The Victims
The investigation began on February 4, 1972, when Yvonne Weber, 12, and Maureen Sterling, 13, were seen hitchhiking on Guerneville Road in Santa Rosa. Their remains were found 10 months later about six miles into the hills north of Santa Rosa.
In March 1972, Kim Allen, 19, was found strangled in a creek eight miles south of Santa Rosa. Then three more bodies were found: Lori Kursa, 13, Carolyn Davis, 15, and Therese Walsh, 23. All four had also been hitchhiking.
On July 2, 1979, the remains of a young woman were found near where Kursa was recovered. That woman, believed to be between 16 and 21 years old, has never been identified.
Other potential victims include best friends Kerry Ann Graham, 15, and Francine Trimble, 14. Investigators also believe the disappearances of two other women, Jeannette Kamahele, 20, and Lisa Smith, 17, may be tied to the serial killer. Neither of their bodies has ever been found.
The Suspects
Retired detective Butch Carlstedt of the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office told reporters in 1989 that he looked into more than 300 suspects.
Investigators said in 2011 there was a chance that serial killer Ted Bundy, who was executed in 1989 after being convicted of killing two women and a 12-year-old girl in Florida, could be the killer. Though he was only convicted of the three murders, Bundy confessed to killing at least 27 other women; his total number of victims may actually be more than 100.
"Bundy is definitely a good suspect," Robert Keppel, a retired Seattle police detective who helped solve the Bundy killings, told SFGate. "The killings in Santa Rosa would fit his methods, he spent time in the area and I'm sure he started killing well before 1974.”
Detectives then hoped they could use DNA testing to confirm their theory, but ultimately Bundy was not positively identified as the killer.
Another suspect included serial killer Rodney Alcala, who is believed to have killed possibly more than 50 women and girls. Most of the women were only identified through pictures that were found at his home after Alcala’s arrest. He became known as the “Dating Game Killer” after it was discovered that he appeared as a bachelor on the show in 1978.
Alcala was convicted of eight murders in total and died in prison in 2021. He has not been definitively tied to the seven hitchhiker murders.
Then, in 2024, a California woman named Sierra Barter revealed her suspicions that her step-grandfather, Jim Mordecai, could be the killer. Several years after Mordecai died in 2008, Barter learned he sexually abused many of the girls and women in his life, including one of his stepdaughters.
Part of her hypothesis is that three of the hitchhiker murder victims were bound and two were hogtied, which is something Mordecai allegedly threatened to do to women. Barter gave some of Mordecai’s personal belongings that may contain DNA to the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office, but he has not been officially connected to any of the murders.
At least one person believes the unknown killer has already died. During the 1980s, former county coroner Tom Siebe told the Press Democrat that a middle-aged married man who died in a car accident in the mid-1970s was their prime suspect. “In investigating the death, detectives found evidence that showed the man knew about the murders,” the newspaper reported at the time. “But there wasn't enough evidence to close the case."
The murders stopped after that man died.
The Sonoma County Sheriff's Office continues to accept accept tips about the case.
