It was December 16th, 1978, and fifteen-year-old Kerry Graham was planning a shopping trip with her best friend and next-door neighbor, fourteen-year-old Francine Trimble. The girls lived in Forestville, California, and on that Saturday afternoon, they were heading to the Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa to buy Christmas gifts for their families. Neither of them returned home.
The Trimble family reported Francine missing within twenty-four hours of her disappearance, though for some reason, the Grahams waited until Christmas Eve before filing a report for their daughter Kerry. Investigators theorized that this discrepancy might have been due to Kerry having allegedly run away from home before, and indeed, police were initially operating on the assumption that both girls were runaways, as there was no sign of struggle at the Trimble household, where the girls had last been seen alive.
However, there were some strange aspects to the case that suggested a more sinister scenario, even from the beginning. Neither of the girls had taken any of their personal belongings with them to the mall, and this included not only cosmetics and other similar items, but also Kerry’s prescription medication; the teenager had recently had her appendix removed, and was still recovering from the procedure.
Furthermore, according to a friend of the girls named Eileen Goetz, Kerry and Francine hadn’t actually been planning on going to the mall as they had claimed, and instead had met her on the grounds of El Molino High School and smoked a few cigarettes before telling Eileen that they were going to hitchhike to a party in Santa Rosa.
Whatever the truth of the matter, both families feared that their daughters had been kidnapped, and desperately clung to any hope of finding them alive, even seeking the aid of a psychic at one point. But it would be well into the following year before any hint of the whereabouts of the two girls was uncovered.
On July 8th, 1979, two bodies would be discovered in Mendocino County. Though the identity of the two victims was uncertain for many years, in 2015, DNA evidence finally confirmed that the remains were those of fifteen-year-old Kerry Graham and fourteen-year-old Francine Trimble, who had vanished in December of 1978 after leaving Francine’s Forestville home to go to shopping at a mall in Santa Rosa.
Kerry and Francine may have been murdered by the same individual responsible for some or all of the other Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, and they are considered the last in the series to be found. Suspects in the slayings include at least two well-known serial killers, including Ted Bundy, the Zodiac, and Hillside Stranglers Ken Bianchi and Angelo Buono. In the specific case of Francine Trimble and Kerry Graham, serial killers Rodney Alcala and Gerald and Charlene Gallego have also been considered persons of interest.
Zodiac suspect Arthur Leigh Allen, in fact, seemed a promising candidate for the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murderer: he owned a mobile home in Santa Rosa at the time the murders occurred, and he was a known child molester. Additionally, he was an avid collector of chipmunks and enjoyed studying the species, and according to one Santa Rosa County sheriff, most if not all of the Hitchhiker Murder victims were found with chipmunk hairs on their bodies.
Whether all the victims were slain by the same killer or killers remains to be seen, and at this stage, the case is still a frustrating puzzle that law enforcement has yet to solve.
Crime Immemorial 