter Creek Road on Franz Valley Road, down a steep embankment approximately 66 feet (20 m) off the east side of the roadway. A single earring, orange beads, and a 14-carat gold necklace with a cross were found at the scene. The cause of death could not be determined from the skeletal remains. Sterling’s mother identified the cross necklace and earrings as her daughter’s property. The mate to the earring was not found at the scene. The cause of death could not be determined. Similarly, nobody could say for sure whether either Sterling or Weber had been sexually assaulted. The police did, however, conclude that the girls had been murdered elsewhere and that their killer had kept their clothes, possibly as trophies.

Kim Wendy Allen

Name: Kim Allen
DOB: 07/22/1956
Missing since: March 4th, 1972
Last seen: hitchhiking from her job in Larkspur in Marin County to her home in Santa Rosa.
Date body was found: March 5th, 1972
Location of the body: found down an embankment on the north side of Enterprise Road, 8 tenths of a mile from the intersection with Bennett Valley Road
Cause of Death: Strangulation with rope-wire, or similar material.
Evidence at Scene: One (1) gold earring, loop type.

Unlike the killer’s first two victims, Kim Wendy Allen was a teenager (19, to be exact) and a college student attending Santa Rosa Junior College. On March 4, 1972, at 5:00 PM, Allen left her job at a health food store in Larkspur to attend a night class. At around 5:20, Allen was seen hitchhiking at the Bell Avenue Freeway entrance. She appeared to be heading north carrying two bags. Allen was also carrying a soy barrel with red Chinese characters painted on the outside. On Sunday, March 5, two high school students, 17-year-olds John Bly and Scott Bunting, found Allen’s nude body in a creek bed near Santa Rosa. Following an autopsy performed by Sonoma County coroner Andrew Johansen, it was concluded that Allen’s killer had tortured her and killed her by slowly strangling her with a cord or wire. It was also proven that Allen’s killer had bound her wrists and ankles before her death. All told, it had taken 30 minutes for Allen to expire.

Lori Lee Kursa

Name: Lori Lee Kursa
DOB: 02/26/1959
Missing since: November 20th, 1972
Last seen: with her mother at U-Save Market
Date body was found: December 14th, 1972
Location of the body: found 20'-30' down the steep embankment on the west side of Calistoga Road less than 1/10 of a mile from the intersection with Harville Road.
Cause of Death: Dislocation of the 1st and 2nd cervical vertebra, with compression and hemorrhage of the spinal cord — due to trauma
Evidence at Scene: Two (2) wire loops in pierced ears. No earrings attached.

Middle school student Lori Lee Kursa was reported missing by her mother on November 20, 1972. It was proven early on that Kursa had deliberately run away from home. She was last seen with friends in Santa Rosa on the day of her disappearance. Less than a month later, on December 14, Kursa’s partially frozen nude body was found by a couple out walking along Calistoga Road. Johansen found that Kursa had been dead for one to two weeks, and he further concluded that Kursa’s killer had thrown her body into the ravine off Calistoga Road. It was never determined whether Kursa’s dislocated vertebrae injury had occurred before or after her death. Kursa’s body showed no signs of sexual assault. Eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen Kursa in Santa Rosa told investigators that she had been thrown into a van on Parkhurst Drive by two unidentified men. Reports also stated that the van was noticeably damaged on one side and that the driver was a white male with an Afro-like hairstyle.

Carolyn Davis

Name: Carolyn Davis
DOB: 12/03/1958
Missing since: July 15th, 1973
Last seen: Hitchhiking on highway 101 on-ramp, Garberville, California.
Date body was found: July 31st, 1973
Location of the body: found less than 10' feet from the spot where Weber and Sterling were found.
Cause of Death: Strychnine poisoning
Evidence at Scene: none

Fifteen-year-old Carolyn Davis, a resident of Shasta County, California, ran away after being dropped off at the post office in Garberville by her grandmother. She was last seen alive on July 15, 1973. At that time, eyewitnesses saw Davis hitchhiking southbound on Highway 101. Davis would not be seen again until her corpse was discovered on July 31. Like all of the others, she had been unceremoniously dumped into a ravine. Shockingly, Davis’s corpse was left almost at the same place where the bodies of Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber had been found. Davis’s cause of death proved to be unusual, for she had died of a strychnine overdose approximately ten to 14 days before her body’s discovery. It could not be conclusively proven whether or not Davis had been raped.

Theresa Walsh

Name: Teresa Walsh
DOB: XX /XX /1950
Missing since: December 22nd, 1973
Last seen: Hitchhiking North on highway 101 to Maranda, California.
Date body was found: December 28th, 1973
Location of the body: found submerged under a log in Mark West Creek about a half a mile down from the cull-du-sac of Michelle Way where it intersects with Lorraine Way in Santa Rosa.
Cause of Death: Strangulation.

Theresa Diane Smith Walsh, 23, of Miranda, was last seen on December 22, 1973, at Zuma Beach in Malibu, intent on hitchhiking to Garberville and joining her family for Christmas. Her partially submerged body was found six days later by kayakers in Mark West Creek. She had been hogtied with clothesline rope, sexually assaulted, strangled, and was determined to have been dead approximately one week. Due to recent heavy rains in the area, high water marks suggested the body could have drifted several miles.

Jane Doe (Unidentified Victims)

On a summer day in July 1979, the skeletal remains of an unidentified woman were discovered by hikers in a ravine off Calistoga Road. Seven years before and about 91 meters (300 ft) away had been the spot where the body of Lori Lee Kursa had been found.[9] This unidentified victim had been hog-tied, with the killer’s rope looped around the woman’s throat. Detective Rick Oliver told the local media that the crime scene reminded him of the Walsh slaying, and he also noted that Jane Doe’s killer had removed all of her clothing. This victim has yet to be identified. Initially, Jane Doe was suspected of being the remains of Jeanette Kamahele, but DNA tests in 2009 ruled that out.

Possible victims

Jeannette Kamahele

Jeannette Kamahele, a 20-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College student, was last seen on April 25, 1972, hitchhiking near the Cotati on-ramp of Highway 101. A friend witnessed her likely abduction and reported that she entered a faded brown Chevrolet pickup truck fitted with a homemade wooden camper and driven by a 20- to 30-year-old Caucasian male with an Afro hairstyle. Her body has never been found.

Kerry Ann Graham and Francine Marie Trimble

Fifteen-year-old Kerry Graham and 14-year-old Francine Trimble, both of Forestville, California, went missing sometime in December 1978. On their last day alive, the girls had gone to Codding town Mall in Santa Rosa to buy Christmas gifts for their friends and family. In a strange turn of events, both girls would go missing on the same day but would be reported missing on different days. Specifically, Trimble’s mother filed a missing child report with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office in mid-December, while the Graham family did not report their daughter missing until Christmas Eve. On July 8, 1979, skeletal remains were found in a shallow embankment inside the Jackson State Forest in Mendocino County, California. Examinations of the remains found that both victims had been bound with duct tape and buried in plastic bags. Although Graham and Trimble are only suspected victims of the Santa Rosa murderer, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence, from the use of a ravine to the fact that both girls were known to hitchhike, to suggest that they ran afoul of the unknown serial murderer.

Suspects

Given that some eyewitnesses told police that Allen had gotten into a car containing two men, Sonoma County officials quickly brought both of those men in for questioning. To the chagrin of homicide detectives, both suspects passed their polygraph examinations.

Almost four years later, investigators caught a break when Fredric Manali died in a car accident on Highway 12 in August 1976. At the time of Allen’s murder, Manali, a former member of the US Army and a native of Illinois, had been a creative writing professor at Santa Rosa Junior College. Following Manali’s death, police discovered several sadomasochistic drawings that Manali had made featuring Allen, a former student.

For a time, serial killer Ted Bundy was suspected of carrying out a few of the Santa Rosa murders. However, a US Department of Justice report published in 1992 ruled out Bundy’s involvement due to gas receipts showing that Bundy had not been in the area on the dates in question. Arthur Leigh Allen, the man who Graysmith believes was the Zodiac Killer, has also been named as a possible suspect. Namely, in Zodiac Unmasked, Graysmith notes that a police officer had informed him that chipmunk hairs had been found on the bodies of several Santa Rosa victims. At that time, Allen not only lived in Santa Rosa but was also supposedly studying chipmunks as a hobby. DNA tests in the early 2000s could not match Allen with any of the prints taken from the Zodiac crime scenes.