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Speaker 5: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 5: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 5: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 5: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
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Speaker 5: journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 7: On July eighth, nineteen seventy nine, two skeletons were found
Speaker 7: off a remote highway in Mendocino County, California. The skeltons
Speaker 7: belonged to a pair of murdered teenagers. For thirty six years,
Speaker 7: the teens identities remained a mystery. The teens killer was
Speaker 7: never brought to justice. In the fall of twenty fifteen,
Speaker 7: the Mendocino teens were identified through DNA testing. The identifications
Speaker 7: raised a number of questions in the community. Who murdered
Speaker 7: the Mendocino teens? Why did the teens go unidentified for
Speaker 7: so long? Were their murders linked to a series of
Speaker 7: unsolved homicides in the neighboring county, filled with gripping interviews
Speaker 7: and previously unreleased details about the Mendocino murders. Lost Coast
Speaker 7: Highway is the inside story of a shocking, multi generational tragedy.
Speaker 7: It is the story that the media won't tell you,
Speaker 7: and the bureaucrats didn't want you to know. The book
Speaker 7: they were featuring this evening is Lost Coast Highway with
Speaker 7: my special guest, journalist and author Gray George. Welcome to
Speaker 7: the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to
Speaker 7: this interview. Great George, Hi Dan, thank you so much
Speaker 7: for having me on tonight. Thank you very much. We
Speaker 7: had a great time last time with Black Knight Gold Coast,
Speaker 7: so welcome back. Let's talk right away because this is
Speaker 7: such an involved story and such an incredible tale. Let's
Speaker 7: start with how you came to write this book. You
Speaker 7: talk about writing Black Knight Gold Coast, and then you
Speaker 7: were doing some research and the Dough Network. Tell us
Speaker 7: how you came to this story and Lost Coast Highway.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, so. Last time we talked about my first book,
Speaker 2: which was Black Knight, Gold Coast, and that one of
Speaker 2: the central features of that book was familial DNA testing. Anyway,
Speaker 2: as part of researching Black Knight Gold Coast, I interviewed
Speaker 2: a law professor at UC Davis named Elizabeth Joe, and
Speaker 2: during the course of our interviews, she started talking about
Speaker 2: a new forensic procedure that had really come into vogue
Speaker 2: in the past few years called familial DNA screening, which
Speaker 2: allows law enforcement agencies to look for genetic similarities between
Speaker 2: DNA recovered at crime scenes and DNA profiles that are
Speaker 2: stored in the National DNA Data Bank. Anyway, I didn't
Speaker 2: know that much about familial DNA screening before speaking with her,
Speaker 2: so after our interview, I decided to look into the
Speaker 2: matter a little bit more, and I found out that
Speaker 2: familial DNA screening really has two applications in the arena
Speaker 2: of law enforcement. One of those applications is suspect identification
Speaker 2: and the other is identifying unknown bodies. And before I
Speaker 2: started researching the subject of familial DNA screening, I really
Speaker 2: had no idea just how pervasive the problem of unidentified
Speaker 2: decedents is. Every year, from coast to coast and around
Speaker 2: the world, law enforcement agencies find the remains of human
Speaker 2: beings whose identities they don't know, and because I had
Speaker 2: no idea of the scale of the problem, I decided
Speaker 2: to start researching it a little bit anyway. To make
Speaker 2: a long story short, my research led me to this
Speaker 2: website called the Dough Network, and the Dough Network features
Speaker 2: just tens of thousands of profiles of unidentified decedents. Some
Speaker 2: of these decedents were small children, some were elderly people,
Speaker 2: some were middle aged people. Some of these people were
Speaker 2: found in big cities. Others were found out in the
Speaker 2: middle of the desert, were out in the middle of forests.
Speaker 2: So as I was as I was writing Black Night,
Speaker 2: Gold Coast, I spent a considerable amount of my downtime
Speaker 2: just reading through the various profiles on the Dough Network.
Speaker 2: They were horrific in their detail, but at the same
Speaker 2: time they were really fascinating. They really opened my eyes
Speaker 2: to a sort of an esoteric side of the American
Speaker 2: criminal justice system. So as I was reading these profiles
Speaker 2: on the Dough Network, some of them just really stood
Speaker 2: out to me. And one of the profiles that hit
Speaker 2: me the hardest was this profile that concerned teenage boy
Speaker 2: and a teenage girl who were found up in Mendocino
Speaker 2: County back in the summer of nineteen seventy nine. These
Speaker 2: were two white kids. One was estimated the boy was
Speaker 2: estimated to be about twelve or thirteen years old, the
Speaker 2: girl was about thirteen or fourteen years old. And I
Speaker 2: spent a lot of time myself when I was young
Speaker 2: up in Mendocino County, and as I when I read
Speaker 2: that profile, it just immediately hit me that how strange
Speaker 2: that case was, how unusual it was that two children
Speaker 2: that age would just disappear without a trace, and then
Speaker 2: over the course of thirty five thirty six years would
Speaker 2: no one would have uncovered their identities. So that's how
Speaker 2: I originally got involved in researching Lost Coast Highway. It
Speaker 2: was actually an extension of the research I was doing
Speaker 2: for Black Knight Gold Coast. Now you say you.
Speaker 7: Developed the list of questions about the case just naturally
Speaker 7: and do called in the countryside proud small towns, even
Speaker 7: inspected the site where the bodies were found, and eventually
Speaker 7: began cultivating sources within the local law enforcement community. So
Speaker 7: tell us how you went about your research and your investigation. Sure, so,
Speaker 7: when I first read about the two teens who had
Speaker 7: been murdered up in Mendocino County in the summer of
Speaker 7: nineteen seventy nine. I really wasn't at Liberty at that
Speaker 7: time to investigate the case in all that much detail.
Speaker 7: I mean, I knew the case was tragic, and I
Speaker 7: had certain questions about it, but I was obviously I
Speaker 7: was in the middle of writing Black Night, Gold Coast
Speaker 7: at the time. I had to finish that project. So
Speaker 7: when I finished Black Night, Gold Coast, I ended up
Speaker 7: taking a week off, and during that week, thoughts about
Speaker 7: the Mendocino case came flooding back into my mind, and
Speaker 7: I decided to take some time that week and just
Speaker 7: explore the case in a little more depth. And as
Speaker 7: I was exploring the case and reading old newspaper clippings
Speaker 7: about it and so forth, I just began to wonder
Speaker 7: more than ever why these teens had not been identified.
Speaker 7: I mean, wasn't someone out there, wasn't a or a
Speaker 7: sibling or someone in their community aware that they'd gone missing.
Speaker 7: I just I couldn't fathom the circumstances under which two
Speaker 7: children that age would go missing and no one would notice.
Speaker 7: I couldn't figure out why there were no missing persons reports.
Speaker 2: I couldn't figure out why they'd never been identified. So anyway,
Speaker 2: the upshot was, after I did as much research as
Speaker 2: I could on the case from here at home in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles, I wanted to know more and I had
Speaker 2: these questions they had to be answered, and so I
Speaker 2: got in my car, I drove up to Mendocino County
Speaker 2: and I just started beating the bushes for any information
Speaker 2: I could find on the case. And literally, in some
Speaker 2: cases that meant just, you know, driving down a street
Speaker 2: and residential community and looking for a guy who's out
Speaker 2: mowing his lawn and pulling my car over to the
Speaker 2: curb and getting out and talking to him. Other times
Speaker 2: it was striking up conversations with people in local coffee shops.
Speaker 2: But at the end of the day, after going up
Speaker 2: there and after really beating the bushes as hard as
Speaker 2: I could, I did start to develop contacts with people
Speaker 2: in that area, and one contact leads to another, and
Speaker 2: eventually I did start to meet people in the local
Speaker 2: law enforcement community, a couple of whom we were willing
Speaker 2: to go on record with me in the book and
Speaker 2: not just give me information on background. So uh, that
Speaker 2: was that was really the genesis of my research for
Speaker 2: Lost Coast Highway.
Speaker 7: Now tell us the first information that you garner from
Speaker 7: this investigation that contradicts the information that that you had researched.
Speaker 2: Well, I should point out that the kids in Mendocino County,
Speaker 2: there were there were a number of problems with the
Speaker 2: investigation itself. But I should probably start by giving a
Speaker 2: couple of background details on the on the Mendocino case. So,
Speaker 2: these two kids were found about halfway down this almost
Speaker 2: vertical ravine on this very very remote highway west of
Speaker 2: the small town of Willets. So for your listeners who
Speaker 2: aren't really familiar with the geography of northern California, we're
Speaker 2: talking about an area that's about one hundred and forty
Speaker 2: one hundred and forty five miles north of San Francisco,
Speaker 2: north of the Golden Gate Bridge. This is a very
Speaker 2: sparsely populated area of our state. It's a part of
Speaker 2: the state that's covered by really dense, heavy coastal forest.
Speaker 2: So the victims in the Mendocino case were discovered almost
Speaker 2: by chance out on this very very remote highway called
Speaker 2: Highway twenty when their remains were found about halfway down
Speaker 2: this vertical thousand foot cliff. Only one item was found
Speaker 2: with their bodies, and that item was a single earring.
Speaker 2: It was shaped like a little bird. It was made
Speaker 2: out of a tortoiseshell material, and for years and years
Speaker 2: and years, that was the only clue to the identities
Speaker 2: of the two Mendocino victims. Well, when I was up
Speaker 2: there beating the bushes up in Mendocino County, you know,
Speaker 2: prowling around Yukayah and Fort Bragg and Willetts and these
Speaker 2: various towns up there, I started talking to some of
Speaker 2: the locals and one of the cases they remembered was
Speaker 2: this case of a number of female hitchhikers who had
Speaker 2: been murdered in Sonoma County back in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 2: as well, just a few years before the Mendocino murders happened.
Speaker 2: And so I started researching the Sonoma County case. I
Speaker 2: should point out that Snoma County is the county directly
Speaker 2: south of Mendocino County along the one oh one corridor.
Speaker 2: So as I was as I was researching that case,
Speaker 2: I discovered that in several of those cases in Sonoma County,
Speaker 2: the only item found with the victim's remains was a
Speaker 2: single ear ring. And as soon as I saw that
Speaker 2: in this report that had been generated by the Snoma
Speaker 2: County Sheriff's office back in the early seventies, that's when
Speaker 2: that's when the light bulbs sort of went off over
Speaker 2: my head, and I realized that some pretty critical information
Speaker 2: has probably been missed in the Mendocino investigation. And as
Speaker 2: I was talking to various law enforcement people up there,
Speaker 2: I was more or less able to substantiate that. In
Speaker 2: other words, I think that Mendocino County law enforcement probably
Speaker 2: had the clue they needed to at least connect those
Speaker 2: unidentified victims on Highway twenty to Sonoma County. And of
Speaker 2: course when the Mendicino County, when the Mendicino teens were
Speaker 2: finally identified, it did come to light that they were
Speaker 2: from Sonoma County.
Speaker 7: Now, you talk early how this investigation went sideways, and
Speaker 7: you talk about identific identifying adolescent bodies and the difficulty
Speaker 7: therein so tell us what happens with the emmy or
Speaker 7: the person responsible for doing that autopsy and the conclusions
Speaker 7: that that time over these two victims and their identity.
Speaker 2: Sure, so when the Mendocino teens were found in July
Speaker 2: of nineteen seventy nine. They were just skeletons. They were
Speaker 2: just skeletal remains that were found down this huge cliff.
Speaker 2: So the Mendicino Sheriff's Department hauled the remains up the cliff,
Speaker 2: took the remains back to the morgue in Ukiah, and
Speaker 2: an autopsy was performed. The problem was the medical examiner
Speaker 2: couldn't really glean too many details about the teen's identities
Speaker 2: because they were so young, and because they were just
Speaker 2: skeletons by the time they were found, and because no
Speaker 2: clothing or anything was found with their remains. So the
Speaker 2: Mendicino Sheriff's Department decided to bring in an anthropologist a
Speaker 2: forensic anthropologists to examine the remains and to try and
Speaker 2: ascertain additional details about the identities of these two unidentified teens.
Speaker 2: And so the anthropologist goes to Ukaiya and he examines
Speaker 2: the remains and he said, as okay, one of the
Speaker 2: bodies in this case belongs to a boy. He was
Speaker 2: about twelve or thirteen years old at the time he died.
Speaker 2: He was white. The other skeleton in this case belongs
Speaker 2: to a girl who was about thirteen or fourteen years
Speaker 2: old at the time of her death, and those were
Speaker 2: the initial conclusions reached by the anthropologists. So, of course,
Speaker 2: for years and years after that, the detectives in the
Speaker 2: Mendicino County Sheriff's Department, through no fault of their own,
Speaker 2: were looking for a boy and a girl who had
Speaker 2: gone missing from some other jurisdiction in the late nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2: Of course, by twenty fifteen, when the bodies were finally discovered,
Speaker 2: it came to light that one of the victims, the
Speaker 2: one who had been identified as a boy, was actually
Speaker 2: a girl. So all the time the Mendicino detectives had
Speaker 2: been looking for a boy and a girl who had
Speaker 2: gone missing, they should have been looking for two girls.
Speaker 2: And I wanted to know why that mistake was made.
Speaker 2: Obviously that was a pretty egregious error, so I researched
Speaker 2: how forensic identifications are made on adolescent skeletons. My research
Speaker 2: ended up leading me to one of the one of
Speaker 2: the top people in the field right now. He's a
Speaker 2: professor at Western Carolina University, and he told me, in
Speaker 2: no uncertain terms that anthropologists should never attempt to estimate
Speaker 2: the sexes of skeletal victims. He said, the reason is
Speaker 2: because until about the age of sixteen or seventeen, possibly
Speaker 2: even eighteen or nineteen, male and female skeletons are virtually
Speaker 2: identical in terms of the contours the pelvic girdles, the
Speaker 2: structures of the rib cages, and so forth. And during,
Speaker 2: you know, during our exchange, I asked this anthropology professor
Speaker 2: and researcher back at Western Carolina University whether or not
Speaker 2: that was sort of the standard operating procedure back in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty when the anthropological assessment was done on the
Speaker 2: Mendocino teens. And he said, yeah, he said, you know,
Speaker 2: we've done this for a long time. We've known for
Speaker 2: a long time that adolescent skeletons are hard to distinguish
Speaker 2: by gender and that that should not be attempted. So
Speaker 2: he was really pretty flabbergasted that the anthropologist back then
Speaker 2: had even attempted to make definitive gender assessments of the
Speaker 2: Mendocino teens.
Speaker 7: Now, what is the police response to this in terms
Speaker 7: of reaching out to media and is there any leads
Speaker 7: as a result of the concerted police effort to reach
Speaker 7: out and seek information from the community.
Speaker 2: Do you mean at this point or back in the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies.
Speaker 7: In the seventies, Yeah.
Speaker 2: In the seventies. Well, in the seventies, the sheriff of
Speaker 2: Mendocino County was a guy named Tom John Doll, and
Speaker 2: I have every confidence that he was a very conscientious
Speaker 2: professional in the field of law enforcement. But the thing is,
Speaker 2: when they couldn't identify the Mendocino teens initially, he ended
Speaker 2: up going to the media, and he ended up making
Speaker 2: some guesses about who the victims were in the case.
Speaker 2: And so he does this interview just a few days
Speaker 2: after the Mendocino teens were found, before they had even
Speaker 2: been assessed by the anthropologist yet, and the sheriff of
Speaker 2: Mendocino County tells this reporter for I think it was
Speaker 2: the Yukaya Daily Journal that the best quote unquote, and
Speaker 2: I'm quoting here, the best guess of his detectives is
Speaker 2: that the remains of those two teens belonged to a
Speaker 2: boy and a girl. Now, I doubt that that is
Speaker 2: a problem with that. I doubt that the same mistake
Speaker 2: would be made today. But obviously, making public on the
Speaker 2: record guesses to a reporter about the genders of two
Speaker 2: unidentified homicide victims posed enormous problems for the investigative trajectory
Speaker 2: of this case. And it also, I believe might posed
Speaker 2: problems with that anthropological investigation. Maybe the anthropologist was eager
Speaker 2: to confirm the guesses of the sheriff. Maybe he wanted
Speaker 2: to favor with the sheriff. I'm just guessing there. I
Speaker 2: don't know that for a fact, but it seems sort
Speaker 2: of suspect to me that the sheriff makes this off
Speaker 2: the cuff guess about the genders of the Mendocino murder
Speaker 2: victims being a boy and a girl, and then suddenly,
Speaker 2: you know, a couple months later, an anthropologist reaches the
Speaker 2: conclusion that the remains do belong to a boy and
Speaker 2: a girl. It seems suspect to me, at least, and
Speaker 2: I try and go through that in a pretty significant
Speaker 2: amount of detail in the book.
Speaker 7: There's another issue that further complicates that, and that is
Speaker 7: the conclusion, wrongful conclusion that there was a familiar connection
Speaker 7: between the two victims.
Speaker 2: Right, that's exactly right. I guess I had not mentioned
Speaker 2: that earlier, But when the anthropologist assessed the remains the
Speaker 2: Highway twenty victims, the Mendocino victims in early nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: he concluded that the remains belonged to two children who
Speaker 2: were biologically related. So the detectives in the case were
Speaker 2: for more than thirty years looking for two children who
Speaker 2: shared some sort of biological relationship. They weren't sure if
Speaker 2: they were a brother and a sister, or if they
Speaker 2: were maybe two first cousins or something like that, But
Speaker 2: it finally came to light in two thousand that the
Speaker 2: children were not biologically related. A forensic dentist re examined
Speaker 2: the remains in two thousand and he determined that the
Speaker 2: children were not biologically related. So that completely changed again
Speaker 2: the trajectory of the investigations, and now no longer were
Speaker 2: Mendocino detectives looking for two kids who were related to
Speaker 2: one another. They were looking for two kids who were
Speaker 2: not related to each other. And I should also point
Speaker 2: out that the forensic dentists with lucky landslods.
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Speaker 2: Just to examine the remains in two thousand was right
Speaker 2: on the money. He is now a legislator up in Sacramento.
Speaker 2: His name is Jim Wood, and he really helped break
Speaker 2: this case open in a very significant way by making
Speaker 2: that that discovery that the two victims were not related
Speaker 2: to one another.
Speaker 7: A big part of this is the attitude of law
Speaker 7: enforcement at that time and looking at runaways that are
Speaker 7: not runaways. Pardon me, missing people as runaways, stereotyping as
Speaker 7: they did that most people that went missing ended up
Speaker 7: coming back home. But you talk about July eighth, nineteen
Speaker 7: eighty nine, there was a ten year anniversary, and we're
Speaker 7: going a little bit forward in terms of this case
Speaker 7: goes cold. Five years pass. The case is handed to
Speaker 7: the FBI. They examined the case, They examined the case
Speaker 7: and the facts are very odd, but again no progress.
Speaker 7: And then you talk about July eighth, nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 7: this ten year anniversary of the discoveries, and a local
Speaker 7: news station does a story and the viewers were shown
Speaker 7: this what we mentioned, the bird shaped ear ring now
Speaker 7: and the broadcast was across the North coast, and one
Speaker 7: of these viewers was a seventeen year old girl named
Speaker 7: Kelly Graham. Tell us about Kelly Graham, what she recognizes
Speaker 7: and what is her response? What does she do?
Speaker 2: Absolutely so, you're exactly right. So just to make sure
Speaker 2: everyone understands the chronology here, the Mendocino teens were found
Speaker 2: in July of nineteen seventy nine. The anthropologic inspection of
Speaker 2: the remains was done in early nineteen eighty and then
Speaker 2: the case was handed off to the FBI in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty five. The FBI couldn't do anything with it, so
Speaker 2: they handed it back, after a short period of time,
Speaker 2: to the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department. Well by nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 2: ten years after the discovery of the teen's bodies or
Speaker 2: the teens skeletons, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department has still
Speaker 2: made no progress with their investigation of this homicide. So
Speaker 2: there's a short news segment that runs on the case.
Speaker 2: It's one of these periodic updates news stations do just
Speaker 2: to remind the public that there are two unsolved teenage
Speaker 2: homicide victims out there and they would like anyone with
Speaker 2: information to come forward. So this broadcast of the case
Speaker 2: goes across the North Coast, And when I say the
Speaker 2: North Coast, I'm talking about the area of the part
Speaker 2: of California that's sort of north of San Francisco all
Speaker 2: the way up toward Oregon. A broadcast is disseminated across
Speaker 2: the North Coast that discusses the general facts of the
Speaker 2: Mendocino homicides. And one of the people who's watching the
Speaker 2: newscast that night as a young woman from the town
Speaker 2: of Forestville, California. Her name is Kelly Graham. As soon
Speaker 2: as Kelly sees that bird shaped earring on the news report,
Speaker 2: she knows immediately who the two Mendocino murder victims are.
Speaker 2: Her own sister, Kerrie Graham, and her best friend, Francine
Speaker 2: Tremble had gone missing in nineteen seventy eight, just a
Speaker 2: few months before the Mendocino teens were discovered. So as
Speaker 2: soon as the broadcast is over, Kelly Graham, as she
Speaker 2: explained to me during our interviews, immediately picked up the
Speaker 2: phone called the Sheriff's department and said, look, I think
Speaker 2: those two kids, those two kids you have up in
Speaker 2: Mendocino County are my sister and her best friend, Francine Tremble.
Speaker 2: The person on the other end of the line asks
Speaker 2: her a few general questions about it, and Kelly explains
Speaker 2: that it was her sister and her sister's best girlfriend
Speaker 2: who had gone missing in December of nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 2: The Sheriff's department on the other end of the line says, oh, sorry,
Speaker 2: we really appreciate your call, but you know what, we
Speaker 2: know that the two Mendosino teens are actually a boy
Speaker 2: and a girl. So appreciate you calling. Thanks, but we
Speaker 2: can't help you. This isn't your sister and her friend.
Speaker 2: So that's the way that whole thing played out.
Speaker 7: And so she is, you say, crestfallen. She knows that
Speaker 7: airring she had given to her sister, She knows the
Speaker 7: timeline matched, and police had given her a theory again
Speaker 7: hitchhiking runaways from the Midwest following with the wrong people.
Speaker 7: What happens with this case. We know what happens with
Speaker 7: this case, but tell us how cool this case goes? Well.
Speaker 2: After Kelly Graham makes her call to law enforcement in
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty nine, there's absolutely no progress that's made on
Speaker 2: the case. Again. The detectives in Mendocino County, for those
Speaker 2: you know, for the next twenty plus years, are looking
Speaker 2: for a boy and a girl who have gone missing
Speaker 2: from some unknown jurisdiction in the United States. They have
Speaker 2: no idea where. At some point, the detectives decide that
Speaker 2: the kids probably came from the Midwestern United States and
Speaker 2: end up disseminating an online bulletin to that effect. I
Speaker 2: think it's worth noting, because we're covering so much ground here,
Speaker 2: that technology was changing pretty dramatically over the course of
Speaker 2: this case. There was no Internet back when the case
Speaker 2: happened in nineteen seventy nine, and there was no internet
Speaker 2: all the way up until the early two thousands. But
Speaker 2: by the time the Internet was starting to go mainstream
Speaker 2: around two thousand, law enforcement agencies started uploading profiles to
Speaker 2: the National Center for Missing an Exploited Children website and
Speaker 2: various other websites, and in these online postings, the Mendocino
Speaker 2: teens who were still unidentified were described as hitchhiking runaways
Speaker 2: from the Midwest, and nothing, absolutely nothing happened on their case.
Speaker 2: The detectives of Mendocino County could find absolutely no cases
Speaker 2: of any teenagers who had gone missing who matched the
Speaker 2: descriptions of the Mendocino teens. And finally the case just
Speaker 2: went absolutely ice cold, and it was ice cold all
Speaker 2: the way up until twenty twelve when the BBC, a
Speaker 2: foreign television station no less, decided to do an updated
Speaker 2: story about the case of the Mendocino teens.
Speaker 7: Yes, you talk about that, they partnered with the National
Speaker 7: Center for Missing and Exploited Children and they start profiling
Speaker 7: these cases and pick the Highway twenty homicide to feature.
Speaker 7: And with that you also talk about a technology this
Speaker 7: was working with Joe Mullens. You talk about this three
Speaker 7: dimensional facial composites were created through software. Tell us about
Speaker 7: this incredible technology that was used.
Speaker 2: Sure, so, in twenty twelve, the National Center for Missing
Speaker 2: an Exploited Children decided to partner with the British Broadcasting
Speaker 2: Corporation to do a special on unidentified homicide victims in
Speaker 2: the US, and one of the cases that was flagged
Speaker 2: was this very old and very cold case for Mendocino
Speaker 2: County that involved these two unidentified teenagers. Now, of course,
Speaker 2: by that point more than thirty years but thirty two
Speaker 2: to thirty three years had passed since the teens were discovered.
Speaker 2: And what they did as part of the special is
Speaker 2: they exhumed the skeletal remains of the Mendocino teams. They
Speaker 2: packed them up in boxes, they flew them to Enova
Speaker 2: Alexandria Hospital near Washington, d C. And they and the
Speaker 2: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was able to
Speaker 2: coordinate a cat scans of the skulls these two unidentified victims,
Speaker 2: and the cat scan technology obviously was very sophisticated. It
Speaker 2: was able to reveal contours and dimensions of the victims'
Speaker 2: faces that would not be observable to the naked eye. Well.
Speaker 2: As soon as those cat scans were complete, they were
Speaker 2: forwarded to a forensic imaging specialist at the National Center
Speaker 2: for Missing and Exploited Children. He's men named Joe Mullins
Speaker 2: and he used computer software to be able to sketch
Speaker 2: in these very lifelike composites of the two Mendocino victims,
Speaker 2: and one of the sketches was of a boy with
Speaker 2: very pointy chin and kind of almond shaped eyes. The
Speaker 2: other composite was of a girl who was in her
Speaker 2: young teens, just like the boy, and she had kind
Speaker 2: of a round face and very open, expressive eyes and
Speaker 2: kind of thin lips. It was really sophisticated technology. But
Speaker 2: I think in my mind, one of the most significant
Speaker 2: aspects of the BBC Slash National Center broadcast on this
Speaker 2: case was what happened at a Nova Alexandria hospital. As
Speaker 2: the technicians in this scan suite we're unpacking the skulls
Speaker 2: of the Mendocino victims. They ended up finding this extraneous
Speaker 2: tooth packed into the packed into the boxes, and they
Speaker 2: couldn't tell exactly where the tooth came from. They knew
Speaker 2: the tooth wasn't as old as the as the Mendocino
Speaker 2: teen skulls, so they examined it really closely and they
Speaker 2: tried to get a sense support it came from. Nobody
Speaker 2: had any idea where this tooth came from. And I
Speaker 2: should point out that in the course of my research,
Speaker 2: I actually spoke with a captain in the Mendocino Sheriff's Department,
Speaker 2: and I asked him about this tooth where he thought
Speaker 2: it came from, and he just sort of shrugged his
Speaker 2: shoulders and says, well, you know, we think it probably
Speaker 2: got mixed into the remains somehow when they were packed
Speaker 2: up here in storage in Yukaya. And I appreciated his candor,
Speaker 2: and I thought he was a good guy, but you know,
Speaker 2: at the same time, it just kind of gave me
Speaker 2: a sense of how how cavalier the Mendocino County Sheriff's
Speaker 2: Department was about this case. You know, he seemed totally
Speaker 2: this This captain seemed notal totally nonplussed by the idea
Speaker 2: that the remains of two teenage homicide victims, unknown homicide
Speaker 2: victims had somehow been mixed in with the remains of
Speaker 2: some unknown person. And to the best of my knowledge,
Speaker 2: the person to whom this extraneous tooth belongs has never
Speaker 2: has never been identified. So anyway, to make a short
Speaker 2: story long, I think that the BBC's involvement with the
Speaker 2: National Center formiscann exploited children in terms of developing, this
Speaker 2: special reveals a lot about the case, not just the composites,
Speaker 2: but it also, I think unintentionally sort of reveals some
Speaker 2: information about the handling of this case that doesn't really
Speaker 2: say great things.
Speaker 7: Now you talk about Carrie and watching the BBC program,
Speaker 7: and after she had her very negative experience with the
Speaker 7: police and trying to report about her sister, she was
Speaker 7: reluctant tell us what she sees on this BBC special
Speaker 7: and who does she contact.
Speaker 2: Sure, So the way Carrie explained, Kelly explained it to me,
Speaker 2: Kelly is the sister who is still alive. Kelly explained
Speaker 2: it to me that in twenty twelve she was still
Speaker 2: just beside herself about her sister being missing. Her sister,
Speaker 2: Carrie had gone missing with her friend Francine back in
Speaker 2: December nineteen seventy eight. They had no idea, the police
Speaker 2: had no idea where the girls had gone. The families
Speaker 2: had always been told that the girls were runaways, even
Speaker 2: though they were both in their very young teens and
Speaker 2: had absolutely no money at the time. So Carrie had
Speaker 2: always she had never been able to stop thinking about
Speaker 2: her missing sister. So in nineteen eighty nine, Carrie sees
Speaker 2: this news broadcast. She tries to call the Sheriff's department.
Speaker 2: She's told no, sorry, we you know, we're looking for
Speaker 2: a boy and a girl. We appreciate your call, but
Speaker 2: we know it's not your sister and her friend. So
Speaker 2: by twenty twelve, Carrie Kelly is even more curious than
Speaker 2: ever about the fate of her sister Carrie and Carrie's
Speaker 2: friend Francine. So one day Kelly is watching TV and
Speaker 2: she sees this BBC broadcast and lo and behold it
Speaker 2: in the broadcast involves the same case for Mendocino County
Speaker 2: that Kelly had seen back in nineteen eighty nine, and
Speaker 2: Kelly sees the online the composites that Joe Mullin had developed.
Speaker 2: She sees the bird shaped earring.
Speaker 6: Again.
Speaker 2: Kelly knows that the earring is one that she had
Speaker 2: given her sister back in the mid seventies. Kelly described
Speaker 2: every detail that about that earring. She even pointed out
Speaker 2: that she'd bought it from a Cherokee Indian jeweler. So anyway,
Speaker 2: after Kelly sees this news broadcast, which by the way,
Speaker 2: also showed images of the skulls, the Mendocino teen skulls
Speaker 2: Kelly is just beside herself. She's completely shocked. She told
Speaker 2: me that when she saw that skull on television, she
Speaker 2: immediately knew it was her sister. She said that Carrie,
Speaker 2: her sister's front teeth looked exactly the same back in
Speaker 2: the seventies as the teeth on that skull did, and
Speaker 2: she knew immediately that was her sister. But Kelly didn't
Speaker 2: know exactly what to do after she saw that broadcast.
Speaker 2: She didn't know if she should call the Sheriff's department again.
Speaker 2: She didn't know if she should keep her mouth shut.
Speaker 2: She didn't know if she tried to call somebody, you know,
Speaker 2: she would be laughed at and dismissed like she had
Speaker 2: been in nineteen eighty nine. Well, finally, Kelly starts researching
Speaker 2: the details of this BBC broadcast, and she learns that
Speaker 2: the broadcast was done in coordination with the National Center
Speaker 2: for Missing un Exploited Children. So, finally, in a last
Speaker 2: ditch effort to get some kind of closure on her
Speaker 2: sister's very odd case in disappearance, Kelly picks up the phone.
Speaker 2: She calls the National Center for Missing an exploited children,
Speaker 2: and the reception she received at the National Center from
Speaker 2: Missing Exploited Children was diametrically different from the one she'd
Speaker 2: received when she tried to call the Sheriff's department. The
Speaker 2: National Center immediately recognized the importance of Kelly's information, and
Speaker 2: over the course of several months, they put Kelly in
Speaker 2: contact with multiple people in the law enforcement community, out
Speaker 2: of state law enforcement officials so that Kelly can explain
Speaker 2: her circumstances to them, and finally, through this long convoluted
Speaker 2: series of events, the out of state law enforcement officials
Speaker 2: end up prevailing upon the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department to
Speaker 2: submit the submit for DNA testing the Mendocino teens remains,
Speaker 2: and to collect DNA from the family members of Carrie Graham,
Speaker 2: who was Kelly's sister, and Francine Trimble, who was Carrie's
Speaker 2: best friend. The DNA samples are sent down to the
Speaker 2: University of North Texas and within a couple of years,
Speaker 2: the positive identifications are made. The Mendocino teens were Kelly,
Speaker 2: were Carrie Graham and Francine Trimble, two girls who had
Speaker 2: gone missing from Sonoma County in December nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 2: whose families never knew what happened to them, whose families
Speaker 2: had been raked with worry, as you can imagine, for
Speaker 2: thirty six years, And finally, in late twenty fifteen, the
Speaker 2: identities of those men of the Mendocino teens are finally
Speaker 2: discovered through familial DNA testing.
Speaker 7: What you add as an incredible background to Francine Trimble,
Speaker 7: her very very troubled in tragic life, and Carrie Graham
Speaker 7: just briefly tell us a little bit about Francine and
Speaker 7: how she came to be a victim.
Speaker 2: Sure, so you know, when I started this project, I
Speaker 2: had no idea what kinds of back grounds victims like
Speaker 2: this would come from. I didn't know if they were
Speaker 2: throw away children. I didn't know if they were runaways
Speaker 2: like law enforcement had expected for so long. But after
Speaker 2: the Mendocino teens were identified as Francine Trimble and Carrie
Speaker 2: Graham in twenty fifteen, I decided to start digging into
Speaker 2: their backgrounds and I contacted both of their families. I
Speaker 2: conducted very, very extensive interviews with multiple members of both families,
Speaker 2: and what I ended up learning about Francceine is that
Speaker 2: you know, in some ways she was an unlikely victim.
Speaker 2: In other ways, it was like her entire life was
Speaker 2: somehow destined for this type of oblivion. Franccene comes from
Speaker 2: an extremely nice, well spoken, well educated family up in
Speaker 2: Marin County. I've gotten to know them very very well
Speaker 2: over the course of my research for this book, and
Speaker 2: I should point out that getting to know them in
Speaker 2: a lot of ways was really the high point of
Speaker 2: my experience writing this Book's grandfather was a decorated combat
Speaker 2: veteran in World War Two who worked for many years
Speaker 2: as an investigative reporter for San Francisco newspapers. Later, he
Speaker 2: went on to a successful career as an executive with
Speaker 2: Pacific Telephone. Francie's grandmother was a I don't know if
Speaker 2: I would be exaggerating to say that she was a
Speaker 2: musical prodigy. She was an extremely accomplished pianist who taught
Speaker 2: chiano lessons for many, many years in the Sandrafell area.
Speaker 2: The only quirk in Francine's life is that her mother
Speaker 2: ended up getting pregnant when she was a student at
Speaker 2: Sandrafell High School back in the nineteen fifties, and obviously
Speaker 2: back then there was a huge stigma attached to single motherhood.
Speaker 2: Francine's mother and father were married, but the marriage dissolved
Speaker 2: pretty soon thereafter. Francine never knew her father. Her mother's
Speaker 2: life ended up spiraling out of control in the nineteen
Speaker 2: sixties and france Scene was placed in foster care. Anyway,
Speaker 2: by the nineteen seventies. The mid seventies, when Franccene was
Speaker 2: about twelve years old, her mother was finally able to
Speaker 2: regain custody of her and by that time, Francine's mother,
Speaker 2: who again had grown up in very very comfortable, affluent
Speaker 2: circumstances in Marin County, Francine's mother is now living in
Speaker 2: this shack, this dilapidated little shack out in the rural
Speaker 2: countryside of Sonoma County. Francine goes to live with her mother,
Speaker 2: and not long thereafter, Francine meets a girl in her
Speaker 2: neighborhood named Carrie Graham, and Francine and Carrie start spending
Speaker 2: a lot of time together as they make that transition
Speaker 2: from childhood into adolescence. Francceine and Carrie, of course, like
Speaker 2: most kids do, like I did, certainly, they start pushing
Speaker 2: their boundaries a little bit more and they start taking
Speaker 2: greater risks with their safety. And not too long after
Speaker 2: they met, Francine and Carrie started hitchhiking, and one day
Speaker 2: in December nineteen seventy eight, Francine and Currie decided to
Speaker 2: hitchhike into Santa Rosa, which was about twelve miles from
Speaker 2: this small town where they lived, and the girls were
Speaker 2: never seen again.
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Speaker 7: Now you talk about a false prison confession leading to
Speaker 7: doctor Wood's examination of the Highway twenty skulls, which were
Speaker 7: exzoomed in two thousand and this New Jersey inmates is confessing,
Speaker 7: but they realize he must have been twelve at the time,
Speaker 7: so that's dismissed. And then you talk about a very
Speaker 7: important story in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and it
Speaker 7: speaks of it spoke of a possible connection with the
Speaker 7: Grahame and Trimble murders and a series of co ed
Speaker 7: murders from the same area in the Santa Rosa Seven
Speaker 7: girls and young young women were found in rural areas
Speaker 7: near Santa Rosa nineteen seventy two to midst nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 7: Tell us about what you consider really solid press coverage,
Speaker 7: local press coverage, what was the national media response, and
Speaker 7: tell us more about this Santa Rosa Press Democrat story.
Speaker 2: Sure, So, after Francine Trimble and Carrie Graham were identified
Speaker 2: as the Mendocino murder victims, the Sheriff of Mendocino County,
Speaker 2: Tom Alman, he decided to hold a press conference about
Speaker 2: the case. The press conference was held on February second,
Speaker 2: twenty sixteen, and the press conference was really great in
Speaker 2: a lot of ways. It omitted some of the less
Speaker 2: favorable information about this case. But after the press conference
Speaker 2: was over, local media decided to go out and file
Speaker 2: stories on the case, and I think the best story
Speaker 2: that was written post press conference was this one by
Speaker 2: a woman named Glenna Anderson for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat,
Speaker 2: and this story mentioned the fact that a few years
Speaker 2: before Carrie and Francine went missing from their hometown while hitchhiking,
Speaker 2: there had been a number of other murders in the
Speaker 2: Santa Rosa area in Sonoma County, and in each case,
Speaker 2: a young female had disappeared without a trace, and then
Speaker 2: later her body was found off in the rural countryside.
Speaker 2: While that story kind of came and went in the
Speaker 2: Press Democrat again, I think it probably resonated with a
Speaker 2: certain segment of the North Coast population that had been
Speaker 2: around for years and years and years and remembered the case.
Speaker 2: But Carrie and Francine's case got relatively little exposure in
Speaker 2: the national media. I know Fox News ran a story
Speaker 2: on it. I know that the story was featured in
Speaker 2: an Australian broadcast. But really at the press conference, there
Speaker 2: were no national newspapers. There were no media organizations from
Speaker 2: the Bay Area or from Los Angeles that had gone
Speaker 2: up there to cover Sheriff Hollman's press conference. It was
Speaker 2: know in many ways that press conference was much like
Speaker 2: Carrie and Francine's life was. It was a fairly a
Speaker 2: spartan affair that was attended heavily by their family members,
Speaker 2: but really was just only attended by a few local
Speaker 2: reporters from up there in Yucaiah and Santa Rosa.
Speaker 7: You really detail the life of Chrissy and this poverty
Speaker 7: that she eventually gets her franccene back from foster care.
Speaker 7: She gets away from this abusive man and starts trying
Speaker 7: to give them whatever she can possibly. But you chronicle
Speaker 7: the attitude at the time from police when she reported
Speaker 7: and when the Walshes reported their child, and what the
Speaker 7: police really stressed and said to those parents regarding their
Speaker 7: missing children. As you're doing the book, tell us really
Speaker 7: what was said by police.
Speaker 2: Sure, so again, Francine Tremble and Carrie Graham go missing
Speaker 2: in mid December nineteen seventy eight. It was either and
Speaker 2: no one I have to point out too, is exactly
Speaker 2: sure if they went missing. If you talk to different people,
Speaker 2: even different people within the law enforcement community, you'll get
Speaker 2: different dates. But it was either December fifteenth or December sixteenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy eight. Well, Carrie had been a runaway in
Speaker 2: the past. Carrie had run away from home in the past,
Speaker 2: and so her parents, who had also raised two other children,
Speaker 2: both of whom had run away during their teenage years.
Speaker 2: Carrie's parents were not too worried when she ended up vanishing.
Speaker 2: They figured that Carrie was off staying with friends. Fran Scene,
Speaker 2: on the other hand, was a very quiet girl. She
Speaker 2: was a very polite girl. She came from very adverse
Speaker 2: economic conditions. Like you pointed out, her mother, Chrissy Walsh Tremble,
Speaker 2: had no money in the nineteen seventies. Despite the fact
Speaker 2: that Chrissy had grown up in relative affluence, she was
Speaker 2: on welfare by the time Franccene came to live with
Speaker 2: her in the mid seventies. Anyway, when fran Scene was
Speaker 2: always very diligent about going home at the end of
Speaker 2: the night, regardless of whatever she was doing, she would
Speaker 2: always go home because her mother did not have a
Speaker 2: telephone and fran Scene didn't want her mother to worry
Speaker 2: about her. So after December fifteenth or December sixteenth, nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy eight, when Franccene didn't return home, her mother, Chrissy
Speaker 2: automatically knew something was missing, something was wrong. She knew
Speaker 2: that something had gone wrong with her daughter, and so
Speaker 2: Chrissy drives down to a local market. It's a local
Speaker 2: market that's still there today in the small town of
Speaker 2: Forestville where they live. It's a place called Spears Market,
Speaker 2: and Chrissy goes to the payphone there. At Spears Market,
Speaker 2: she starts making phone calls. The first person she calls
Speaker 2: is Carrie's family, and she asks if they've seen Francine,
Speaker 2: if Franccene is staying with Carrie that night, and Carrie's
Speaker 2: mother explains to Chrissy, no, sorry, Francine is not here.
Speaker 2: In fact, she and Carrie left last night and neither
Speaker 2: of them have been around here since. Well. Of course,
Speaker 2: upon hearing that neither girl is around, Chrissy's stomach automatically drops.
Speaker 2: She goes home. She looks around Francene's room. She notices
Speaker 2: that Francine had not taken any clothes with her, and
Speaker 2: she also noticed something else that was even more troubling
Speaker 2: to Chrissy. Chrissy notices that Franccene left her favorite ring
Speaker 2: on her bedside table, and Chrissy knows that if Franccene
Speaker 2: was playing to leave for any prolonged period of time
Speaker 2: she would have taken this ring with her. So Christy
Speaker 2: is pretty frantic after she sees that ring. So she
Speaker 2: goes back down to the payphone at Spears Market. She
Speaker 2: gets on the horn with the Snowma County Sheriff's Department.
Speaker 2: The Snowma County Sheriff's Department at the time, like law
Speaker 2: enforcement agencies all across the country and all around you know,
Speaker 2: North America. I think they were of the opinion that
Speaker 2: when children go missing, they were most likely runaways. It's
Speaker 2: no secret that, especially here in California, there was an
Speaker 2: enormous runaway epidemic back in the nineteen seventies, especially the
Speaker 2: late seventies. So Chrissy goes down to the payphone. She
Speaker 2: calls the Snoma County Sheriff's Department. She says, look, my
Speaker 2: daughter went out last night. She didn't come home. She's
Speaker 2: a good kid, she's never been in any trouble. Can
Speaker 2: you help me find her? What can you do? I'm frantic,
Speaker 2: And they say, look, don't worry, ma'am. Your daughter has
Speaker 2: just probably gone to stay with a friend for a
Speaker 2: couple of days. We need you to calm down, We
Speaker 2: need you to go home. And just wait for her
Speaker 2: to come back. So, you know, Chrissy has really no
Speaker 2: choice but to take their advice. Chrissy's car was an
Speaker 2: old clunker. It would barely make it down to the
Speaker 2: end of the street. Christy had no money. She couldn't
Speaker 2: go out and mount a search on her own. So
Speaker 2: she goes home and she waits for fran scene. And
Speaker 2: this is mid December, against the sun is setting early
Speaker 2: and as as it's getting dark, and this this very cold,
Speaker 2: dark patch of forests where Chrissy lives in this little
Speaker 2: shack with franccene and her son, Chrisy gets increasingly concerned.
Speaker 2: She's very worried, so she goes back multiple times to
Speaker 2: call Carrie's mother to find out if Carrie's mother has
Speaker 2: seen anything. She goes back to the payphone to continue
Speaker 2: calling the Snowma County Sheriff's department to ask if they
Speaker 2: have gotten any word on Carrie and or franccene, or
Speaker 2: if they'll come out and file a missing person's report.
Speaker 2: They continue to tell Chrissy, no, sorry, ma'am, we can't
Speaker 2: do anything. We you know, our hands are tied. We
Speaker 2: you know, we can't go out and look for every
Speaker 2: every kid who doesn't come home. And so that's where
Speaker 2: Chrissy was left. Christy was left more or less without options.
Speaker 2: She was absolutely frantic when Franccene disappeared. She knew something
Speaker 2: was dreadfully wrong. She suspected the worse. She waited a
Speaker 2: little while to call her parents. She didn't, obviously, Chrissy
Speaker 2: did not want to burden her parents back in Marin
Speaker 2: County with information that Francine had gone missing. But finally
Speaker 2: she had no choice. Chrissy had literally worried herself sick.
Speaker 2: She had caused two ulcers to open up in her stomach,
Speaker 2: and her father went up there and her father took
Speaker 2: Christsy to the emergency room. And while Chrissy was in
Speaker 2: the emergency room being treated for these bleeding ulsters, Chrissy's
Speaker 2: mother picked up the phone and started calling every law
Speaker 2: enforcement agency she could think of, and those law enforcement
Speaker 2: agencies told her the exact same thing they'd told Chrissy,
Speaker 2: that Kerrie and Francine were probably runaways, that they had
Speaker 2: just taken off from home, that she didn't need to
Speaker 2: worry that kids were running away all over the place,
Speaker 2: and that she didn't need to be concerned. She should
Speaker 2: just sit back and wait for the girls to come
Speaker 2: home and not bother law enforcement because law enforcement was
Speaker 2: too consumed with more pressing investigations. And that's where things
Speaker 2: sat for years and years and years. But you're absolutely right, Dan,
Speaker 2: I mean, the attitude toward runaways and toward missing people
Speaker 2: and toward missing children was just totally different in the
Speaker 2: nineteen seventies than it is now. I think there were
Speaker 2: really three cases that had a major impact on the
Speaker 2: public's attitude toward missing persons and law enforcements attitude toward
Speaker 2: missing persons, and they all happened immediately after Carrie and
Speaker 2: Francine went missing. One case was Aton Potts's disappearance in
Speaker 2: New York City in nineteen seventy nine. Another one was
Speaker 2: the very high profile kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh
Speaker 2: in Hollywood, Florida in the summer of nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 2: And the third is the disappearance of a paper boy
Speaker 2: from West des Moines, Iowa that happened in nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 2: His name was Johnny Gosh and Eton and Johnny have
Speaker 2: never been found. Adam Walsh was obviously his severed head
Speaker 2: was found in a drainage canal. But those three cases
Speaker 2: really elevated the issue of public children to the level
Speaker 2: of public discourse. And before that, law enforcement was the
Speaker 2: standard operating procedure for most agencies, unfortunately, was to you know,
Speaker 2: write off missing children as runaways, and that was sort
Speaker 2: of the path of least resistance for law enforcement. And
Speaker 2: you know, I think that in a lot of cases
Speaker 2: law enforcement was right. I think that kids were runaways.
Speaker 2: But in this case, obviously the outcome was much different,
Speaker 2: and no action was really taken immediately when the girls
Speaker 2: went missing.
Speaker 7: Let's go backwards, but forward in the story to February fourth,
Speaker 7: nineteen seventy two, and do you have that in the evening,
Speaker 7: a mother, her daughter, and the daughter's friend went to
Speaker 7: the Redwood Empire ice arena. And this is Maureen Sterling.
Speaker 7: She was twelve years old in Yvonne Weber thirteen and
Speaker 7: her mother was to pick them up at eleven o'clock. So,
Speaker 7: and her name is Arlene. Tell us about what happens
Speaker 7: at eleven o'clock?
Speaker 2: Sure, So, as I was researching Carrie Graham and Francine
Speaker 2: Trimble's disappearance, I decided to look in more detail into
Speaker 2: these homicides that had happened in the early seventies in
Speaker 2: Sonoma County, to see if there might have been some
Speaker 2: kind of link, as this reporter for the Santa Rosa
Speaker 2: Press Democrat had suggested it. So I started investigating these
Speaker 2: these murders in Santa Rosa that came to be known
Speaker 2: as the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders. And the first case
Speaker 2: involved these two girls, Marine Sterling and Avon Weber. The
Speaker 2: mother drops them off at seven thirty at night at
Speaker 2: the ice arena. She comes back at eleven o'clock and
Speaker 2: Marine and Yvonne are nowhere to be found. The mother
Speaker 2: gets out of her car. She goes into the ice arena.
Speaker 2: She looks all over the place. She can't find the girl.
Speaker 2: She goes into the snack shop, she goes into the bathroom.
Speaker 2: She walks around the ice arena. She looks out on
Speaker 2: the sidewalk. She looks out in the parking lot. The
Speaker 2: girls are absolutely nowhere to be found, So the mother
Speaker 2: is worried. I mean, Marine and Yvonne, from everything I
Speaker 2: could gather, they were very nice girls. They were not
Speaker 2: the kinds of girls who would just run off, especially
Speaker 2: considering that they had no clothes, no money, nothing. The
Speaker 2: mother is terribly worried, so she contacts the other girl's mother.
Speaker 2: They go down to the police station in Santa Rosa,
Speaker 2: which is the seat of Sonoma County. It's the largest
Speaker 2: city in Sonoma County, and they file missing persons reports
Speaker 2: on their daughters and they are told the same thing
Speaker 2: that Chrissy Tremble and Margaret Graham who is Francine, who
Speaker 2: is excuse me, Carrie's mother were told in the late seventies.
Speaker 2: This mother is told that her daughter is a runaway.
Speaker 2: If Vonn's mother has told this, Marine's mother has told this,
Speaker 2: and they're told to go home and sit and wait
Speaker 2: for the girls to come home. And again at the time,
Speaker 2: I think it might be a little bit harder for
Speaker 2: some contemporary listeners to appreciate just what it was like
Speaker 2: back in the early seventies. But in the early seventies,
Speaker 2: you know, there weren't show was on network television every
Speaker 2: single night about serial killers. There weren't there.
Speaker 6: There had been no milk cart in kids.
Speaker 2: There wasn't this pervasive feeling in the Western psyche that
Speaker 2: kids could go missing and be murdered by strangers at
Speaker 2: any moment. So Marine and Yvonne's parents were very, very
Speaker 2: worried when their daughters disappeared, But at the same time,
Speaker 2: because they hadn't really had the exposure to the same
Speaker 2: kind of media coverage a contemporary audience, as I think,
Speaker 2: they were a little bit inclined to just kind of
Speaker 2: go along with what law enforcement wanted. Law enforcement, the
Speaker 2: Santa Rosa Police Department wanted those parents to just go
Speaker 2: home and be quiet and wait for their daughters to return.
Speaker 2: And that's what the parents did. I mean, I can
Speaker 2: only imagine they worried themselves sick after Marine and Ivonne disappeared,
Speaker 2: but nothing happening. I should point out too that this
Speaker 2: is not a condemnation of contemporary law enforcement. I spoke
Speaker 2: with a sergeant in the in the Santa Rosa Police
Speaker 2: Department in the course of researching this book, and he
Speaker 2: told me, he said, look, Gray, he said, you know,
Speaker 2: every time a missing person's case gets called into my unit,
Speaker 2: and by the way, he's the gentleman who handles all
Speaker 2: the missing person's cases in Santa Rosa, his unit does
Speaker 2: He told me, we take these cases very seriously, and
Speaker 2: he said there are laws on the books now that
Speaker 2: mandate how we respond to these cases. He told me,
Speaker 2: you know, if a case like Marine Sterling and von
Speaker 2: Weber's happened today, patrol officers would immediately roll out there
Speaker 2: to the ice arena and take a statement from the mother,
Speaker 2: And because of the girl's ages, a detective would immediately
Speaker 2: be assigned to the case. Marine and yvon would be
Speaker 2: known as what would be known as what we call
Speaker 2: today high risk victims because of their very young ages.
Speaker 2: And so this this type of case would be handled today.
Speaker 2: But yeah, that's essentially the upshot of Marine and Yvonne's case.
Speaker 7: Now you say, just one month later, March fourth, nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy two, a Santa Rosa co ed left work. Her
Speaker 7: name is Kim Wendy Allen. She was nineteen years old.
Speaker 7: She worked part time at the health food store and
Speaker 7: as you found out, she was a seasoned hitchtiger. She
Speaker 7: as you're in an investigation, you find out that she
Speaker 7: was picked up by a couple men dropped off, but
Speaker 7: she was still a long way from Santa Rosa when
Speaker 7: those two men.
Speaker 5: Dropped her off.
Speaker 7: Then you talk about the following day, March fifth, nineteen
Speaker 7: seventy two, three teens decided to drive to Santa Rosa
Speaker 7: and what do they find there?
Speaker 2: So these three teens, one of whom I have interviewed,
Speaker 2: he's a gentleman named John Bly's an engineer up in
Speaker 2: Santa Rosa. John Bly and his two friends decided to
Speaker 2: go take a motorcycle ride in a very rural part
Speaker 2: of Sonoma County on March fifth, nineteen seventy two. And
Speaker 2: as they're riding around, it's a beautiful day just before
Speaker 2: the start of spring. They decided to turn down this
Speaker 2: very remote Kirby road called Enterprize Road. And as they're
Speaker 2: traversing Enterprise Road, they find this patch of shade near
Speaker 2: a small creek bed and they pull over to the
Speaker 2: side and they decide to let their bikes cool down.
Speaker 2: So as their motorcycles are cooling down, John Blin and
Speaker 2: his friends just start wandering I don't know, twenty or
Speaker 2: thirty feet up the road. And as they're wandering up
Speaker 2: the side of the road, John Bly happens to look
Speaker 2: off the east side of the road and he sees
Speaker 2: what he thinks is a mannequin down near the bottom
Speaker 2: of this creek bed that's about twenty feet below the roadway.
Speaker 2: And the way he explained it to me. He turned
Speaker 2: to his friends and he said, hey, guys, look at
Speaker 2: that mannekin down there in the creek bed. And he said,
Speaker 2: and I quote, you know, as soon as those words
Speaker 2: were out of his mouth, he knew immediately that it
Speaker 2: must be a homicide victim. So John bly decides to
Speaker 2: walk down and he examines the body. He confirms that
Speaker 2: it is the nude body of this young woman who
Speaker 2: appears to be a female in our late teens. He
Speaker 2: sees deep, dark black bruises circling the circumference of her neck,
Speaker 2: and at that point he knows he's definitely looking at
Speaker 2: the body of a homicide victim. So he runs up,
Speaker 2: jumps on his motorcycle, leaves his two friends there to
Speaker 2: wait with the body, and he roars away a couple
Speaker 2: miles to a farmhouse and calls the Snoma County Sheriff's Department,
Speaker 2: who immediately respond to the scene out there on Enterprise Road.
Speaker 7: Now, you say, there's some interesting situation and evidence found,
Speaker 7: and you talk about the victim had a single ear
Speaker 7: ring in the right ear and they searched for that
Speaker 7: other matching earring and didn't find it. So tell us
Speaker 7: what the age of this woman is and what they
Speaker 7: find in terms of bruising or wounds or cause of death.
Speaker 7: Tell us what they do find in examining this woman,
Speaker 7: and what are their conclusions.
Speaker 2: Sure, So, Kim Allen was a nineteen year old co
Speaker 2: ed at the time for murder. She was a nineteen
Speaker 2: year old co ed at Santa Rosa Junior College. She
Speaker 2: had gone to a private school in Santa Rosa, and
Speaker 2: when her body was hauled up the embankment and taken
Speaker 2: to the morgue, the coroner's findings are absolutely one of
Speaker 2: the most terrific things I have ever read in my life.
Speaker 2: And I know you know you and I and your
Speaker 2: listeners are seasoned veterans of the true crime genre. Of
Speaker 2: these real life murder cases, I have to say that
Speaker 2: the details of Kim Allen's murder are probably the worst
Speaker 2: thing I have ever read. Kim Allen had been murdered
Speaker 2: by ligature strangulation, and the coroner was able to determine
Speaker 2: that Kim was not strangled all at once. Instead, she'd
Speaker 2: been raped at some point, and then the person or
Speaker 2: persons who murdered her had wrapped a soft ligature around
Speaker 2: her neck and pulled the thing tight so it would
Speaker 2: cut off her air supply. Kim, by the way, I
Speaker 2: should point out, had been bound at the wrists and
Speaker 2: angles during her strangulation, and they were able to determine
Speaker 2: that by the very very deep, severe bruising on her
Speaker 2: wrists and angles. So as this person is strangling Kim
Speaker 2: Allen with a ligature, he waits until she just about
Speaker 2: blacks out, and then he releases the tension on the
Speaker 2: ligature so she's able to suck more oxygen into her lungs.
Speaker 2: And then after just a couple of minutes or after
Speaker 2: a certain period of time, after she's been able to
Speaker 2: catch her breath, he pulls the ligature tight again strangles
Speaker 2: her again, and the coroner determined in really horrific detail
Speaker 2: that this strangulation torture process had gone on for at
Speaker 2: least thirty minutes before this young woman, this young college
Speaker 2: student had expired. And you know, I think we can
Speaker 2: only imagine what it must have been like for the
Speaker 2: victim in that case. Then again, you know, maybe we
Speaker 2: aren't able to fully appreciate how just how horrible that
Speaker 2: type of a murder would be.
Speaker 7: Now after this this report of this murder and this
Speaker 7: discovery there is some change in the behavior of people
Speaker 7: in this community in terms of organize in carpools. While
Speaker 7: they're doing that, in the panic is increasing. Another hitchhiker,
Speaker 7: Lori Lee Cursa, thirteen years old in the eighth grade,
Speaker 7: and she apparently is a chronic runaway and from a
Speaker 7: troubled life. You find that she stayed with friends for
Speaker 7: a couple of weeks and then vanished around November twentieth
Speaker 7: or twenty first, nineteen seventy two, and tell us when
Speaker 7: she was discovered and what were the conditions of that
Speaker 7: body when they found her.
Speaker 2: Sure so, Lori Cursa disappears in late November nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 2: About two or three weeks later, a young couple is
Speaker 2: walking up up a very very steep road called Calistoga Road,
Speaker 2: just northeast of downtown Santa Rosa, and the young man
Speaker 2: happens to look over the guardrail and there is this again.
Speaker 2: It's almost a vertical cliff, very similar to the one
Speaker 2: where Francine Trimble and Carrie Graham's skeletons were found up
Speaker 2: in Mendocino County. There's this almost vertical cliff that leads
Speaker 2: down to the valley floor. He looks over the guardrail
Speaker 2: and he sees a chalky white body about forty or
Speaker 2: fifty feet below the guardrail, and so he runs. He
Speaker 2: contacts the Sheriff's department. The Sheriff's department responds to Kalistoga Road.
Speaker 2: They get out of the cars, they go down the
Speaker 2: embankment that they look at the body, and when the
Speaker 2: body is finally taken back to the morgue, gets identified
Speaker 2: as this thirteen year old girl, Lourie Lee Cursa and
Speaker 2: detectives are mystified by her murder. They can't figure out
Speaker 2: even how she died. Two of Lourie lee curses cervical
Speaker 2: vertebrae had been really badly dislocated, and that broken neck
Speaker 2: could have contributed to her death. That was the finding
Speaker 2: of the corner. But the most compelling finding of the
Speaker 2: autopsy and the ensuing investigation is just how similar Lorii
Speaker 2: Lee curses murder was to Kim Allen's murder out on
Speaker 2: Enterprise Road. I mean, here you had two young females,
Speaker 2: both dumped in the nude, both dumped down all most
Speaker 2: vertical embankments, both dumped out in the middle of nowhere
Speaker 2: on these little known roads that no one but a
Speaker 2: local would even know how to access. So it was
Speaker 2: at that point that sheriff's officials started looking at a
Speaker 2: potential connection between the cases. I mean, and again, this
Speaker 2: is a time when the term serial killer did not
Speaker 2: even exist. The Sheriff's department at the time did have
Speaker 2: reasonably that these two cases might be linked to one another.
Speaker 2: And when they found out that both Kim Allen and
Speaker 2: Lori Cursa had were seasoned hitchhikers who had disappeared while hitchhiking,
Speaker 2: that was when the alarm bells went off, especially within
Speaker 2: the broader community.
Speaker 7: Now the bodies continue to pile up and along France
Speaker 7: Valley Road. You talk about some people again going for
Speaker 7: a hike and discovering this horror. Tell us what they
Speaker 7: find and tell us this magnificance of the again jewelry
Speaker 7: in this.
Speaker 2: Case definitely so. Two weeks after Lori Cursa is found
Speaker 2: in late nineteen seventy two, these two young high school
Speaker 2: students go for a hike out on another very very
Speaker 2: rural road northeast of downtown Santa Rosa, and while they're
Speaker 2: hiking through the forest, they decide to climb this very
Speaker 2: steep embankment, and as they're climbing this embankment, they end
Speaker 2: up finding a small graveyard of bones out there. Sure IFFs,
Speaker 2: these two young men get in their car, they drive
Speaker 2: back to one of their homes. They alert law enforcement.
Speaker 2: Law enforcement response to the scene. They end up combing
Speaker 2: this embankment, this very steep embankment, and this very rural road,
Speaker 2: and they end up finding that there are two skeletons
Speaker 2: out there. Both skeletons belong to children. Of course, they
Speaker 2: couldn't determine the genders of the children because of their ages,
Speaker 2: but they could tell that these were young kids. They
Speaker 2: find big clumps of law ung hair with the victims,
Speaker 2: so they determine that they're probably girls. And as the
Speaker 2: sheriff's officials are searching the steep embankment off Franz Valley Road,
Speaker 2: they made two really crucial discoveries. One of the discoveries
Speaker 2: is a necklace, a gold crucifix necklace that's found sort
Speaker 2: of along the shoulder of the road directly above the
Speaker 2: embankment where the bodies are found, where the skeletons are found.
Speaker 2: And the other is a single earring that was found
Speaker 2: with the remains. And obviously it's unusual for someone to
Speaker 2: just wear a single ear ring, especially back then. So
Speaker 2: sheriff's officials ended up clearing all the brush off the
Speaker 2: side of that hill. They sifted, they sifted earth, they
Speaker 2: picked through sticks, they picked through down trees, They looked
Speaker 2: everywhere they could find for that second earring, couldn't find
Speaker 2: it anywhere. So again, now they have a total four
Speaker 2: homicides in Sonoma County, all of the involve young females,
Speaker 2: and the first one and anyway, when they take the
Speaker 2: two skeletons from Franz Valley Road back to the morgue,
Speaker 2: they end up discovering that it's Maureene Sterling and Yvonne Weber,
Speaker 2: who had been missing since the previous Stebruary.
Speaker 7: Right now, you also talk about that there is at
Speaker 7: some point there's a connection made between them, the method
Speaker 7: of operandi and the co ed murders here and the
Speaker 7: initial murders of the two girls of France scene and Carrie.
Speaker 7: So tell us how they make that connection and who
Speaker 7: makes that connection and when. Tell us more about how
Speaker 7: that connection is made and how the investigation moves ahead.
Speaker 2: Finally, well, I am I'm not sure that they ever
Speaker 2: identified and Francene is potentially being part of this series.
Speaker 2: I don't know if that, As I point out in
Speaker 2: the book, I'm not sure that's something law enforcement ever
Speaker 2: ends up exploring. I in fact, I think that law
Speaker 2: enforcement didn't do a very good job of identifying that
Speaker 2: potential link. Them. Similarities between these cases that I mentioned
Speaker 2: in the book were all my byproducts of my own research,
Speaker 2: and there are many, many manymo similarities between these cases.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I don't think law enforcement ever fully explored
Speaker 2: those because if they had, I don't think it would
Speaker 2: have taken thirty six years to identify Kerrie and Francine
Speaker 2: as being residence of Sonoma County.
Speaker 7: Now, how do they progress with these investigations? As you
Speaker 7: just mentioned, you talk about your investigation gathering similarities, because
Speaker 7: as you can tell us now, there were differences and
Speaker 7: there were similarities between all of these murders. Maybe can
Speaker 7: tell tell us some of the things that were similar
Speaker 7: in terms of mo and signature, and also just as
Speaker 7: you talk about the geographical links or geographic links, so
Speaker 7: tell us about that.
Speaker 2: Sure, so the cases in Sonoma County all sort of
Speaker 2: involved similar features. And I should also point out that
Speaker 2: there was another young woman who was found in the
Speaker 2: summer of nineteen seventy three. Her name was Carolyn Davis.
Speaker 2: She was found out there on Frans Valley Road, at
Speaker 2: exactly the same spot where Maureen Sterling and von Weber
Speaker 2: had been found. There are several different geographic and MO
Speaker 2: similarities between all the cases. So you know, obviously all
Speaker 2: of the cases involved young females who had been murdered
Speaker 2: and who had been dumped down very steep embankments out
Speaker 2: in the middle of nowhere. The geography of all of
Speaker 2: these areas is virtually identical. We're talking about very remote
Speaker 2: roads out in the middle of nowhere, and all of
Speaker 2: them were All of these roads were situated beside very
Speaker 2: steep embankments. So those are obviously some of the PRIMARYMO
Speaker 2: similarities between the cases. In terms of geographic similarities. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, they're all kind of northeast of Santa Rosa,
Speaker 2: they're all in Sonoma County, They're all within just a
Speaker 2: few minutes of each other. So yeah, those are a
Speaker 2: few of the similarities. And I go into much greater
Speaker 2: detail in the book. So if anyone's interested in getting
Speaker 2: a really comprehensive understanding of them and signature and geographic
Speaker 2: similarities between these cases. Definitely check out the book because
Speaker 2: I go into it and excruciating detail.
Speaker 7: You talk about this killer having this five year hiatus
Speaker 7: in terms of being noticed. Anybody had these two bodies
Speaker 7: in seventy eight, So you say that he did something
Speaker 7: different to throw officials off the of him as a killer.
Speaker 6: What did he do? Right?
Speaker 2: So, and I should point out, you know, I don't
Speaker 2: know for certain whether or not the murders of Carrie
Speaker 2: Graham and Francine Tremble were committed by exactly the same
Speaker 2: person who murdered all of those those poor young women
Speaker 2: down in Sonoma County. I do point out in the
Speaker 2: book though, that I think there is extremely compelling evidence
Speaker 2: that all of these homicides, including Francine and Carrie's homicide,
Speaker 2: were committed by the same person. But yeah, So, the
Speaker 2: last victim in Sonoma County is found in July of
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy nine, and they end up establishing that she
Speaker 2: was probably murdered in nineteen seventy three or nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 2: Then there's this gap of five years, and there is
Speaker 2: no record of any young women going missing in Sonoma County.
Speaker 2: No more bodies are found in Sonoma County. It appears
Speaker 2: that this horrific series of murders that was taking place
Speaker 2: in the early nineteen seventies comes to a screeching halt,
Speaker 2: and law enforce is continuing to investigate it, of course,
Speaker 2: but they're never able to identify the person responsible for
Speaker 2: these murders. So then in December nineteen seventy eight, Carrie
Speaker 2: Graham and Francine Tremble disappear from Sonoma County, and the
Speaker 2: following summer, their skeletons are discovered up in Mendocino County.
Speaker 2: And you know, it just occurred to me that that's
Speaker 2: a major difference. In the early seventies, all of these victims,
Speaker 2: all of these young females, were being dumped up northeast
Speaker 2: of Santa Rosa, or east of Santa Rosa in the
Speaker 2: case of Ken Allen. And then you have Carrie and Francine,
Speaker 2: whose murders are virtually identical, right down to that single
Speaker 2: earing being left with their remains. They're dumped eighty miles
Speaker 2: to the north in Mendocino County. And as I was
Speaker 2: thinking through the logistics of the case, I said geez,
Speaker 2: you know. I mean, if it's the same guy who's
Speaker 2: responsible for all these cases, why wouldn't he just take
Speaker 2: Carrie and Francene out and dump them out there somewhere
Speaker 2: east of Santa Rosa like all of the other victims.
Speaker 2: Who's to whose murders they were identical? And then it
Speaker 2: hit me that, you know, now, it could be a
Speaker 2: case of someone, some guy from somewhere going to prison
Speaker 2: for five years. Let's say around nineteen seventy three or
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy four. He's in prison for five years, not
Speaker 2: on a murder beef. It could be anything. He could
Speaker 2: have been in there on a rape charge. He could
Speaker 2: have been in there on a robbery or burglary charge something. Anyway,
Speaker 2: he's in prison for five years, he gets out. When
Speaker 2: he gets out, he ends up facing certain stresses in
Speaker 2: his life. He sees Kerry and Francine out hitchhiking on
Speaker 2: the side of the road, so he picks him up.
Speaker 2: He murders them, but he doesn't want to dump them
Speaker 2: out east of Santa Rosa, where he dumped all the
Speaker 2: other victims back in the early seventies. He knows that
Speaker 2: if he dumps them out there, law enforcement is going
Speaker 2: to know that the murders have resumed, and maybe they're
Speaker 2: able to put together the timeline of his release from prison,
Speaker 2: or you know, there's some series of events they're able
Speaker 2: to identify him as a suspect in the case. So
Speaker 2: where does he go? Well, the only freeway that runs
Speaker 2: through Santa Rosa is the one on one. So it
Speaker 2: occurred to me that if you go south out of
Speaker 2: Santa Rosa on the one on one, go down to
Speaker 2: Marin County, which is very suburban, and then south of
Speaker 2: that is San Francisco obviously, which is a very urban area.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, if you go north out of
Speaker 2: Santa Rosa on Highway one oh one, you go into
Speaker 2: Mendocino County. Like I said before, it's a very rural county.
Speaker 2: Lot of isolated forest out there, perfect place to go
Speaker 2: dump a body. And so it occurred to me that
Speaker 2: if someone wanted to throw off law enforcement, if there's
Speaker 2: a five year hiatus between murders, and he doesn't want
Speaker 2: the murders of Francine and Carrie to be connected up,
Speaker 2: it would be very clever of him to go dump
Speaker 2: these bodies in a neighboring county, particularly a county that's
Speaker 2: not known for having an ultra aggressive law enforcement presence.
Speaker 2: Mendocino County is probably best known in pop culture as
Speaker 2: the center of a lot of marijuana growing activity. It's
Speaker 2: not a place, you know, where law enforcement is ultra aggressive,
Speaker 2: So it would be a pretty good place to dump
Speaker 2: a body back in the nineteen seventies. And anyway, that
Speaker 2: is complete conjecture on my part. I'm not saying that's
Speaker 2: a definitive, definitive explanation for why Carry and Francine ended
Speaker 2: up there, but I think it's something worth considering in
Speaker 2: the context of the case as a whole.
Speaker 7: You write about your experience with Sergeant Gorley and going
Speaker 7: out to the dump site where Sterling, Weber and Davis
Speaker 7: were dumped. Tell us just a little bit about that
Speaker 7: and his response to what you had to say in
Speaker 7: your theories and your deductions.
Speaker 2: Sure, Roy Gorley is a terrific guy. In nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 2: when Carrie Graham and Francine Trimble's remains were first found
Speaker 2: up in Mendocino County, they were actually found by a
Speaker 2: civilian who had just pulled over to the side of
Speaker 2: the road and walked into the woods. The deputy, the
Speaker 2: Mendocino County deputy who responded to the scene that day
Speaker 2: was gentleman named Roy Gorley, and he had only been
Speaker 2: on the job for about four or five years at
Speaker 2: that time. He was still very young. He went out
Speaker 2: there and he told me he had a heck of
Speaker 2: a time trying to find the exact spot where the
Speaker 2: skeletons were out in the woods. But finally he was
Speaker 2: able to figure out where the bodies were and he
Speaker 2: was able to summon help to the site out there
Speaker 2: and get the skeletons collected from up in Mendocino County well.
Speaker 2: As part of my research for this case, I reached
Speaker 2: out to him. Of course, most of the detectives who
Speaker 2: worked the case at the time had been dead for
Speaker 2: decades by the time I even learned about this case,
Speaker 2: so I ended up reaching out to Roy Gorley, and anyway,
Speaker 2: we decided to meet up up in Sonoma County this
Speaker 2: past summer. In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago,
Speaker 2: and I met up up there and while I was there,
Speaker 2: he told me more about his career and by just
Speaker 2: sheer coincidence. In the early nineteen nineties, about halfway through
Speaker 2: his career, he decided to transfer from the Mendocino County
Speaker 2: Sheriff's Department to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and go
Speaker 2: to work down there. And when he's working in the
Speaker 2: Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, he ends up working in the
Speaker 2: violent Crime Unit, which investigates homicides in Sonoma County. So
Speaker 2: one day, he said it was sometime in the midnightties
Speaker 2: he didn't know exactly when he was going through and
Speaker 2: reviewing some cold cases in the homicide unit of his department,
Speaker 2: and he came across the hitchhiker murders, and at the
Speaker 2: time he didn't really he didn't make the connection, the
Speaker 2: possible connection between the hitchhiker murders in the Santa Rosa
Speaker 2: area and the two skeletons found up on that he'd
Speaker 2: found up on Highway twenty back in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: Of course, about sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years had passed between
Speaker 2: the two events at that point, so it's probably not
Speaker 2: surprising he did not make that connection anyway, Like I say,
Speaker 2: I decided to go up and meet Sergeant Gorley for
Speaker 2: lunch one day this past summer, two summer of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: and while we were having lunch, I decided to just
Speaker 2: kind of lay out my thesis about the possible connection
Speaker 2: between the Graham Tremble homicide up there in Mendocino County
Speaker 2: and the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders. And you know, my
Speaker 2: thinking at the time was, look, I'm not a detective.
Speaker 2: I'm not a member of the law enforcement community. I
Speaker 2: don't know if it would be wise for me to
Speaker 2: go out write an entire book about a potential link
Speaker 2: between these cases when I might not know what the
Speaker 2: heck I'm talking about. So at lunch, I laid out
Speaker 2: all the connections between these cases that I saw, all
Speaker 2: the connections in terms of modus operandi, all the geographic
Speaker 2: similarities between the cases, all the signature similarities as far
Speaker 2: as the earring and other factors were concerned to Sergeant Greley,
Speaker 2: and I'll never forget, you know, as we're sitting there
Speaker 2: and we're talking about the similarities between these cases, you know,
Speaker 2: his face took on this very serious look, and I
Speaker 2: could tell, you know, when he started nodding along with me.
Speaker 2: I could tell that the potential connections I saw between
Speaker 2: these cases were probably more than my own overactive imagining
Speaker 2: running away with itself. So after I got done laying
Speaker 2: out all my information for him, he said, yeah, he's like,
Speaker 2: you know, I think you're making some excellent points. And
Speaker 2: he's like, it's too bad that that wasn't looked at
Speaker 2: back at the time, because it's possible these girls could
Speaker 2: have been identified. It's possible that that's an angle we
Speaker 2: could have worked in terms of looking for a connection
Speaker 2: between the Mendocino County skeletons and the murders down in
Speaker 2: the Santa Rosa area. And after lunch, he and I
Speaker 2: decided to go out and inspect one of the sites.
Speaker 2: He had never been out to Franz Valley Road, the
Speaker 2: site where Carolyn Davis, Marine Sterling, and von Weber had
Speaker 2: been found back in the early nineteen seventies. So he
Speaker 2: and I drove up there and it was just it
Speaker 2: was a swelteringly hot day that day. I mean, he
Speaker 2: is standing in the shade. It was well over one
Speaker 2: hundred degrees. He and I get out of the car, though,
Speaker 2: and we're standing back up in this remote wooded area
Speaker 2: on the side of this isolated road. There are no
Speaker 2: houses around, there are no buildings around. I'm sure it
Speaker 2: probably looks more or less the same today than as
Speaker 2: it did back in the early seventies when the girls
Speaker 2: were dumped up there. But as we're standing there, we
Speaker 2: were both just kind of quiet. I was just sort
Speaker 2: of lost in my own thoughts, and I could tell
Speaker 2: I suspect that he probably was too. And after a
Speaker 2: few minutes, I said, you know, what do you think?
Speaker 2: And he said, you know, I'm just sitting here looking
Speaker 2: at the way the embankment falls away from the edge
Speaker 2: of the road, and he said, you know, now that
Speaker 2: I'm looking at it, he said, this looks almost identical
Speaker 2: to the place where I found those two skeletons up
Speaker 2: in Mendocino County back in nineteen seventy nine. I said, well,
Speaker 2: what does that tell you? And he looked at me
Speaker 2: with this expression of untrammeled sincerity on his face, and
Speaker 2: he says, to me, you know, Gray, this had to
Speaker 2: be the same guy. He's like, it must have been,
Speaker 2: just the way this looks, the earrings, the similarities between
Speaker 2: the cases, the victimology. He's like, you know this, it
Speaker 2: must have been the same guy who did all of this.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it was really an extraordinary statement, and he
Speaker 2: provided me with a lot of really invaluable help in
Speaker 2: putting this book together and making sure that it was accurate.
Speaker 7: What we didn't talk about. And I apologize if it's
Speaker 7: I'm asking you for graphic detail, but I think one
Speaker 7: of the signatures for a couple of these murders was
Speaker 7: the similarity in the way that they were tied legs
Speaker 7: to arms and neck. Can you describe this what can
Speaker 7: only be described as a sort of a torture device
Speaker 7: or contraption.
Speaker 2: Definitely, sure. So two of the victims who were found
Speaker 2: in Sonoma County, one of whom was identified. The other
Speaker 2: has never been identified. She's still listed as a Jane Doe.
Speaker 2: They were both found trusted up in exactly the same way.
Speaker 2: Their wrists and ankles were bound together, and then the
Speaker 2: ankles were connected to a noose that was then slipped
Speaker 2: over their heads. And you know, I remember seeing let's
Speaker 2: say bone not bondage magazines, but you remember those detective
Speaker 2: magazines from the nineteen seventies. They were really popular in
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies. They weren't pornographic, at least they weren't
Speaker 2: explicitly pornographic, but I remember, you know, seeing covers of
Speaker 2: those online and that sort of thing, and they often
Speaker 2: involve themes of torture, and it was a fairly common
Speaker 2: trope among those detective magazines that that type of bondage
Speaker 2: configuration was used. So anyway, yeah, both of these young
Speaker 2: women had been bound hand and foot. A noose had
Speaker 2: been connected to their ankles, the noose had been put
Speaker 2: around their necks, and then the whole idea of that
Speaker 2: bondage configuration is that as the victim's legs tire, they
Speaker 2: can't keep their knees flexed anymore, so they have to
Speaker 2: try and straighten their legs as blood clots form around
Speaker 2: their knees. And then of course, as the bound victim
Speaker 2: tries to extend her legs, the noose ends up strangling
Speaker 2: around the neck. And there were two victims who were
Speaker 2: found bound in almost exactly the same way using that
Speaker 2: bondage configuration in Sonoma County. One of the young women
Speaker 2: was found not too far from Franz Valley Road in
Speaker 2: December of nineteen seventy three. The other one was found
Speaker 2: It took years and years and years to find her,
Speaker 2: but she was found just a few feet from where
Speaker 2: Lori Cursa was dumped up off Calistoga Road. And by
Speaker 2: the time they found that young woman, of course the
Speaker 2: ropes were still looped around her body and her neck.
Speaker 2: But you know, she was just a skeleton. She'd been
Speaker 2: dead for almost a decade by the time they found
Speaker 2: her body in nineteen seventy nine. So yeah, you're right,
Speaker 2: it was a torture device. I think it speaks to
Speaker 2: the psychopathy of the offender who committed these crimes, and
Speaker 2: it just speaks to the overall depravity of what happened
Speaker 2: in Sonoma County back in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 7: There was at least two witnesses that reported seeing this
Speaker 7: perpetrator in some of these cases. And what was the
Speaker 7: description and what did police end up with that They
Speaker 7: talked about a brown Chevy truck. Did they make any
Speaker 7: headway with that, and how did they pursue that? What
Speaker 7: was it?
Speaker 2: Well, again, yeah, these were very very tenuous leads. Another
Speaker 2: young woman whose body has never been found. She's still
Speaker 2: listed as a missing person in snow mccowny. Her name
Speaker 2: is Jeanette Camma Heely. She disappeared in nineteen seventy two
Speaker 2: around the time that Kim Allen disappeared. About a month
Speaker 2: after Kim Allen disappeared, she was last seen hitchhiking along
Speaker 2: the one oh one not far from Santa Rosa, and
Speaker 2: she's never been seen again. She's still listed as a
Speaker 2: missing person. But the last time she was seen, she
Speaker 2: was seen getting into this pickup truck driven by a
Speaker 2: guy who was described as a white male, maybe in
Speaker 2: his twenties, between twenty and thirty years old. He was
Speaker 2: driving a brown Chevy pickup and Jeanette Camma Heey was
Speaker 2: never seen again. We don't know if that's the offender. Obviously,
Speaker 2: that could have just been some good samaritan who was
Speaker 2: giving her ride. And that's one of the confounding things
Speaker 2: about this case is every lead sort of makes you wonder, well,
Speaker 2: you know, this, is this a true lead or is
Speaker 2: it just a red herring? But yeah, so she was
Speaker 2: seen getting into that brown pickup. Also, around the time
Speaker 2: Lorii Cursa disappeared, a witness reported seeing a young blonde girl,
Speaker 2: and of course Lorii Cursa was a young blonde girl
Speaker 2: sitting in a pickup truck with a guy with bushy
Speaker 2: hair up near the summit of Kalistoka Road, near where
Speaker 2: Lori Curs's body was found. So it makes you wonder
Speaker 2: if maybe the same person who picked up Jeanette Cammi
Speaker 2: Healy had picked up Lorii Cursa and murdered her. I
Speaker 2: don't think that. In fact I met that lead did
Speaker 2: not go anywhere, but it was just it was just
Speaker 2: one more fascinating detail in this case that could potentially
Speaker 2: point potentially and I use the word potentially there very strongly.
Speaker 2: It could potentially point to the identity of the offender
Speaker 2: in this case.
Speaker 7: You include in your book the case of Gary Ridgeway,
Speaker 7: the Green River Killer. Just tell us briefly why you
Speaker 7: included this and what did you want to demonstrate or
Speaker 7: illustrate with the inclusion of the Green River killer story.
Speaker 2: Right, Like I said before, I mean, I think it
Speaker 2: was I think it was a real failure of public
Speaker 2: policy that a potential link between the Graham Trimble homicide
Speaker 2: up in Mendocino County and the hitchhiker murders in Sonoma
Speaker 2: County was not explored more aggressively by law enforcement. Even today.
Speaker 2: You know, there are people I've spoken to in law
Speaker 2: enforcement who don't think these cases are connected. Or they
Speaker 2: don't think they should have been They don't think that
Speaker 2: they should have been investigated as part of the same
Speaker 2: potential murder series. But I end up, you know, describing
Speaker 2: the Green River Case, or I end up alluding to
Speaker 2: the Green River Case in Lost Coast Highway, because I
Speaker 2: think it's a real blueprint for how to solve this
Speaker 2: type of murder investigation. As most of your listeners are aware,
Speaker 2: I'm sure the Green River Case was a case that
Speaker 2: started back in nineteen eighty two. Authorities up in the
Speaker 2: Seattle area were finding corpses of young women, young murdered
Speaker 2: women all over the Seattle area, and the authorities up
Speaker 2: in Washington State had no idea if all the murders
Speaker 2: were connected. In fact, there were people in the FBI
Speaker 2: and various psychological experts around the country who said that, no,
Speaker 2: these are the work of multiple killers. You need to
Speaker 2: be looking for multiple guys. But what the King County
Speaker 2: Sheriff's Office finally decided in the Green River case is
Speaker 2: that they it was incumbent upon them to investigate all
Speaker 2: these homicides as the work of the same offender so
Speaker 2: they could cross reference the suspects and the leads that
Speaker 2: were developed in one case with potential leads in another case.
Speaker 2: In other words, by cross referencing all of those suspects
Speaker 2: in each individual Green River homicide, they could potentially find
Speaker 2: links that they might not identify if they were investigating
Speaker 2: each specific each Green River homicide in a vacuum. And
Speaker 2: I think that was an absolutely brilliant move on the
Speaker 2: part of the King County Sheriff's Office up in Washington.
Speaker 2: If they had investigated each of those prostitute murders in
Speaker 2: the Seattle area in the early eighties as the work
Speaker 2: of separate offenders, it's very possible that Gary Ridgeway, the
Speaker 2: suspect in that case who was ultimately proven to be
Speaker 2: the Green River killer through DNA, I think there's a
Speaker 2: good likelihood that he never would have been identified. The
Speaker 2: only reason he was identified is because the King County
Speaker 2: Sheriff's Office in Washington worked so diligently to cross reference
Speaker 2: leads between these cases. And I think that's what has
Speaker 2: not been done in the case of the Graham Trimble
Speaker 2: homicide of Mendocino and the hitchhiker murders in Sonoma County.
Speaker 2: I think that the Green River homicide investigation provides almost
Speaker 2: a perfect blueprint for how to potentially investigate these cases
Speaker 2: up in Sonoma County. If the cases are investigated separately,
Speaker 2: it's possible these law enforcement agencies may not share critical
Speaker 2: information that would point to one suspect, or there may
Speaker 2: be some piece of evidence that's missed. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: definitely think a coordinated investigation along the lines of the
Speaker 2: one in Washington State for the Green River investigation might
Speaker 2: pay off big dividends in this case, and in fact,
Speaker 2: it might be the only way to reach any to
Speaker 2: achieve any real justice in Carrie and Francine's case and
Speaker 2: the cases down in Snowma County.
Speaker 7: We only have a few minutes left, so I would
Speaker 7: just like to ask what you, of course we talk
Speaker 7: about through this whole interview, what you took away from
Speaker 7: this investigation, in this book, the investigation for this book,
Speaker 7: in this entire case, what's the most profound thing that
Speaker 7: you take away from this In conclusion?
Speaker 2: Well, I think I learned three really big lessons as
Speaker 2: a result of this case. Like I say that my
Speaker 2: interest in this case originally started when I was doing
Speaker 2: my research for Black Knight Gold Coast, when I was
Speaker 2: looking at all those profiles on the dough Network, and
Speaker 2: I had a question about even before the Mendocino teams
Speaker 2: had been identified as fran Scene and Kerrie, I just
Speaker 2: wanted to know how in the twentieth and twenty first
Speaker 2: centuries in the United States, two children could go missing
Speaker 2: for decades and not be identified. And by the time
Speaker 2: I finished researching this project and writing about this project,
Speaker 2: I think I have my answers. I think one reason
Speaker 2: is because there was not a lot of community engagement
Speaker 2: back at the time I fran Scene and Carrie went
Speaker 2: missing from their small town, this very very small town
Speaker 2: of less than three thousand people out in the middle
Speaker 2: of nowhere, and their friends never even knew they were missing.
Speaker 2: Their school officials never raised a stink about it. Law
Speaker 2: enforcement didn't fill out missing persons reports on the cases.
Speaker 2: An exhaustive investigation was never done. You had two girls
Speaker 2: who disappeared from this tiny, small town out in the
Speaker 2: middle of nowhere, and it barely raised an eyebrow among
Speaker 2: the people of that communities. There was no real outpouring
Speaker 2: of support for looking for these girls. So I think
Speaker 2: that's one thing that contributed to them going unidentified for
Speaker 2: thirty six years. I think another thing that obviously contributed
Speaker 2: to it was the technological limitations of that time period.
Speaker 2: The Internet was non existent when they disappeared. There were
Speaker 2: no DNA databases, there were no national organizations that could
Speaker 2: help coordinate the collection of DNA and biological materials to
Speaker 2: help identify unidentified decedents. And I think one of the
Speaker 2: other big reasons here, and I know i'll catch flag
Speaker 2: for this, but I think another big reason is I
Speaker 2: think law enforcement really dropped the ball on this case.
Speaker 2: I think a potential link between the between the Mendocino
Speaker 2: County murders back in the late seventies and those orders
Speaker 2: that were virtually identical down in Snoma County should have
Speaker 2: been investigated in depth, even if these cases are completely
Speaker 2: not related. If law enforcement had identified the similarities between
Speaker 2: the cases and then they had searched for missing children
Speaker 2: from Sonoma County, I think there's a good chance they
Speaker 2: might have identified Carrie and Francine much sooner than they did.
Speaker 2: I don't think it would have taken thirty six years.
Speaker 2: It should not have taken thirty six years, But the
Speaker 2: failure to investigate a link between those cases is a
Speaker 2: tremendous failure. Of public policy. The failure to solve these
Speaker 2: cases is a tremendous failure of public policy, and I
Speaker 2: think all of us should call on the lawmakers in
Speaker 2: this state, the power brokers in this state, to investigate
Speaker 2: resources in this. You know, we had a number of
Speaker 2: young women right here in this state slaughtered back in
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies. The person who did it has never
Speaker 2: been held accountable. Families were shattered as a result of this.
Speaker 2: The heartache of Francine's family was just overwhelming. Kerrie's family
Speaker 2: was overwhelming, The families victims in Snowma County overwhelming. They
Speaker 2: deserve justice, and I think it's time to invest significant
Speaker 2: resources in this and investigate a connection between these cases
Speaker 2: that might just lead to a suspect.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, I agree with you, and I commend you for
Speaker 7: this book and your effort with that. I also wanted
Speaker 7: to say that you include some astounding murder stats in
Speaker 7: your analysis as well, So that's just a bonus for
Speaker 7: people that will read this book that the incredible backstory
Speaker 7: of murder statistics that will shock you. So I want
Speaker 7: to thank you very much for coming on and talking
Speaker 7: about Lost Coast Highway. Thank you very much for coming
Speaker 7: on and talking about this incredible case. I hope to
Speaker 7: speak to you again real soon.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me on, Dan, Thank you Gray. Good night,
Speaker 6: good night. It was tipt