Zodiac or Bundy? The Unsolved Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders

It's 1975.

Seven girls and young women have all been taken in their youth.

Five found murdered on the side of the road.

One still missing.

Their faces haunt investigators who desperately want to let them rest.

But the killer who took them has left nothing behind.

All they have is a broad description of a possible perpetrator.

That man could be anywhere.

He could be anyone.

Then comes a dark realization.

Maybe the killer isn't some unknown predator.

Maybe he's one of the most well-known serial killers in the world.

Welcome to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

Every Monday, we bring you the true crime stories that stand out.

I'm Janice Morgan.

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Arlene Sterling stops her car in front of the Redwood Empire Ice Arena around 7.30 p.m.

on Friday, February 4th, 1972.

She's dropping off her daughter, 12-year-old Maureen, and her daughter's best friend, 13-year-old Yvonne Weber.

An evening skating at the rink is a regular Friday night for the young young friends.

The two spend a lot of time together.

They even wear their hair in the same style, long and parted in the middle.

They hop out of the car and wave goodbye to Arlene.

She reminds the girls to meet her back out front at 11 p.m.

But when Arlene returns to pick up the girls, they don't show.

Maureen and Yvonne have vanished.

Arlene reports the girls missing that night, and after the story is publicized, police get a tip.

A man claims he's seen the girls around 9 p.m., hitchhiking on nearby Guerneville Road.

Arlene reported that the girls planned to skate at the ice rink that night, but this new lead suggests that they had other plans.

According to the San Francisco Examiner, Maureen and Yvonne often used the ice rink as a cover.

After their parents dropped them off, the girls would hitchhike to a local park across town where other young people mingled without adult supervision.

They would hitchhike back to the ice rink before their designated pickup time, and their parents were none the wiser.

It may sound strange today, but hitchhiking was common in the 1970s, especially among teens and those with limited means for mobility.

And hitchhiking went hand in hand with the counterculture movement, with California being one of its major hubs.

Hitchhiking offered young people a sense of freedom, sometimes even a thrill.

Although it was generally known that hitchhiking came with risks, at that time it was far more accepted and widespread than it is today.

Back in 1972, many of the residents of Santa Rosa feel safe within its bounds.

The city sits an hour's drive north of San Francisco.

With a population of around 50,000 people in 1971, Santa Rosa saw fewer than 10 homicides that entire year.

As such, the young people of Santa Rosa continue to hitchhike around town.

This includes a 19-year-old art student at Santa Rosa Junior College named Kim Allen.

Kim often hitchhikes to and from classes as well as her part-time job at Larkspur Health Foods.

A small grocery store is about 40 miles from her house in Santa Rosa where she lives with several of her friends.

At 5 p.m.

on March 4th, 1972, exactly one month after Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber disappeared, Kim leaves work with an orange backpack on and a barrel of soy sauce in her arms.

She sticks up her thumb looking for a ride.

Two men stop and offer her a lift.

They say they can take her three miles up the road, a far cry from the many miles she needs to travel to get home.

It's better than nothing though, so she hops in.

The three of them have a pleasant conversation before Kim is dropped off at an on-ramp for Highway 101.

The men leave her with her thumb up on the side of the road around 5.30 p.m.

The following afternoon, Kim's body is discovered at the bottom of a 20-foot embankment, about eight miles southeast of Santa Rosa.

According to her autopsy, Kim likely died around midnight on March 5th, a little over six hours after she was last seen.

Evidence indicates she'd been tied up and sexually assaulted.

Her cause of death is strangulation.

Sonoma County Sheriff Don Streepe assigns 10 detectives to the case, almost his entire detective bureau, to trace the killer.

Authorities also put out a plea for tips, and they get more than they ever expected.

Several women and girls from Sonoma County call in to report that they had been the victims of rape after hitchhiking with strangers.

They'd been too scared to come forward earlier, but after hearing about Kim's murder, they hope their stories can help catch the killer.

Unfortunately, they're far from alone.

An officer later tells the press that, Over the course of the last year, there have been over 100 reports of rape in Sonoma County, and around 80% of them have occurred while the victim was hitchhiking.

And that's just the ones we know about.

According to some estimates at the time of the murders, 9 out of 10 rapes go unreported due to social or police stigma.

The sheer volume of the problem is more awful than most people had ever imagined.

And to make matters worse, most of the reported rapists are nearly impossible to track.

Given the itinerant nature of hitchhiking, the perpetrators are often far out of the county long before their crimes are ever reported.

The detectives now have a few leads they can follow, but chasing them takes time, and the dark presence that prowls Santa Rosa's streets will use that time to strike again.

On April 25th, 1972, only a little over a month after Kim Allen's murder, another woman makes her way to the side of the road.

Just like Kim, 20-year-old Jeanette Kamahelli is a student at Santa Rosa Junior College who often hitchhikes to and from classes.

That morning, she stands at an on-ramp to Highway 101 with her thumb out.

One of her friends sees her trying to hitch a ride.

He tries to pick her up himself, but before he can get to the curb, another vehicle stops in front of him.

It's a brown Chevy pickup from the 1950s with a wooden camper in the back.

The driver is a white man in his 20s or 30s with brown hair and an Afro style.

The friend watches as Jeanette steps into the truck.

That night, Jeanette doesn't return home.

She doesn't go to any of her classes the next day.

Jeanette's roommate reports her missing, and the friend who saw her climb into the pickup provides police with a description.

Even though the truck is quite distinct, the police aren't able to track it down.

Jeanette's friend hadn't gotten the license plate, so it could belong to anyone and have gone anywhere.

Still, it's the best lead police have received.

They search for Jeanette for months.

but the trail goes cold.

Around the time of Jeanette's disappearance, people start to take notice that young women and girls are going missing while hitchhiking in the Santa Rosa area.

Students on the nearby Sonoma State College campus, just nine miles away from Jeanette's junior college, organize a carpool service to protect themselves.

They also petition the government to improve public transit so students have an alternative to hitchhiking.

Yet, even as they tried to take action, Some people call these women paranoid.

Others blame the victims for hitchhiking to begin with.

Still, the Carpool Service seems to help, because there's not another hitchhiker, murder, or disappearance in Santa Rosa for the rest of the summer.

But on November 11, 1972, 13-year-old Lori Lee Kursa leaves the Santa Rosa house she shares with her mother.

She's left before, but has returned on her own accord.

Lori's mother reports her missing, but assumes she'll find her way home in a few days as usual.

Unfortunately, she's wrong.

On December 14th, 1972, a little over a month after Lori's disappearance, her body is found at the bottom of a 30-foot embankment off Calistoga Road.

It seems the Santa Rosa hitchhiker killer has struck again, but there's something different about Lori.

Her autopsy shows she only suffered one injury, a broken neck.

Unlike the other victims, Lori had not been raped or sexually assaulted, yet she had been found nude.

The police speculate that after being abducted while hitchhiking and stripped by her captor, the girl ultimately jumped out of a moving vehicle before anything worse could happen to her.

Unfortunately, the jump and the fall cost her her life.

She likely broke her neck on the way down.

Whoever had her simply drove away.

Her body had been frozen solid, so the coroner was unable to pin down a specific time of death.

However, she probably died a week before her body was discovered, sometime between December 1st and December 8th.

Several of Lori's friends tell police she'd stayed with them, but they last saw her on November 30th.

Authorities also receive a tip from a man who says he saw Lori on Calistoga Road during the first week of December.

He tells police he saw a white van parked on the side of the road.

It had an off-color door and looked like it had been in an accident.

A white man with an afro sat in the driver's seat.

Two other men were outside the van, holding up a young girl who matched Lori's description.

The men pushed the girl inside the van, then hopped in themselves and sped away.

The sheriff's office gets to work searching for the van, and the perpetrators.

Both Jeanette Kamaheli and Lori Lee Kursa had been seen getting into a car with a white man with an Afro, but this time it sounds like he had accomplices.

Unfortunately, these tips had the men driving different vehicles, and neither witness had gotten a license plate number.

Without that, the models, or the years, the search proves to be difficult.

Police make the description public in the hopes that someone who had seen the van might come forward.

But instead of a tip, the next call the Sheriff's Department gets is far darker.

On the evening of December 28th, 1972, two skeletons are found at the bottom of a 30-foot embankment.

After conducting forensic testing, they confirm the bodies are of 12-year-old Maureen Sterling and 13-year-old Yvonne Weber.

They'd been missing for 10 months.

The pathologist determines the girls had died at least six months before they'd been discovered.

Unfortunately, the autopsy was unable to uncover any other useful information, like the cause of death.

Some publicly admit their disappointment with the Sheriff's Department.

Yvonne's stepfather claims that during the girls' entire disappearance, the police had treated them as runaways.

Now, the best the sheriff's department can do is try and find the girls' killers, and the discovery of their bodies reveals they have a much more serious problem on their hands.

Four young women's bodies have been found, completely nude, tossed down embankments on the side of the road.

All of the victims have been young women with long hair parted in the middle.

All of them were last seen hitchhiking.

A possible fifth victim fitting a similar description also disappeared while hitchhiking.

And all of this has happened just in the past year.

The Santa Rosa Sheriff's Department isn't dealing with a couple of isolated incidents.

They're dealing with a serial killer.

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By the beginning of 1973, residents of Santa Rosa begin to suspect a serial killer is stalking their community.

They're horrified.

To them, serial killers are supposed to strike in big cities like Sacramento or Los Angeles.

Even the Zodiac killers stayed mostly near San Francisco, at least an hour's drive south.

To make matters more frightening, they have very little information about the killer.

According to witness descriptions, he is probably a white man with an Afro hairstyle.

Beyond that, though, little is certain.

One report says he drives a truck, another says he drives a van, and one even claims he has accomplices.

The press warns girls and young women to stop hitchhiking until the murderer is caught, but sadly, those warnings didn't reach the towns outside of Santa Rosa.

On February 6th, 1973, 15-year-old Carolyn Davis runs away from her home in Anderson, California, a tiny town over 180 miles north of Santa Rosa.

Caroline sends letters back home that explain why she left.

She skipped too many days of school.

She's worried she'll have to go to juvenile detention.

She assures her mom she won't be hitchhiking.

She knows how dangerous it is.

But when letters start coming from farther and farther from home, Carolyn's mom suspects her daughter is hitchhiking.

Carolyn seemingly makes it as far as New Mexico and Illinois, but midway through the summer, the letters stop.

On July 31st, Carolyn's body is found at the bottom of an embankment off Franz Valley Road.

It's about 11 miles north of Santa Rosa.

It's less than four feet from where Yvonne Weber and Maureen Sterling's bodies were found.

The area where all three bodies were found is pretty remote.

It doesn't seem coincidental.

Police confirm what everyone's been thinking.

There's a serial killer in Santa Rosa.

Officially, they only say Maureen, Yvonne, and Carolyn were killed by the same person, but they are investigating the similarities in the murders of Lori Lee Kursa and Kim Allen and the disappearance of Jeanette Kamahele.

And if it is the same killer, his methods have evolved.

Carolyn's autopsy shows she died of strychnine poisoning.

But the police have some good news too.

They have a suspect.

Back in June, authorities in Golden, British Columbia arrested and charged a man for attacking an officer and sexually assaulting two girls.

When investigators looked into his past, they discovered the man is a lead suspect in three sexually motivated killings in Virginia and Colorado.

He's also been charged in the recent murder of a man in Sonoma County, a man whose body was found in an embankment near Santa Rosa.

The police are able to place this man in Santa Rosa on July 18th, the day Carolyn Davis was likely killed.

Given his violent past and his location at the time of the murder, he seems to fit the bill for the Santa Rosa hitchhiker killer.

Sergeant Butch Carlstedt flies to Canada to question the suspect.

He denies involvement through and through.

Detectives spend the next several months looking into him and any more tips they can find, yet for all their searching, nothing can directly tie the man to the killings.

To make matters worse, none of the tips they receive lead to any other plausible suspects.

The police are left in limbo, and Santa Rosa is left in fear.

As Christmas approaches, a grim atmosphere falls over the town.

Far to the south, a group of friends ring in the winter holiday on the golden beaches of Malibu.

23-year-old Teresa Walsh lives in Miranda, a tiny town over 160 miles north of Santa Rosa.

She's in the Los Angeles area visiting some friends who live there.

On December 22nd, Teresa's vacation winds to a close and she gets ready to make the trek back north.

She's due to arrive just in time for Christmas, which she'll spend with her parents and two-year-old son.

She says goodbye to her friends and sticks her thumb out on the side of the highway.

But Christmas comes and goes and Teresa never returns.

Come New Year's Eve, her family files a missing persons report.

Unfortunately, no one has seen her in days.

She could be anywhere.

Then, on December 28th, two teenage boys are kayaking down Mark West Creek, a popular whitewater area just outside of Santa Rosa.

As they flow downstream, they notice something bobbing up and down in the water far ahead of them.

It's Teresa Walsh.

An autopsy determines Teresa died by strangulation.

She'd also been tied up and sexually assaulted.

The coroner believes she's likely been dead for about a week, and she could have been discarded into the creek anywhere upstream.

The waters had been unusually high that week, so the body could have been carried for miles.

Once police established the timeline, they realize they have a problem.

Their only suspect couldn't have committed the murder because he was in prison.

And since he didn't kill Teresa Walsh, it stands to reason he hadn't killed any of the other victims either.

The Santa Rosa hitchhiker killer is still on the loose, waiting to strike again.

But if he does strike again, it's not in Santa Rosa.

After Teresa's murder in December 1973, the city goes quiet.

The following month, similar murders begin occurring in Washington state.

The Santa Rosa Police Department investigates the possibility their killer has moved north.

In July 1974, the killings in Washington stop, then pick up again in Salt Lake City.

In Santa Rosa, Sheriff Streepeck and Sergeant Carlstedt believe all of these murders, along with 28 other killings across Northern California, may be connected.

But it's more than they can handle within their small department, so they bring in the help of the FBI and forensic psychologists to help them create a profile of their killer.

In April of 1975, the Sheriff's Department present their findings to the public.

According to the FBI's behavioral science unit, the killer murders his victims slowly, for gratification.

He keeps items such as jewelry or clothing as mementos.

He may regard himself as a religious messiah, cleansing the world of, quote, fallen women.

It's likely he lives in or is from Santa Rosa and is familiar with its more rural areas.

He may be a loner in his early 30s with a high school education, a hatred for his mother, and a history of animal torture.

The report also includes similarities between the victims.

All were young girls and women found nude.

They all had long hair parted down the middle and went missing while hitchhiking.

After he puts all the pieces together, Detective Streep proposes a theory with a tie to an even more famous serial killer case.

The Santa Rosa hitchhiker killer could also be the Zodiac.

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Between 1968 and 1969, the notorious Zodiac killer murdered at least five men and women around San Francisco.

He craved notoriety and toyed with the public.

He wrote taunting letters to the police and media, claiming ownership for murders and sending blood-stained evidence.

Some of his letters contained ciphers, a few of which still haven't been cracked to this day.

And the identity of the Zodiac himself remains unsolved.

In his letters, the Zodiac claimed to have killed 37 people.

In April 1975, Sheriff Streepak and Sergeant Carlstead of the Santa Rosa Police Department theorized that number may include their six hitchhiking victims.

victims.

In a press conference, the officers explain their reasoning.

They believe the Zodiac's penchant for taunting law enforcement matches the Santa Rosa hitchhiker killer's behavior.

For example, the murderer discarded Carolyn Davis in the same spot as Yvonne Weber and Maureen Sterling.

It was a clear message that he'd been watching the papers and thought he was in control of the situation.

They also point to the Zodiac killer's possible interest in witchcraft.

In one letter, the Zodiac says he wants wants to make, quote, slaves of his victims in the afterlife.

Detective Streepe says that near the embankment where Maureen, Yvonne, and Carolyn's bodies were found, investigators discovered a strange symbol made out of sticks.

It was shaped like two rectangles, connected by a single twig in the middle.

The design, a professor told the detective, is a symbol from Old English witchcraft, intended to hurry a dead person's spirit to the afterlife.

Some are quick to point out that the Zodiac typically shot his victims, while the the Santa Rosa killer's methods have varied from strangulation to strychnine poisoning.

To explain this, Streepe points again to the Zodiac's correspondence.

This time, it's from a letter the killer sent about a month after what's believed to be his final murder.

In it, he says he'll change his modus operandi to avoid suspicion.

Perhaps that's exactly what he did in Santa Rosa, Seattle, and Salt Lake City.

But Zodiac experts in San Francisco aren't convinced.

Homicide Inspector William Armstrong says his department won't rule out the possibility that the Zodiac and Santa Rosa killers are the same person, but it's not likely.

Detectives in Salt Lake have a similar opinion.

They think it's possible their local victims were murdered by the hitchhiker killer, but they have no reason to think the Zodiac was involved.

And as for Seattle, They think their unsolved murders have nothing to do with the Santa Rosa killings, Zodiac, or otherwise.

It turns out, Salt Lake Lake and Seattle are both dealing with their own infamous serial killer.

At the time, he's a predator known only by Ted, but later, his name is revealed to be Ted Bundy.

Ted Bundy was sentenced to death in 1979 for several murders and attempted murders in Florida.

Ten years later, in the days leading up to his execution, Bundy makes full confessions to several law enforcement officers.

He tells them that between 1973 and 1978, he killed 30 women across California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and Florida.

Though they can no longer prosecute Bundy, detectives in Salt Lake City and Seattle feel they can close many of their unsolved murder cases.

But for Detective Sergeant Mike Brown, Bundy's confession opens up so many more questions in the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker case.

Brown has taken over files from Butch Carlstedt, who's now retired.

And while his predecessor is skeptical, Brown believes Ted Bundy may be their culprit.

He points out some of the similarities between the cases.

Ted Bundy often targeted girls and young women with long brown hair parted down the middle.

Every victim in the Santa Rosa hitchhiker case had the same hairstyle.

Bundy had spent some time in Northern California and admitted he'd committed murders in the state.

He was known to sexually assault and strangle his victims.

Some of their bodies were discovered in remote areas, and when his hair was long, one might describe it as an afro if they saw him from a distance.

The similarities are impossible to deny.

For a moment, the Santa Rosa Sheriff's Department think they finally have their man, until they look a little closer.

While Bundy strangled his victims, he almost always bludgeoned them in the back of the head first.

Only one of the Santa Rosa hitchhiker victims had been bludgeoned, Teresa Walsh.

Bundy did sexually assault his victims, but it was typically after after he killed them.

All of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker victims who had been raped had been assaulted before they were killed.

The final nail in the coffin comes when investigators actually track Bundy's movements.

His credit card purchases place him in Washington state at the time of many of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker murders.

That means Ted Bundy is likely not their killer.

But in 2011, Bundy's name is brought back into the conversation when the San Francisco Chronicle examines his police records.

Credit card reports show that at the time of the murders, Bundy would have had a two-day window to drive to Santa Rosa and back to Seattle.

It's an 800-mile drive, but Bundy had been known to travel long distances to commit murders.

Investigators are hopeful that, with DNA technology, questions about Ted Bundy's possible involvement might eventually be put to rest.

But there are other suspects still in consideration.

Back in 1989, Sergeant Carlstett, while retired, narrowed in on a pair of men he believed could be responsible.

According to Carlstedt, there's circumstantial evidence to tie them to the murders, which stopped after they both passed away.

He says he'd bet money they were responsible.

But unfortunately, investigators haven't found any concrete evidence.

And that's the way many of the theories go in this case.

A suspicion, a feeling, but no tangible proof.

It's the same reason a man named Jack Alexander Boken is a suspect.

In 2022, the Press Democrat reports a recent development in technology that solved a 26-year-old case.

In 1996, Michelle Marie Veal had been raped and murdered in Union City, only 80 miles away from Santa Rosa.

DNA evidence found on Veal's body is a positive match for Boken, a convicted rapist, child abuser, and now, Veal's most likely killer.

This prompts investigators to look into Boken's past.

Many of his rape cases were similar to the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders.

He chose victims with long hair and often picked them up by the side of the road.

His parents owned a house in Santa Rosa during the years the murders took place, which meant he could have been in the area.

Boken was imprisoned on multiple rape and child abuse charges in 1997.

He spent the rest of his life behind bars until he died of pneumonia on December 4th, 2021 at 78 years old.

He can never be questioned about the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders, but luckily, his DNA is still in storage.

Using refined technology, investigators intend to find out if he was the man responsible for the hitchhiker murders all along.

Police also have the DNA of a man named Jim Mordecai, who lived on a ranch in Sonoma County in the 70s.

In 2024, Mordecai's step-granddaughter Sierra teams up with the streaming service Max to produce a docuseries titled, The Truth About Jim.

Mordecai died in 2008 and had no criminal record, but when family members clean out his belongings, they find female jewelry they can't identify.

That leads to the unearthing of decades-long allegations.

Mordecai reportedly sexually assaulted one of his stepdaughters when she was a teen.

Other female family members allege Mordecai threatened to tie them up and kill them.

Sierra wonders if her step-grandfather could have been the Santa Rosa hitchhiker killer, the Zodiac killer, or both.

Sierra hands over Mordecai's DNA to the Santa Rosa crime lab, but as of this recording, there are no updates on the testing.

And unfortunately, it's not the only unanswered question in this case.

On July 6th, 1979, six years after Teresa Walsh was murdered, a couple of hikers found bones in a steep ravine just off Calistoga Road.

They had discovered the final victim of the Santa Rosa hitchhiker killer.

The remains must have been there for a very long time, because investigators also found a hard contact lens that likely belonged to the victim.

These hadn't been popular for at least five to seven years.

This placed the victim's murder squarely in the midst of the Santa Rosa hitchhiker slayings between 1972 and 74.

The connections became even clearer when strands of long dark hair were discovered nearby.

The size of the bones showed they likely belonged to a teenage girl or young woman, and the location of the body was just 100 yards away from where Lori Lee Kurse's body had been found in 1972.

It was also observed that she'd been tied up, much like Teresa Walsh.

At first, investigators assumed the body belonged to Jeanette Kamahele.

She'd last been seen in 1972 getting into a car with a white man with an Afro hairstyle.

Her body had never been found.

But dental records later proved these bones did not belong to Jeanette.

The investigators tried to identify the body by cross-referencing the dental records with unsolved missing persons files, but they were unable to find a match.

To this day, the skeleton, the Santa Rosa killer's suspected eighth victim, is known only as Jane Doe.

The tragedy left an open wound on the psyche of the city.

one that longed to be healed.

And now, 50 years after the slayings, only science may tell us who killed these young women.

For the average person, life in Santa Rosa has long since returned to normal.

The population has more than tripled since the 1970s, and its idyllic countryside and wine vineyards draw tourists and residents to the area year-round.

But the horrors remain in the memories of the city's older residents.

Many stopped hitchhiking.

They warned their kids of the dangers, and an upraised thumb has become a thing of the past.

The only undeniable facts of this case are the victims: Yvonne Weber,

Maureen Sterling, Kim Allen, Jeanette Kamahele,

Lori Lee Kursa, Carolyn Davis, Teresa Walsh,

and Jane Doe.

Investigators still think of them and hope to get their cases solved,

so they don't let them down.

Thank you for listening to Serial Killers.

We're here with a new episode every Monday.

Be sure to check us out on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast.

And if you're listening on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts.

For more information on the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders, among the many sources we used, we found coverage in the Press Democrat extremely helpful to our research.

Stay safe out there.

This episode was written by Giles Hofsteth and Chelsea Wood, edited by Chelsea Wood, researched by Mickey Taylor, fact-checked by Cheyenne Lopez and Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button.

I'm your host, Janice Morgan.