The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders

Part Three

In 1975, an FBI report purported that the murders of hitchhikers from Santa Rosa were linked to at least eight others from the surrounding area. These eight murders, which spanned as far north as Yuba County and as far south as Monterey County, all unfolded at the same time as the Santa Rosa crimes and seemed to be centered around the San Francisco Bay Area…

Listen to "The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders (Part Three)" on Spreaker.

Between February of 1972 and December of 1973, a series of murders took place in the region surrounding Santa Rosa - a small city in northern California, about an hour north of San Francisco, which is surrounded by miles of rural farmland.

The victims were all teenage girls and young women with petite builds and hair parted down the middle, who ranged in age from 12 to 24, but may have all appeared to be around the same age (by their killer). All had last been seen hitchhiking or attempting to hitchhike, and their remains were discovered in the area surrounding Santa Rosa. Most had been asphyxiated - some through more complicated means than others - and of the cases linked to this potential spree, all but one of their bodies were found.

Investigators would spend the next couple of years attempting to find the culprit(s) of these savage crimes, eventually theorizing that one individual or group had been behind the murders; picking up young hitchhikers and then murdering them, before disposing of their bodies off of embankments in the area surrounding Santa Rosa. Because of the strength required to physically toss the victims where they were found, it was believed that this was a physically strong male, or at least two men acting in-tandem.

As you heard in the last episode, a profile of the killer would be published in 1975, alleging that he was a young man in his early 30s, who had a history of mental illness and had tortured animals as a child. Living as a loner, this young man likely held resentments towards women because of his domineering mother, and had likely developed a savior complex in adulthood, believing that he was doing the world a favor by killing the young women. It was also theorized that this man was actually quite cunning, leaving his victims to be discovered by police in the hopes that it would extend their continued game of cat-and-mouse.

The same year that the details from this psychological profile were published, a report would begin to make the rounds through the Federal Bureau of Investigation, purporting that the deaths of these six murdered women from Santa Rosa (seven, if you include Jeannette Kamahele, whose body was never found) were in fact linked to eight others from the surrounding area: other young women who matched similar descriptions, whose bodies had been dumped in public spaces, and who appeared to have died of similarly violent means.

Decades later, all of their deaths remain unsolved.

This is part three of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders.

On Tuesday, May 29th, 1973, the body of a young woman was discovered by passing motorists in some bushes near the Arguello Boulevard entrance of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The young woman - who had dark hair and brown eyes, and appeared to be about thirty years old - had been strangled to death with her own bra, which was still wrapped around her neck when her body was discovered. This would be the only piece of clothing recovered from the crime scene, with authorities unable to find any other clothing items in the surrounding area. However, the woman was wearing a religious necklace and a pair of earrings at the time of her discovery, and police would later determine that she had been thrown off of the roadway several feet into the shrubs where her body was later found.

This woman was later identified as 20-year-old Rosa Maria Vasquez, a keypunch operator at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco's Presidio. Rosa had lived with her roommate, Frances Almazan, along the 800 block of Bush Street in San Francisco, about four miles away from where her body was found. Frances had last seen Rosa about three days prior - on Saturday, May 26th, 1973 - with her having been gone the entire holiday weekend. Frances had gone to the police to report Rosa missing the day beforehand, resulting in her remains being identified rather-quickly.

Unfortunately, not much would be learned about Rosa's murder, with police running down a list of potential suspects but unable to make any headway with any of them. And within weeks, Rosa's case would be overshadowed by others from the San Francisco area.

Less than two weeks later - on June 10th, 1973 - the body of another young woman would be found in the southeastern neighborhood of San Francisco known as Bayview. That Sunday, a couple of kids were playing in a vacant lot along the 1300 block of Galvez Avenue, which was littered with trash and abandoned objects (despite signs from the local health department, forbidding dumping) and there, hidden among the weeds, was the young woman's nude and battered body - the victim of an apparent strangling.

Yvonne Quilantang was a 15-year-old that lived in Bayview, who was a well-liked teenager from the region. Yvonne had attended Opportunity II High School, where she had plenty of friends and was well-known. Having developed a reputation for being rather meek and shy, Yvonne had just started to "break out" of her shell the year prior, according to her sister-in-law, Darlene.

Despite this, however, Yvonne was no stranger to hardship. She had grown up in a broken home, with an absentee father that found work away-from-home, and a mother that would ultimately prove unable to take care of her. For that reason, she grew up in foster care, where she was living at the time of her untimely death.

Yvonne had last been seen on Saturday, June 9th - the day before her body was found - about 2.5 miles away at their home along the 100 block of Delta Street. She had received a phone call from someone, before telling her foster sister that she was heading to a nearby store to pick up some items. Witnesses would last see Yvonne walking in the opposite direction of the store, leading family to believe that she planned to meet up with somebody that afternoon... but the 'who' or 'why' in that proposed situation would never be answered.

As police began investigating this teenage girl's murder, they discovered that their victim - 15-year-old Yvonne - had been seven months pregnant at the time of her death. As they dug into her personal life, they discovered that she had been dating a boyfriend in the Army, who was stationed in Missouri at the time of the murder. While she hoped to eventually marry this young man and provide a good life for her baby (the type of upbringing she never got to experience), it was learned that their relationship had grown splintered in recent months, resulting in her seeing a local man from the San Francisco region - who, it turns out, was the father of her unborn child.

Police would end up dedicating a lot of resources into investigating both of these men - as well as attempting to learn who Yvonne had spoken to over the phone shortly before her death - but would struggle to make any inroads in the case. Investigators would also hesitate to link Yvonne's murder to Rosa Vasquez's from a couple of weeks prior, offering up no explanations for the similarities between the two cases... at least, not publicly.

Less than a month later, another body would be discovered in the greater San Francisco area - this time, in Daly City, about ten or so miles south of San Francisco itself.

Police would theorize that the young female victim, who was found wearing nothing other than a thin, gold necklace, had been killed elsewhere just a few hours beforehand. Her nude body had then been dumped outside of Benjamin Franklin Junior High School's gymnasium, which was discovered during a routine check of the school grounds early on the morning of Monday, July 2nd, 1973. This young woman, who looked to be between 20 and 25 years old, appeared to have been strangled to death, either by hand or by an item of clothing, such as a pillow (which some police officials theorized early on).

Based on information received in the days to come, investigators were able to quickly piece together the victim's identity.

16-year-old Angela Thomas had grown up in Belton, Texas, but had lived in San Francisco for a spell earlier in her teenage years due to her father's military career. After returning to Texas with her family, Angela's parents had divorced, resulting in her becoming despondent, struggling to grip the divide in her personal life. She would drop out of school multiple times over the next couple of years, and seemed to be unable to regain the bearings of her life afterward.

In an effort to raise his daughter's spirits, Angela's father had arranged for her to fly out to San Francisco that summer and spend a few weeks with the friends she had made out there. He was simply hoping to do a nice thing for his daughter, give her a taste of independence, and hopefully lift her spirits ahead of the upcoming school year.

In mid-June of 1973, Angela would fly out to San Francisco, where she would visit with friends from the region (whom she had met years earlier, but remained in close contact with). While there, she would stay with a military family that her parents had befriended while living in the region, who kept an eye on the teenager while she was with them; but Angela would end up spending the majority of her time in San Francisco out-and-about, visiting with friends and other new acquaintances, who kept her busy with activities like swimming and horseback riding.

Angela Thomas was last seen on Sunday, July 1st, when she spent the afternoon on a picnic date with a 19-year-old young man from the region. Afterward, the two went horseback riding for a few hours, and he then drove her back into San Francisco, dropping her off near the home of a friend that lived in San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood. Unfortunately, Angela's friend was not home at the time, but she would end up speaking to the friend's mother, who later told police about this encounter.

Inspector Gus Coreris, later speaking to the San Francisco Examiner, seemed to anticipate speculation about the young woman's date being a suspect when he stated:

"We do know the girl was alive in the Presidio after the date dropped her off in that area."

For that reason, it seems like investigators were able to eliminate Angela's date as a suspect.

That same evening, Angela would end up calling the military family that she had been staying with, telling them that she planned to stay the night with a girl friend of hers - who also lived on the Presidio - but would never arrive at this friend's home. Investigators would later theorize that she likely encountered her eventual killer on the Presidio, perhaps attempting to hitchhike to this friend's house nearby.

In the wake of this savage crime, police seemed more open to the idea of it being related to the others. After all, this was the third young woman to have been murdered in the San Francisco area within a little over a month, and each bore significant similarities. On this, Homicide Inspector John Fotinos would tell the press:

"Medically speaking, they are [all] very similar. All were young, all were nude and all were dumped somplace. Apparently, this woman was suffocated, and the others were either strangled or snuffed out very quiet like."

All three of the victims so far were of Latin American or Filipino descent, had been strangled or choked and then had their nude bodies dumped in public areas. All three were around the same height and weight, and while their ages differed, it wasn't by much. Almost all of the early reporting in these cases described the victims as appearing much older than they were - appearing to look in their mid-twenties or early-thirties - so it's possible that their killer believed them to be older, as well. Even though police hadn't made any connections to the victims from Santa Rosa (as of yet), assumptions were being made in the press that these victims might have been attempting to hitchhike at the time of their murders.

On Sunday, July 15th, 1973 - less than two weeks after the discovery of the last body - another was discovered on the campus of San Francisco's George Washington High School. The woman's corpse had been dumped in an alcove between two buildings, and was discovered at around 10:30 AM by a woman attending a karate demonstration, who stumbled upon it near the school's athletic fields.

The young redheaded woman appeared to be in her late teens or early twenties, and - like the other young women murdered over the past two months - was discovered nude, with none of her clothing or belongings found nearby. The only piece of evidence that police were able to recover from the victim or the crime scene was a single item of jewelry: a gold earring, shaped like a fish, was was still embedded in the woman's right ear.

This victim appeared to have been deceased for less than 24 hours at the time of her body's discovery, and physically appeared to have been asphyxiated. Investigators began to speculate that she had been strangled even before an autopsy could take place (which confirmed their suspicions), and also began to publicly speculate that she might be connected to the three other young women that had been killed in the preceding two months. In addition to being the fourth woman in less than two months to be strangled or smothered to death, she was the second to be dumped on a public school ground.

Speaking to the press, Homicide Inspector John McKenna stated:

"We have four females. They were all nude and all had apparently been suffocated or strangled. All of them were found in areas of public access, but we have nothing in their backgrounds to connect all the victims.

"The similarities are, that the murders began on May 29th. Of the four girls the method of death was fairly similar - all died of manual asphyxiation. In each case the cause of death was such that it appears they were killed elsewhere then dumped in public places."

However, along with his partner Al Podesta, McKenna would voice some doubts about labeling these victims as part of the same crime spree, stating that all of the victims had "dissimilar" backgrounds, and none appeared to have been sexually assaulted before their deaths, which made this string of murders rather-bizarre to them: investigators that didn't often see violent crime without some kind of apparent motive. Speaking to the press, McKenna said:

"The only way to connect this is if we have some kind of freak who travels the whole city. That could be, but it's all guessing."

As police set out to identify the victim and figure out the story of her final days alive, they would discover a sad and convoluted story, which did little to answer any of their questions, such as why this young woman had been targeted and killed in such a heartless way.

Nancy Patricia Gidley was a 24-year-old from Mountain Home, Idaho, who had spent four years in the U.S. Air Force as an X-ray technician. During her four-year enlistment, Nancy had been stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, near San Francisco. During this brief period of time, she would fall in love with the Bay Area, hoping to return again in the near-future. Nancy would be discharged from the Air Force in early 1972, but would return to San Francisco in the summer of 1973... for reasons that remain murky at best nearly five decades later.

In the weeks before her death, Nancy wrote to friends and family, describing a fiancé of hers named Kerry, who police were unable to confirm ever existed. You see, it seems like Nancy had been fabricating a large part of her life - including not only her fictional fiancé, but her entire reason for traveling out to San Francisco. Nancy had told her loved ones that she had gone out to the Bay Area to participate in a couple of weddings; including the wedding of a young woman that had been stationed alongside Nancy at Hamilton Air Force Base. But when police reached out to this old friend of Nancy's, she said that she had not spoken to the murdered woman in months and was not planning to get married.

Another part of Nancy's life that she had fabricated was her potential employment with a local newspaper, having told family members that she was working as a freelance writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. This appears to have been another fictionalized component of Nancy's trip, which investigators were never able to account for.

During their research, police were able to discover that Nancy had arrived in San Francisco on Thursday, July 12th, 1973 - three days before her body was discovered - and checked into the Rodeway Inn that afternoon, along the 800 block of Geary Street. This was the last time that Nancy was ever seen alive, with police later using the items from a red overnight bag in her room to identify her remains.

Almost immediately after the discovery of Nancy Gidley's remains, reporters and police officials began to suspect that these murders were the work of a single killer: perhaps one that was targeting young hitchhikers in the region.

At the time, police were asking themselves whether or not this string of crimes could be related to the similar crimes from about an hour north, in Santa Rosa. There, multiple young women matching the same age demographic and description of these victims had gone missing or been murdered over the past year-and-a-half, but the crimes had seemed to abruptly end about three months prior to these murders beginning.

For the first time, investigators began to speculate that these two sets of crimes might be related, with all of the young women being found in incredibly similar circumstances, down the missing clothing and jewelry items, and - as was the case in this most recent case from July of 1973 - a single earring being removed from the victim's ear before the disposal of her body in a public place.

On Sunday, July 22nd, 1973, the body of a young woman was discovered in rural Sutter County, along Pleasant Grove Road, about 200 feet away from the Placer County Line and approximately two miles east of Highway 70.

This young woman's body was discovered by a fisherman heading out that morning at around 6:00 AM, and appeared to be another young woman of Latin descent between the ages of 18 and 25. Like the other victims, she was rather short and petite with brown hair and eyes. However, unlike the other victims, she was still partially-clothed, wearing bikini briefs and a skirt, with police finding her blouse abandoned nearby. She was also wearing a St. Christopher medal around her neck, as well as a "Christ In Peace" medallion and a pair of earrings.

Unlike the other crimes linked to this spree, this young woman had been stabbed nearly thirty times, with an autopsy noting that she had suffered 22 stab wounds to her chest and stomach and at least 7 to her left arm. Police theorized that she had been murdered two to four hours before her body's discovery, and had been dumped at this location at-random, with the killer likely not having any specific knowledge of this area or its surroundings; likely just discovering it a couple of miles off of Highway 70 and believing it to be isolated enough. Investigators would also speculate that the victim had been from nearby Sacramento... a hypothesis that would prove to be correct.

23-year-old Nancy Darlene Feusi had recently lived in Sacramento with her husband Gerald and their five children (who ranged in age from 18 months to 7 years old), but at the beginning of the year, had separated from her husband. Afterward, she had moved into an apartment complex along the 1400 block of Lochbrae Road with her five children, where she also lived with two other young woman.

Nancy was last seen alive just hours before her body was discovered, with her two roommates, Rita and Dawna, later telling police that she had gone out to a party that evening. Investigators were able to track her whereabouts until approximately three hours before her body was found, with her having gone dancing in Sacramento, near California State University, until approximately 2:00 AM. She had then been given a ride to the corners of 43rd Street and 11th Avenue, where she was last seen walking at around 3:00. Police officials would later speculate that she had then attempted to hitchhike, and had undoubtedly been picked up in the early morning hours by her eventual killer.

It was discovered that Nancy had had sex within 24 hours of her murder, but police did not believe that this factored into her death (with it likely occurring several hours before her death).

Police at the crime scene were able to make plaster casts of both shoe and tire prints from the crime scene, which were made from both a vehicle and driver that appeared to have recently gone off-road near where Nancy's body was dumped. It was believed that the vehicle used to dump the body had been rather small - about the size of a Volkswagen - and likely would have shown signs of Nancy's murder. Speaking to the press, Sacramento Police Sergeant Larry Gaston and Detective Denver Duncan would state:

"Mrs. Feusi lost a considerable amount of blood. The vehicle in which she was transported would have required considerable care in cleaning to remove the blood."

Several months later - on November 7th, 1973 - another female body would be found near Stow Lake, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The young woman's body, which was discovered by a passerby at around 2:30 PM that Wednesday, was found mostly-nude and lying facedown, with the rest of her clothing scattered in bushes nearby. She visibly appeared to have suffered significantly before her death, with her hands bound behind her back, and investigators noting early on that she had been raped before her death. It would be noted during the woman's autopsy that she appeared to have been beaten severely and strangled, and a definitive cause-of-death was impossible to rule on because of the trauma she had received before her death; with her potentially dying of asphyxiation, head injuries, or even a broken neck.

This young woman - who was identified within a day - was 21-year-old Laura Albright O'Dell, who lived with her sister at 100 Hugo Street. A graduate of John Adams Adult School, Laura had been missing for three days at the time of her body's discovery, having last been seen on Sunday, November 4th. Her sister had been desperately attempting to track her down in the interim, with Laura having just recently undergone psychiatric treatment, so her disappearance had set off a lot of alarms early on.

Publicly, police officials would indicate that Laura's death was likely not related to others from the region: the other four women that had been asphyxiated to death over the past handful of months, let alone Nancy Feusi (whose stabbing death from months prior had been virtually forgotten in the press). Despite that, however, investigators would never state why they believed this case to be so different from the rest, despite this being the third woman to have been strangled and have her remains dumped in the area surrounding Golden Gate Park that calendar year.

On the morning of February 1st, 1974 - nearly three months after the murder of Laura O'Dell - a young man returned to the apartment he shared with a young woman and her infant son in Marysville, California. This was a small town in Yuba County, about an hour north of Sacramento.

Inside the apartment, that young man, George B. Stewart, would discover the bloody remains of the young woman he shared an apartment with. Still wearing her blood-soaked nightgown, this young woman was lying in the corner of their shared living room, having been stabbed more than thirty times with a long-bladed knife... but that hadn't resulted in her death. Rather, investigators would note, she had asphyxiated to death on her own blood, just feet away from where her infant son was sleeping - who was thankfully unharmed, and too young to remember any details of the evening prior.

19-year-old Brenda Kaye Merchant was the mother of a 10-month-old, who was an attractive young blonde woman in the prime of her life. She had graduated from Marysville High School the year prior (1972), but was cut down before she could leave her mark upon the world.

Brenda had last been seen alive the night prior (January 31st) at around 6:00 PM, when she had eaten dinner with her roommate, George Stewart. He had left the apartment shortly thereafter, and would not return for approximately nine hours (during which time, his whereabouts were apparently accounted for). Neighbors of the two would recall hearing loud sounds - which seemed similar to a couple having an argument - which broke out at some time between 9:30 and 10:00 PM. It was reported that a similar argument would break out at around 2:00 AM, which preceded George's return to the apartment by a mere hour-and-a-half (3:30).

Police would find a bloody handprint on the screen door of the apartment, which they believed belonged to the killer. They would also discover several bloody fingerprints in the apartment, which they similarly hoped would lead them to the culprit(s) of this vile act. However, investigators would be unable to find any trace of forced entry, leading them to believe that the killer was someone that Brenda knew; this indicated to them that the crime was either personal or steeped in some other kind of ulterior motive.

In the wake of Brenda's murder, it was reported that she had been arrested alongside her friend and roommate, George Stewart, for possession of marijuana. But the two had been freed on bail awaiting trial, and it was not believed that this had anything to do with her murder.

While this murder seems to bear no significance to the other crimes from the surrounding area, profilers with the FBI would later deem it similar enough to include in their report of potentially-linked homicides from the area. Because very few details about the crime have ever been released to the public, it's unknown why, exactly, they came to this conclusion, but the fact that they did so - despite this despicable act sharing close to no similarities to the other crimes is significant enough to note, in my opinion.

The eighth and final murder included in the 1975 FBI report is the one in which I was able to learn the least about. This may be due to not only the circumstances of the crime itself, but the age of the victim, as well as the rather-low profile that the crime attracted early on.

On the morning of September 29th, 1974, a crop-dusting pilot would spot a body floating in the Salinas River, more than two hours southeast from San Francisco. The young woman, who had apparently only been deceased for a day or so - if not hours - seemed to have been dumped into the water near Greenfield, a small town about an hour southeast of Monterey.

The young victim would be identified later that week as 14-year-old Donna Marie Braun, a freshman from Alisal High School in Salinas, who was reportedly on probation at the time of the murder. Local newspapers would report that Donna had left her home at around 2:00 AM on the morning her body was discovered: Sunday, September 29th. This gave a four hour window for investigators to attempt to fill, but they were unable to do that because of the relatively quiet area that Donna lived in. Nobody had seen her go missing, so they just assumed that she had attempted to hitchhike somewhere in the surrounding area, and a wandering killer had preyed upon her age and naivete, strangling her before dumping her body in the Salinas River.

Unfortunately, Donna's murder would begin to stagnate almost as soon as it began, with police unable to narrow in on any suspects early on, and her case quickly growing cold. Months later, when asked about whether or not Donna's death could be linked to the others from the surrounding area over the past year or so, Monterey Country Sheriff's Captain Henry Gilpin would state:

"We haven't ruled it out. Of course, we're still working the case locally, but there is a possibility of a tie-in with these other cases - maybe the same ones the Sonoma [County] sheriff is talking about."

In February of 1975, the FBI would issue a report titled "Unsolved Female Homicides - An Analysis of a Series of Related Murders in California and Western America."

This confidential report speculated that the murders of these eight women - those whose stories I've detailed throughout this episode - were linked to the still-unsolved murders from Santa Rosa. These were all cases that had started to unfold at around the same time, with the cases from Santa Rosa predating the others by at least a year, but significant overlap happening.

The Santa Rosa murders had seemed to pick up in early 1972 (perhaps earlier, if we include the disappearance of Lisa Michele Smith, a case that wouldn't be publicly linked to this story until decades later), but had started to slow down significantly in the first half of 1973. That is when the other murders throughout the surrounding area - those that spanned as far north as Yuba County and as far south as Greenfield - had seemed to begin in earnest.

While the date of the crime sprees overlapped, it was absolutely possible for one killer to have been responsible for all of them... none of the dates conflicted in any way. And just months after the Santa Rosa crimes came to an end in 1973, so did the others I've detailed in this episode. This could be for a variety of reasons: a killer moving onto another area, picking less noticeable targets (like sex workers), or just getting better at covering up his tracks.

While the causes-of-death seemed to vary between all of the victims from this episode, that was nothing unusual for the profilers looking into connections to the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders. After all, the causes-of-death in those cases had also varied, so this just seemed to be more of the same; perhaps intentional obfuscation by the killer, who - as profilers had noted - would attempt to shake investigators off of his trail in order to continue their ongoing game of cat-and-mouse.

While it's hard to prove whether or not these crimes were - or are - related to the Santa Rosa crimes, it's worth noting that they too remain unsolved decades later... as do a couple of other cases from the Santa Rosa region, which seemed to bear even more significant similarities to the hitchhiking murders. Those crimes - which came at the tail end of the 1970s, years after both of these alleged crime sprees came to an end - would end up creating even more questions than answers for investigators.

That's on the next episode of Unresolved.

continue to part four

Episode Information

Writing, research, hosting, and production by Micheal Whelan

Published on on January 10th, 2021

Producers: Roberta Janson, Ben Krokum, Gabriella Bromley, Peggy Belarde, Quil Carter, Laura Hannan, Travis Scsepko, Damion Moore, Brittany Norris, Amy Hampton, Steven Wilson, Scott Meesey, Marie Vanglund, Kevin McCracken, Scott Patzold, Bryan Hall, Astrid Kneier, Aimee McGregor, Sydney Scotton, Sara Moscaritolo, Sue Kirk, Jo Wong, Thomas Ahearn, Marion Welsh, Patrick Laakso, Meadow Landry, Tatum Bautista, Teunia Elzinga, Michele Watson, Ryan Green, Stephanie Joyner, Dawn Kellar, Jacinda B., Elissa Hampton-Dutro, Sharon Manetta, Ruth Durbin, Cherish Brady, and Jennifer Henshaw