Just over a week into the new year of 1976, a series of murders of dark-haired young women would commence, most of them centered on the beach town of Pacifica, located about fifteen miles south of San Francisco. Because many of the known victims were found in the vicinity of Gypsy Hill Road, the murders became known as the Gypsy Hill Killings, and the perpetrator was dubbed the San Mateo Slasher.
Though for many years, the five canonical murders and two peripheral murders were believed to be the work of a single offender, recent evidence suggests that there were likely at least two killers, though it remains unknown whether they were working together or separately. And while charges have been filed in three of the slayings, no convictions have yet been announced.
The first victim in the series was eighteen-year-old Veronica “Ronnie” Cascio, whose body was found on January 8th, 1976. She was lying in a creek on the Sharp Park Golf Course in Pacifica, and she had been stabbed thirty times.
Weeks later, a fourteen-year-old named Tatiana Blackwell left her Pacifica home to walk to a nearby convenience store, and subsequently vanished. Her whereabouts would be undetermined for more than five months.
The grisly career of the so-called San Mateo Slasher had begun.
As January ceded to February, seventeen-year-old Paula Baxter unwittingly got her vehicle stuck in the mud on February 2nd, 1976, after which she abandoned her car and thereafter disappeared.
Two days later, on February 4th, her naked body was discovered behind the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints building on Ludeman Lane in Millbrae. She had been raped, stabbed four times, and had her skull caved in with a piece of concrete.
Paula Baxter would be the third in the Gypsy Hill series of murders, but sadly would not be the last.
On February 24th, 1976, another possible victim of the San Mateo Slasher turned up dead, this time not in Pacifica, California, but in Reno, Nevada.
Nineteen-year-old Michelle Mitchell was having car trouble, just as previous victim Paula Baxter had been. Her Volkswagen Beetle had broken down on 9th Street in Reno, and witnesses later reported that Michelle had been spotted pushing her car into a parking lot nearby with the help of an unidentified individual.
Hours later, Michelle’s body was found in a 9th Street garage. Her hands had been bound behind her back, and her throat had been cut.
In a tragic miscarriage of justice, a schizophrenic woman named Cathy Woods would be convicted of Michelle Mitchell’s murder in 1979 after falsely confessing to police that she had killed a girl named Michelle. For this reason, Michelle Mitchell was not initially considered a victim of the San Mateo Slasher.
However, in 2015, DNA evidence in her case, as well as several others in the Gypsy Hill series, was retested. Startlingly, the DNA linked the murder of Michelle Mitchell to the murders of Veronica Cascio and Paula Baxter, and both of those slayings were subsequently connected to a career felon named Rodney Halbower, who had been convicted of a 1976 rape in Reno. Following this conviction, Halbower had escaped and fled to Oregon, where he committed several other crimes and was incarcerated there in 2013.
Cathy Woods was released from prison in 2015, after having served more than thirty years for the murder of Michelle Mitchell. Rodney Halbower has since been charged with the killings of Veronica Cascio and Paula Baxter, and DNA evidence also apparently links him to the slaying of Michelle Mitchell. Though investigators are confident that Halbower was responsible for most of the Gypsy Hill slayings, evidence in another of the murders points to yet another offender.
And less than a month after Michelle’s body was found, another young woman would vanish from South San Francisco. Twenty-six-year-old Carol Booth was last seen walking home from a bus stop on Arroyo Street, but never appeared at her residence. She was reported missing by her husband on March 15th, though her remains would not be found for nearly two months.
In the meantime, two days after Carol disappeared, another woman would be viciously slain in San Francisco, possibly another casualty of the San Mateo Slasher. Twenty-one-year-old Idell Friedman was found raped and stabbed to death in her apartment on March 17th, 1976. Her nude body was discovered by a coworker after she had failed to show up for her shift. Authorities noted that the apartment had been ransacked, leading them to believe that her murder was possibly carried out by a different offender than the others in the Gypsy Hill series, and that the motive may have been robbery.
April 1st in Pacifica, California would reveal yet another addition to the San Mateo Slasher’s grim tally, though later evidence tends to suggest that a different assailant might have been responsible.
Nineteen-year-old Denise Lampe worked at the Macy’s department store in the Serramonte Mall in Daly City, California. On the first day of April, she left work and headed for the parking lot, but shortly after getting into her 1964 Mustang, she was attacked. Her body was later found inside her vehicle; she had been raped, and stabbed twenty times.
In late 2017, authorities were able to match a blood stain on Denise’s jacket to an inmate named Leon Melvin Seymour, who had been incarcerated in the Coalinga State Hospital for a series of rapes and kidnappings in the early 1970s. While authorities are convinced that Seymour likely murdered Denise Lampe, they have no evidence linking him to Rodney Halbower, who was charged with two of the other Gypsy Hill killings.
On May 6th, 1976, the body of Carol Booth—missing since March 15th—was found buried under some brush on Grand Avenue in South San Francisco. And exactly one month later, on June 6th, the remains of Tatiana Blackwell, who had vanished the previous January, were discovered off Sharp Park Road. Like the other victims, she had been stabbed multiple times. She was the last of the Gypsy Hill victims to be found.
As of this writing, there is insufficient evidence to connect the murders of Carol Booth or Tatiana Blackwell to either Rodney Halbower or Leon Seymour. Their deaths, along with that of Idell Friedman, remain unsolved.
Crime Immemorial 