Jim Mordecai and the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders
Was Mordecai the serial killer who abducted and murdered young women around Santa Rosa, California in the early 1970's?
I’m taking a quick break from my longform investigation into the legend of Murphy Ranch to write this little piece which I hope will clarify some of the allegations made in the recent documentary series The Truth About Jim. Warning: Spoilers Ahead!
I recently had the opportunity to watch the new true crime documentary series, The Truth About Jim, in which Sierra Barter digs up horrifying details about her late step-grandfather, Jim Mordecai, whose unpredictable violence created decades of trauma for family members. Because of her age—and her mother’s decision to stay as far away from Mordecai as possible—Barter never really knew the man who married her grandmother. But ten years after his death, Barter decided to investigate the disturbing rumors about him that had been whispered among family members for years. What she uncovered revealed patterns of domestic abuse, sadism, and rape that made her ask if Mordecai could have been capable of even more heinous behavior.
James W. Mordecai was born August 27, 1941 and raised in Santa Rosa, California. As early as 1953, his name pops up frequently in local newspapers due to his obvious talent in both basketball and football. Numerous articles at the time attributed victory to his feats on the field, and it looked like Jim Mordecai had a promising athletic career ahead of him. An article written on November 13, 1964, notes that he was responsible for his team’s only touchdown that day.
He never played football again.
Barter notes in an early episode of the documentary that an injury ended Mordecai’s dreams of playing professional football, and she speculates that the resulting bitterness and frustration could have played a role in the violent outbursts he inflicted upon family members for years. Following his abbreviated sports career, in the summer of 1965 the school board of Half Moon Bay High School formally approved Mordecai as a teacher in the agriculture department, a job he maintained for the rest of his life.
Jim Mordecai married his first wife, Sharon Yeager, in Carson City, Nevada when he was 18 and she was 16 after she became pregnant. This marriage resulted in two children and lasted until June of 1972, when Jim and Sharon officially divorced. The following year, Mordecai married Jeanne Probst (now Jeanne Kirkpatrick)—footage taken on their wedding day is shown in the documentary. This marriage also resulted in two children and lasted until 1982. Mordecai married yet again in 1989, this time to Judy Williams. Judy’s daughter from her first marriage, Shannon, gave birth to Sierra Barter in 1992.
Barter grew up having little contact with Jim or Judy Mordecai, and when she was finally old enough to ask “why?” the answer seems self explanatory. As recounted in the documentary, nearly all the women and children in Mordecai’s life appear to have suffered lengthy abuse at his hands, and Shannon didn’t want Sierra to experience the same.
A stepdaughter from his second marriage, Christi, describes how Mordecai began raping her at age thirteen. A biological daughter, Jaime, also says he raped her. Both Jeanne and Judy detail the physical and emotional violence he inflicted upon them. Shannon recalls receiving phone calls she believed were from Mordecai, which threatened her with sexual assault. Students of Mordecai’s claimed he’d raped them at his remote cabin, while others felt they narrowly escaped being raped by him. Mordecai, an agriculture teacher, regularly told family members he would “hogtie” them and “slit” their throats.
(A son from the first marriage—who did not appear in the documentary— was arrested in 2021 on 27 felony counts, “which included nine charges of assaulting a minor with the intent to commit a felony and five counts of committing a lewd act with a child…The victim and Mordecai both attended New Vintage Church in Santa Rosa, where he was a volunteer small group leader working with high school-age students for several years.”)
In the midst of these new revelations, Barter discovered that between 1972–1973 a series of teenage hitchhikers were abducted, raped, and murdered in Santa Rosa, California. The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, as they would eventually be called, were never solved. Victims’ bodies were often hogtied and left in remote parts of the county that only someone familiar with the area could know—someone who grew up there, like Jim Mordecai. Never solved, these murders took place during the same time period that Mordecai’s first marriage was falling apart. Could it be possible, Barter wondered, that her abusive, rapist step-grandfather took out his bottled up anger on these poor girls?
This is the central question asked by The Truth About Jim: Could Jim Mordecai have been a serial killer?
While watching the documentary, however, I became increasingly frustrated by its refusal to ask the basic questions that might help resolve the premise of the show: who, what, where? The circumstantial evidence appears damning, but was there any evidence showing where Mordecai actually was when the murders occurred? Was he physically present to commit them?
By the show’s end, there’s little doubt that Mordecai was the monster-hiding-in-plain-sight that Barter feared, though his role as a potential serial killer remains ambiguous. The first hand accounts of family members make it clear that he left them terrified and terrorized. And it’s clear that finally opening up about the trauma they endured was a cathartic process that brought a badly damaged family closer together.
But the documentary, as it was sold, wasn’t primarily about a family’s healing process, but whether or not Jim Mordecai was responsible for The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders. For all the time it spent digging up the past—including a pointless 45-minute segue into speculation that Mordecai was also the Zodiac Killer—it didn’t seem interested in doing much real investigative work.
So I did what any armchair detective does when they think they know better than a team of people who dedicated years of their lives researching a story: I fired up the ol’ internet.
Even after he stopped playing football, Mordecai’s name still appears in local newspapers with some frequency in the 1960’s and 70’s. Although his injury prevented him playing professional football, in 1967 he joined the adult basketball league at Half Moon Bay High School where he taught.
As a teacher, Mordecai would have been in the classroom roughly Monday through Friday from 8am to 3pm. Adult league basketball games were played on Mondays and Wednesday, and by 1972 the schedule switched to Mondays and Fridays. Other events, like an awards ceremony in the school gymnasium on May 31, 1972 (Wednesday) where Mordecai acted as a presenter, also provided public corroboration of his whereabouts. It wasn’t much to go on, but did these dates either coincide or align with the seven unsolved Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders?
The first known victims were Maureen Louise Sterling, age 12, and Yvonne Lisa Weber, age 13. At approximately 9pm on Friday February 4, 1972, they told a friend at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena in Santa Rosa that they were going to smoke pot with an older man. It was the last time they were seen alive.
There’s no mention of Mordecai playing in the adult league basketball game on the Friday the girls disappeared — he played and lost that Wednesday, February 2 — so it’s not impossible that he was out on one of the long drives Barter says he was known for. In the documentary, Barter interviews the girls’ friend who saw the man they left with and, when presented with a photograph of Mordecai, she agrees that he could be the same person.
Maureen and Yvonne’s skeletal remains were found 2.2 miles North of Porter Creek Road on Franz Valley Road, about a thirty minute drive from the Ice Arena, and two hours from Half Moon Bay. Binding materials found at the scene suggested they were restrained. Their clothes were never found, though investigators did identify a 14-carat gold necklace with a cross that belonged to Maureen, as well as a single earring and orange beads. (Pointedly, Sierra’s mother Shannon recalls finding a box of trinket jewelry among Mordecai’s belongings after his death which included orange beads. The box was thrown away.)
On March 4, 1972, 19-year old Kim Wendy Allen hitched a 15 minute ride from her job at Larkspur Natural Foods in Larkspur, California to the northbound ramp of the 101 in San Rafael. The men who gave her the ride were cleared of any wrong doing, and said they last saw her at approximately 5:20pm when they dropped her off. A student at Santa Rosa Junior College, Kim planned on hitchhiking the rest of the way there.
Her body was found the next day, March 5, at the bottom of an embankment off Enterprise Road in Santa Rosa. She had been bound, raped, and strangled with a wire. Her murderer’s semen was recovered from her body. (In the final episode of the documentary, Mordecai’s DNA was presented to police, but as of this writing there are no publicly known results.)
Three weeks later, sometime between 6am and 12:05pm on Friday March 24, Kim’s checkbook was dropped off at the Post Office in Kentfield, California, approximately 6 minutes from Larkspur Natural Foods and 60 minutes from Half Moon Bay High School. Did her killer return the checkbook or was it found by a random pedestrian? Would Mordecai have been away from work on a Friday morning?
Tracking his movements that Spring and Summer yields little information. The adult league basketball championships were held on March 20 —Mordecai’s team took 2nd place. In May, he presented at the aforementioned Tenth Annual Awards Night. In June, Jim and Sharon get divorced, perhaps leading credence to the theory that he was frustrated and angry in the months before and after the separation.
Sometime between November 20 and 30, 1972, 13-year old Lori Lee Kursa, a habitual runaway, disappeared. Her mother last saw her on November 11 before she took off to visit friends in Santa Rosa, who last saw her November 20 or 21. Two separate witnesses later came forward claiming to have seen her accompanied by a white man with an “afro-style” haircut driving a van as late as November 30 or even December 9. Lori’s nude body was found on December 14 along Calistoga Rd in Santa Rosa, just 20 minutes away from downtown. Her neck was broken, possibly as the result of falling from the van while trying to escape her abductor(s).
(Six years later, an unidentified Jane Doe was found only 100 yards from the spot where Lori Lee Kursa was found. Her arm was fractured. She had been hogtied and stuffed in a duffle bag. Police suspected her death to have occurred between 1972 and 1974.)
In August and November of 1972, Mordecai attended Future Farmers of America (FFA) events in Santa Rosa as advisor to the high school group. The latter event took place on November 30, but because of the two week window when Lori might have been abducted, it’s currently impossible to precisely line up any dates between her disappearance and Mordecai’s activities.
The first half of 1973 shows much of the same as far as Mordecai’s public appearances are concerned. He was photographed at a Cougar Club Dinner in January. At a Faculty All-Stars basketball game in April, his play style is described as “physical.” And then in June, he handed out awards at an FFA banquet. It was around this time that his second wife, Jeanne, says they began dating.
The next victim of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Killer was Carolyn Davis, a 15-year old runaway who disappeared on the southbound ramp of the 101 in Garberville, California on July 15, 1973. Carolyn’s older sister, Judy, claimed that Carolyn had told her she was running away after witnessing a double murder. According to Judy, Carolyn was so afraid for her life that she slept in the closet and asked her friends to send letters to her parents from different cities to mask her location. (I was able to find evidence that a suspected double homicide did take place in Redding that January, only 15 minutes from Carolyn’s hometown of Anderson and only one week before she ran from home.)
Carolyn’s body was found on July 31, 1973 only three feet away from where Maureen and Yvonne’s bodies were discovered in December. A pathologist determined she’d died of strychnine poisoning around July 20. It couldn’t be determined if the poison that killed her had been injected or swallowed, nor could investigators identify if she’d been raped. Strangely, Judy later discovered a map at the California Hotel in Garberville (where Judy worked) that she said had been in Carolyn’s possession at the time of her disappearance.
As with Lori Lee Kursa’s abduction, because of the loose nature of the dates, it’s difficult to align Carolyn’s whereabouts with Mordecai’s. An article dated September 13, 1973 notes that Mordecai had only that week returned from an extensive trip to Mexico, but whether that puts him out of the country when Carolyn vanished is presently unknown.
The next victim discovered appears to perfectly match the circumstantial evidence presented in The Truth About Jim alleging Mordecai’s involvement in the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders. Theresa Diane Smith Walsh was 23-years old when she vanished on December 22, 1973 while hitchhiking from Zuma Beach in Malibu back to visit her mother for Christmas in Garberville. Her body was discovered by kayakers six days later—exactly a year since the discovery of Maureen and Yvonne—in Mark West Creek near Michele Way outside of Santa Rosa. She wasn’t even reported missing until three days after her body was found.
The details of Theresa’s death are particularly awful. Police suspected she had been dumped a ways up the creek, then her body washed to its final location during heavy rains. Like the other victims, she was nude. She had been hogtied, with her thumbs bound tightly together. Her left eye was bruised and there was an injury to the back of her head. A nylon rope looped from her ankles to a noose around her neck, meaning that in order to breathe she had to keep her body painfully flexed—an impossible situation that slowly strangled her. There were no leads.
Is it possible that Jim Mordecai was responsible for her death?
No.
Somehow, the documentary team and Mordecai family missed what appears to be a very important detail, a date that should have stood out.
The day Theresa Diane Smith Walsh disappeared in Malibu, Jim Mordecai was getting married to Jeanne Probst in Half Moon Bay.
Jim Mordecai married Jeanne Probst in a small afternoon ceremony at the Community Methodist Church where they’d first met. Jim’s brothers, Dennis and Rick, flew in from Los Angeles and Texas to attend. An evening reception was thrown by the Matron of Honor at Moss Beach, a 13 minute drive from the church.
Zuma Beach in Malibu is over 6 hours away from where Jim Mordecai was surrounded by friends and relatives the entire day, and recorded on video evidence shown by The Truth About Jim. Their honeymoon in the days after took place in Carmel-by-the-Sea, nowhere near the crime scene.
Does this exonerate him completely? No, not yet. But I believe it provides credible evidence against the circumstantial evidence put forward by the documentary. Put simply, he couldn’t have been in two places at once. Jim Mordecai couldn’t have killed Theresa Walsh.
But his DNA should be checked against DNA found at the crime scenes. And the crime scene DNA should be examined by a company like Othram, which has had remarkable success in breaking cold cases such as the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders.
It’s likely the killer or killers are long dead, but the families of the victims deserve some form of closure not unlike what Sierra Barter and her family experienced while confronting the suffering they’d experienced at Mordecai’s hands. The culture of shame and silence that protected Mordecai during his lifetime undoubtedly helped protect the person or people responsible for the rapes and murders in Santa Rosa.
Only by uncovering all the available evidence can we hope to provide closure and justice to the victims.
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