On the evening of May 1st, 1967, in California, fourteen-year-old Nikki Benedict was walking home from a girlfriend’s house at around six p.m. As she took a short cut along a dirt road in the then-unincorporated town of Poway, near San Diego, she was attacked by a person or persons unknown.
About a half-hour later, eleven-year-old Ronald Fisk, who was walking home from Little League practice, came across Nikki’s prone body, amid signs of a struggle in the sand. The girl had been stabbed twice in the heart, but was still struggling for breath. The boy ran to his father’s market nearby, where an ambulance was immediately contacted.
Though emergency services responded to the scene only minutes later, Nikki died before arriving at Palomar Hospital.
Detectives began a house-to-house investigation, in which they showed what was believed to be the murder weapon—a small knife with a wooden handle—to residents in hopes that someone would recognize it. They also followed up on a vague witness report of a white man who had been seen running from the scene of the crime. Neither of these nebulous leads produced a single suspect, and the murder case soon ground to a complete halt.
For a time, some detectives hypothesized that Nikki had been a victim of child killer Jay Kenneth Miller, who in 1968 was convicted of raping two girls, aged nine and thirteen, and killing one of them. Miller denied involvement in the attack on Nikki Benedict, and investigators soon dismissed him as a suspect, as Nikki had not been raped. Miller was still in prison as of 2014.
In ensuing years, some researchers have speculated that Nikki Benedict may have been an early victim of the Zodiac Killer, but a resident of San Diego who lived in the same neighborhood as Nikki in 1967 might have a more likely explanation.
This unnamed source told police in 2014 that upon seeing a story in the media about a memorial vigil honoring Nikki, he suddenly remembered that he had been shown the murder weapon when investigators came to his family home in 1967, when he was only eight years old. He further recalled that he had recognized the knife as one he had seen before at Bob Fisk’s Meat Market, a shop where his family went regularly. Bob Fisk was the father of Ronald Fisk, the eleven-year-old boy who had discovered the dying Nikki Benedict. Ronald Fisk, it should be noted, died in a 1988 plane crash.
The source also stated that the same set of knives that the murder weapon had allegedly come from was also sold at the market, and then went on to say that an unnamed classmate at Pomerado School had told him on two occasions that his older brother had killed a girl.
The person of interest referred to by this source has not been named by police, and as of this writing, no arrests have been made. Both the motive and the perpetrator are still unidentified.
Crime Immemorial 