The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders: The Truth about Santa Rosa
In my last article, Jim Mordecai and the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, I examined undiscovered evidence overlooked by the recent true crime documentary, The Truth About Jim, in which a woman alleged that her grandfather may have been responsible for the string of kidnappings, rapes, and murders of young girls and women in the small town of Santa Rosa, California in the early 1970’s. The evidence she provided included actual physical and sexual abuse that family members said they’d suffered at Mordecai’s hands, and more circumstantial allegations like his habit of driving down rural roads for hours at a time, or a photograph taken of him at Lake Berryessa, where one of the Zodiac Killer’s murders occurred.
My only intention was to address those specific allegations after feeling frustrated by the documentary’s lack of hard evidence but, in the wake of publishing that article, I received the same question again and again:
“Ok then, who did it?”
I didn’t have an answer, but it seemed that several known serial killers had been suggested as suspects: Ted Bundy, The Zodiac Killer, The Hillside Stranglers (Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, Jr.), and Jack Bokin, just to name the most infamous. Given the similarities of the victims, the locations where bodies were found, and the disturbing violence of the crimes themselves, it’s not surprising that police and researchers alike assumed these murders were the work of a deranged serial killer.
As terrifying as the concept of serial killers is, there may be some comfort in the idea that they’re an aberration from the rest of us—inhuman monsters. But when I went looking for the true identity of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Killer, I didn’t find a lone wolf stalking his victims in the night.
I found wolves, packs of wolves.
I’m taking another break from my longform investigation into the legend of Murphy Ranch to write this little piece which I hope will further clarify some of the allegations made in the documentary series The Truth About Jim and elsewhere.
Warning: Very Graphic Content Ahead.
To recap the sad details of The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders: between 1972 and 1973, seven young girls and women were the victims of horrific crimes in the general area of Santa Rosa, California.
- February 4, 1972. 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. They were never seen alive again.
- 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 Bell Avenue entrance to Highway 101, northbound 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.
- April 25, 1972. Jeannette Kamahele, age 20, was last seen hitchhiking near the Cotati on-ramp of Highway 101 to Santa Rosa Junior College, where she was a student. “A friend witnessed her likely abduction and reported that she entered a 1950–1952 faded brown Chevrolet pickup truck fitted with a homemade wooden camper and driven by a 20- to 30-year old Caucasian male with an Afro hairstyle.”
- November 20-30, 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 as late as November 30 or even December 9, accompanied by a white man with an “afro-style” haircut driving a van .
- July 15, 1973. 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.
- December 22, 1973. 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.
The bodies of all but one, Jeannette Kamahele, were found nude at the bottom of steep embankments in an area northeast or east of the city.
- December 14, 1972. Lori Lee Kursa’s nude body was found 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 or abductors. (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.)
- December 28, 1972. Maureen and Yvonne’s skeletal remains were found on Franz Valley Road 2.2 miles north of Porter Creek Road, about a thirty minute drive from the Ice Arena. 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.
- March 5, 1973. Kim Wendy Allen’s body was found at the bottom of an embankment off Enterprise Road in Santa Rosa the day after she disappeared. She had been bound, raped, and strangled with a wire. Her murderer’s semen was recovered from her body.
- July 31, 1973. Carolyn Davis’ body was found 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.
- December 22, 1973. Theresa Diane Smith Walsh’s body was discovered exactly a year after the discovery of Maureen and Yvonne — in Mark West Creek near Michele Way outside of Santa Rosa. 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.
- Jeannette Kamahele’s body was never found. It is assumed that she, too, was a victim of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Killer.
Five of the victims — Lori Lee Kursa, Maureen Sterling, Yvonne Weber, Carolyn Davis, and Theresa Walsh—were found on roads that form a rough circle from Santa Rosa’s city limits, up into the rural hillsides, and back to the 101 near Larkfield-Wikiup. This loop includes Calistoga Road, Porter Creek Road, Franz Valley Road, and Mark West Springs Road. The body of Kim Wendy Allen was found off Enterprise Road, near the other bodies but outside the loop.
By January of 1973, $2500 in reward money (over $17,000 now, adjusted for inflation) was being offered for any “information about the girls or persons responsible for their deaths.” The murders remain unsolved to this day.
Fifty years later, what could I possibly find that hadn’t already been picked apart and republished a thousand times?
I started my investigation by looking in the wrong place.
While there are striking similarities shared among the murders—most specifically the locations of the dumpsites and states of the bodies—there are enough differences that by the time I finished writing the last article I wasn’t entirely convinced they were the work of one killer. It’s entirely possible that police have withheld key evidence that made them think otherwise, but I haven’t seen it.
Lori died from a broken neck and exposure. The cause of Maureen and Yvonne’s death couldn’t be determined. Kim was strangled with a wire. Carolyn died of strychnine poisoning. And Theresa was killed with an elaborate nylon binding. Jeannette’s likely death, of course, is not known.
But it was Carolyn’s death that struck me as potentially the most unlike the others, and therefore the place where I wanted to look first. Garberville, where she was last seen, is nearly three hours north of Santa Rosa along the 101. And although her body ended up in the same place as Maureen and Yvonne, the Franz Valley Road location had already been published in newspapers and it’s not unfathomable that through word of mouth locals would have known exactly where it occurred.
According to her sister, Carolyn claimed to have witnessed a double murder before running away, and feared for her life prior to her disappearance. So desperate was she to not be found, she instructed her friends to mail letters to her parents with postmarks from multiple cities.
As I previously noted, I was able to find evidence that a suspected double homicide actually did take place in Redding, California that January, only 15 minutes from Carolyn’s hometown of Anderson and only one week before she ran away from home.
On January 27, 1972, police discovered the bullet-riddled bodies of Evelyn Mackenzie, 57, and Elmer Cowles, 67, inside Mackenzie’s trailer at 1691 Smith Road, Redding, California when Mackenzie failed to show up for work that morning. Police initially believed it to be a case of murder-suicide because of the .32 four-inch revolver found in Cowles’ hand, “but the angle of the bullet wound and lack of powder burns on the man’s chest indicate he was killed by a third person.” Additionally, police had reason to believe that a red and white Ford pickup truck seen in the area might be connected to their murders.
Could this have been the homicide that Carolyn says she witnessed? Were there other crimes like this in the area? Why did Carolyn go to such elaborate lengths to hide her location from her parents? Was it to protect them or to hide from them?
With nothing else to go on, I looked into her parents. But because of a mistake I made in the last article (since corrected), I accidentally started my search by looking at Lori Lee Kursa’s parents instead. And what I found there —at least initially— lead me to think that there might be something to the idea that Carolyn/Lori was hiding from them. This was 100% wrong on my end, but it was an important mistake nonetheless.
Lori had run away numerous times before, and even the exact date of her disappearance remains unknown. When I looked into the circumstances of her home life, I discovered multiple instances in which either her mother or father, Lorraine (39) and Ronald Kursa (28), had run-ins with police at 518 Roseland Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA, the house where Lori lived.
On October 24, 1969, both of Lori’s parents were arrested for providing narcotics to minors as young as 15 years old in their house. The following July, the Kursas were arrested again for the exact same crime. In both cases, the charges involved marijuana, but other instances of burglary and the sale of potentially stolen goods can also be traced to the same address. In 1976, Lori’s mother was arrested yet again—this time for possession of hashish oil and selling barbiturates.
As I was researching this while confused about Carolyn/Lori, these circumstances made sense to me because perhaps the double murder of Evelyn Mackenzie and Elmer Cowles in Redding could be connected to the drug dealing and burglary taking place at Lori’s home in Santa Rosa.
In the end, I discovered no evidence of untoward activity in Carolyn’s household, except for the tragic 1971 suicide of her older sister by overdosing on barbiturates. But given these circumstances, it’s easy to understand why both girls were escaping their home life and putting themselves in potentially dangerous situations at this time.
Six months after Lori Lee Kursa’s funeral, her mother, acting as guardian ad litem of Lori’s siblings and step-siblings, filed a civil complaint against Howard Sampson, Doe Sampson, William Sampson, Jane Sampson, Ernest DeGroff, and Doe One through Doe Ten. It’s unclear to me what this suit was about, but because of the timing less than a year since her daughter was murdered, and because by this point it didn’t seem to me that Lorraine was a particularly strict parental figure, I decided to look into who it was she was taking to court on behalf of her children.
At the time of Lorraine Kursa’s civil suit, Howard Garfield Sampson and his son Howard William Sampson (aka William Sampson), 28, ran a contracting business out of their family compound, a “junkyard” property consisting of multiple trailer homes, at 1196 Liberty Road Petaluma, California— about twenty minutes south of the Kursas. It’s possible that Lorraine was suing the Sampsons because of shoddy repair work but, again, I didn’t get the impression that the Kursa household during this period was, say, renovating their kitchen—and why would the suit be brought in relation to the children?
More likely, I think, the suit had something to do with the Fields of the Woods Church that the Sampsons also ran on their property, which had approximately twenty-five congregants in 1975— roughly the Sampson and DeGroff families plus an additional 10 Does. I don’t like to speculate, but lacking any other evidence at present, I’ll call it a semi-educated guess.
The Fields of the Woods Church was founded in 1963 when, according to Howard Sampson, he received “a mandate from God,” to create a church based on “literal interpretations of the Bible including the Apocalyptic books” because, “the present system of society [is] totally corrupt with lying judges and drunkard district attorneys…being run by men that are atheist, socialist, and communist.”
Sampson and his co-pastor, Ernest DeGroff, moved the church to its location on Liberty Road (where DeGroff and his family also lived) after a falling out with the Church of God Prophecy in Petaluma when DeGroff was arrested for shouting at the congregation, directing most of his anger at the women. A 1971 service at the church included one sermon by Howard’s son Floyd, “young Christian leader,” and another by DeGroff in which he discussed “proper and decent wear for Christian women in present-day churches.”
Not content with church work, the Sampsons were very concerned about law and order in Sonoma County and so formed a local chapter of Posse Comitatus, “a conspiracy-minded, anti-government, and anti-Semitic [group] linked to white supremacy aiming to counter what they believe is an attack on their social and political rights as white Christians.”
In addition to their religious and cosplay-police work, the Sampson family compound was busy with yet another activity during the 1960’s-70’s: crime, so much crime.
Several months before getting sued by Lorraine Kursa, Reverend Howard Sampson was sentenced to 90 days in jail for sticking a .45 caliber revolver against the throat of a state inspector who showed up at the family compound to inquire about the Sampsons’ contracting license. Ultimately, the judge placed him on probation for 18 months, but this was just one of dozens of legal problems connected to the Liberty Road property:
In June of 1974, Floyd and his twin brother, Tony, were arrested for possession of both marijuana and tear gas after they damaged 45 separate automobiles during a hit-and-run spree in downtown Petaluma. Less than a year later, Tony was arrested for a DUI, which prompted Floyd the next day to drive so erratically that he was stopped by police who believed he, too, was drunk. “You fools!” he told them, “I just proved you don’t know a drunk when you see one.”
This was followed by their attempt to conduct a citizens’ arrest of the officer who arrested them, and then years of frivolous multimillion dollar lawsuits brought by the Sampsons against the city of Petaluma, with much of their reasoning apparently informed by the sovereign citizen movement. A $36M lawsuit filed by Floyd and Tony in 1977 was eventually settled to everyone’s satisfaction for $4,600. Before the end of the year, and while they were running for city council, Floyd and Tony (with brother William) initiated another lawsuit, this time for a mere $1,000,000.
Tony Sampson was later sent to a diagnostic facility for observation after it was alleged he sang “Nearer, My God, To Thee” while firebombing the Two Rock School in Petaluma, only days after a molotov cocktail was thrown under the car of Petaluma’s first female mayor, Helen Putnam. Howard Garfield Sampson’s mayoral campaign began the next year.
But let’s return to the time period in question.
On May 4, 1971, Robert Allen Jackson, a 19-year old married friend of William Sampson, gave police his address as 1196 Liberty Road when he was arrested for the kidnap and rape of two 15-year old girls who said that Robert and a man in his 40’s, “Chester,” offered to give them a ride. After driving the girls to a remote location at Camp Meeker, Jackson pulled out a knife while Chester explained they had to submit. After “forcibly raping” and “committing deviant sexual acts” on the girls, Robert and Chester drove them to a bowling alley where the girls eventually escaped.
The circumstances of the crime were similar enough to the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders that I wondered if Jackson or “Chester” could have been responsible—after all, how many kidnaps and rapes could take place in a county like Sonoma?
But Jackson was sentenced to six months in prison in July of 1971, and was arrested again in April 1972 for public drunkenness, possession of stolen property, and arson. (His accomplice this time, Paul G. Chaney, was also found with Seconal, a barbiturate, in his pocket.) Jackson would be arrested a third time in 1975, first for possession of marijuana, then for violating his parole, and then was convicted for two consecutive terms after he violently sodomized another inmate. Chester, meanwhile, was revealed as Iven Richard Bench, a Santa Rosa man with a lengthy rap sheet who spent most of 1972 in prison for raping the two teen girls, before dying of apparent natural causes in 1973. Both Robert Jackson and Iven Bench seem to have been incarcerated when some or all of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders occurred.
But Robert Jackson didn’t officially live on the Liberty Road property—he was just crashing in one of the trailers where William Sampson lived. Why would William, son of a god-fearing minister, even be hanging out with someone like Robert?
William Sampson’s first recorded arrest took place on March 3, 1963 when a 14-year old girl said that Sampson, then age 18, attempted to rape her with an underage male after luring the girl to the Steele Canyon Resort at Lake Berryessa on the pretense of a birthday party taking place there. The girl managed to break free and found an adult who called the police.
The following January, William married Jane Foster (the Jane Sampson named in Lorraine Kursa’s lawsuit), and in October 1965 the happy couple announced the birth of their first child. One year later, just two weeks after his child’s first birthday, William and eleven other members of his motorcycle gang, The Collectors, were arrested for kidnapping and raping a 15-year old Santa Rosa girl.
According to the girl, she accompanied two friends to a liquor store on Santa Rosa Avenue at 9pm on the Saturday before Halloween 1966. While her friends went inside, three members of The Collectors, who she knew, pulled up alongside her and forced her into their car. Shortly after midnight, police received a phone call from a Richard Massini complaining of a disturbance on his 40-acre property. Officers made the 15 minute drive out to the remote logging road where they found The Collectors partying, damaging Massini’s heavy equipment, and raping the girl.
Where was it The Collectors decided to take her after abducting her from a parking lot? Mark West Springs Road, roughly equidistant between the locations where Theresa Walsh and Carolyn Davis, Maureen Sterling, and Yvonne Weber were found six years later. (Newspaper reports at the time only give the street name, but a 1960 business directory places Massini’s residence at 1921 Mark West Springs Road, presumably within hearing distance of The Collectors’ activities.)
Kidnapping charges against three of The Collectors—Russell Gean Green, 18, of 711 Ware Street Santa Rosa, California; Scott Allen Schubert, 19, of 3160 Rocklin Drive Santa Rosa, California; and Robert Lee Capps, 19, of 116 English Street Petaluma, California—were dropped because, according to police, “It wasn’t a good kidnapping case. The girl knew them and she likes one of them.” But each would continue to have run-ins with the law for years to come:
- Russell Gean Green died in 1982, age 34, of a gunshot wound to the head. His body was found near an all night grocery store in Oakland with a pistol in his hand.
- Scott Allen Schubert got married in 1967 before he was charged with beating and threatening to kill his wife. That case was dismissed. In 1971, he was sentenced to nine months for burglary, then in 1973 he accidentally set fire to a child, and then in 1977 he was found guilty of felony possession of a sawed off shotgun.
- Robert Lee Capps was first arrested for attacking his mother at age 14. A month after he was let go for kidnapping in 1966, he was arrested again for attacking a woman and destroying her home. In December, he burglarized a local bar, The Question Mark, for which he was sentenced to 90 days in a medical facility that diagnosed him as “violent and aggressive.” In 1971, he was arrested for kidnapping and molesting a 10-year old girl. And he would make a prime suspect in the Santa Rosa killings, but in February 1972 he was sentenced to two years in prison after getting caught immediately for robbing a Wells Fargo. Capps was stabbed to death in San Quentin three years later.
Among those arrested for assaulting the girl, charges were reduced to statutory rape: Michael Earl Warren, 22, of 122 W Robles Avenue Santa Rosa, California; Paul Rene Guidry, 18 of 122 W Robles Avenue Santa Rosa, California; and George Merwin Johnson III, 19, of 1844 Terry Road Santa Rosa, California.
- Michael Earl Warren had already been arrested once in 1966 for throwing a party with minors in a vacant house. He got busted the following year at The Collectors clubhouse for possession of marijuana, and was then responsible for a car crash after swerving into an oncoming vehicle. In 1970, he was charged with forgery. In 1971, he was a perfect inmate at the Sonoma County Jail and was working there as a trustee until he was found with marijuana at the jail. He was arrested that December for carrying a concealed weapon and marijuana, then again in 1973 for burglary. The following year he sold hard drugs to undercover agents, then fled to Texas where he was apprehended and returned to California. He married in 1977, then in 1985 he was arrested for selling methamphetamine, and again in 1987 for burglary, carrying a concealed weapon, and methamphetamine.
- Paul Rene Guidry was arrested again with members of a new motorcycle gang in San Jose in 1968 for possession of dangerous drugs and resisting arrest, but his legal troubles seem to disappear from public record after that.
- George Merwin Johnson III, who married about six months before his rape charge, was arrested earlier in October 1966 after beating another youth during a Collectors party.
As for William Sampson, he was merely charged with trespassing during this 1966 Halloween episode but, like the other Collectors, he would continue to get himself into trouble.
Before we get to that, let’s talk about the Hells Angels.
Founded in Fontana, California in 1948 or 1951 depending on who you ask, the Hells Angels were an outlaw motorcycle club whose members were known to ride Harley Davidsons. Over the next decade, new chapters sprung up across the state, but Ralph “Sonny” Barger of the Oakland Chapter is often credited with unifying the group in 1957 into the international organization it is today.
On September 7, 1964, headlines screamed “Cyclists Chased Out of Moneterey” when two girls, age 14 and 15, were found stripped naked and sobbing hysterically after at least four of the Hells Angels gang raped them in Hollister, a town the bikers had famously terrorized in 1947. A six month investigation made at the request of Senator Fred Farr (D-Carmel), noted that “…the 446 reported members around the state have criminal records totaling 874 felony arrests, 300 felony convictions, 1,682 misdemeanor arrests and 1,023 misdemeanor convictions…It is alleged that any new member must bring with him to the meeting a woman or girl, termed a ‘sheep,’ willing to submit to sexual intercourse with each member of the club.”
On May 5, 1965, rumors began swirling that the Hells Angels had started meeting at a secret hideaway in Petaluma. By Spring of 1966, the people of Petaluma speculated that not only were the Hells Angels meeting there, but in fact were trying to buy a bar in town.
Reactions to the news of this development were mixed, but one Sonoma businessman was quite pleased. That past October, thousands of anti-war demonstrators held a two day protest in Oakland against the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. The event was dubbed “mostly peaceful” until the Hells Angels arrived to take on what they called the “chicken shit communists.”
According to Wayward Angel: The Full Story of the Hells Angels, “The cops herded the Angels behind their own lines,” before the Angels slipped past them and ran “roughshod over [the protesters], a sixteen man juggernaut of bottles, chains, and boots.” Six Hells Angels were arrested, but charges were dropped against all but one. “Conservative columnists praised the club for teaching the peace creeps a lesson.” Among the impressed was Fred Ullner, owner of Dexters HiFi-TV-Radio in Larkfield-Wikiup, 15 minutes north of Santa Rosa up the 101.
Fred Ullner, who described himself as a Goldwater conservative, ran his political group, Republicans for Conservative Action, out of his TV shop at 467 Magnolia Avenue, next to Mark West Creek. Ullner himself ran the first series of ads in 1966 encouraging the then-actor Ronald Reagan to run for governor, and Reagan later admitted that Ullner’s work helped convince him to campaign. At the same time, Ullner was running “well disciplined youth camps” in the Russian River area and had set up a defense fund called “Friends of the Hells Angels,” for the gang members who he felt had been unfairly treated by police during the protests in Oakland.
Ullner welcomed the “patriots” to the Sonoma area and continued to declare that Reagan was “wonderful” but threw his support behind the Theocratic Party Candidate, William Penn Patrick, a John Birch Society member whose cosmetics company was eventually investigated by the SEC as a pyramid scheme amid allegations of cultlike physical and sexual abuse.
Ullner himself dropped out of the limelight when, in March 1967, his wife divorced him after he threatened to kill her if she revealed he’d raped a 15-year old friend of his daughter. That September, he wrote to Governor Reagan asking for help from his room at Synanon, a drug rehab center that turned into an abusive cult. Ullner attempted a comeback in 1971 when he formed the group Men Against Women’s Lib (“Fight back & walk like a man.”), but appears to have only succeeded in “pissing off his girlfriend.”
Equally as enthusiastic about the arrival of the Hells Angels in Petaluma were the teenage boys. On March 19, 1966, The Petaluma-Argus Courier asked, “Have you noticed the unusual amount of motorcycles buzzing around our city lately? Many of the riders are members of the Hell’s Angels, and a lot of them are local boys who are also becoming motorcycle conscious.”
Four days later, the same newspaper reported that the Angels had gang raped a woman near the Petaluma bar they were thinking of buying. In light of this, the paper noted, “We can’t hold much sympathy for the Hells Angels or the tall, willowy blonde who was reportedly assaulted by a group of the motley gang,” because the girl had hitchhiked to the party and thus knew what she getting herself into. The next day, “in the mightiest show of force ever massed in Sonoma County,” over 80 police officers raided an unoccupied farmhouse at 201 Knudtsen Road, Petaluma where the Hells Angels were hiding out. Among those captured was Lanny Lee Keller, a Petaluma teen who began stealing cars at age 14, and would be arrested the following year alongside William Sampson.
The raid, intended to show “the county was not accepting their kind,” did little to dissuade their presence. This could have simply been a case of stubbornness on the part of the motorcycle outlaws, but the Hells Angels may also have had a financial motive to stay in the area as well. It takes money to roam the country, and the Angels kept afloat by dealing in methedrine, cocaine, heroin, barbiturates, and eventually LSD.
What the police didn’t know, and what the police never figured out, was that beginning in 1968 one of the largest LSD manufacturing facilities in the world was operating with help from the Hells Angels just 13 minutes north of Santa Rosa up the 101.
More on that later. Let’s turn back to The Collectors.
Excited by the presence of motorcycle outlaws in town, the young men of Sonoma formed several new “clubs” in the area between 1965–1970. Among them were The Misfits, Grim Reapers, and Collectors. Membership often shifted or overlapped as allegiances changed or chapters merged, but there were consistent qualities to wherever these young baby boomers were found: drugs, rape, and murder.
The Collectors located their clubhouse at 124 W Robles Ave, Santa Rosa, CA, a five unit collection of houses situated right next to the 101, with members living in at least two of the units. On February 24, 1967, a 13-year old girl found herself outside The Collectors’ clubhouse at 2:30am after she ran away from home following an argument with a teacher at school the previous day.
She was greeted at the door by her cousin’s husband, Charles Hollen, 23, of Petaluma. Within minutes of her arrival, the “bespectacled teenager” said, he “asked me to go to the bedroom and I did…Then we had sexual intercourse.”
Moments later, she was tapped on the shoulder by The Collectors’ Seargent-At-Arms, William Sampson, then 22, who told her, “Come on. Let’s go into the bedroom.”
“I knew what he meant,” she said. “He wanted sexual intercourse with me.” And they did. While Sampson and the girl were in the bedroom, a man who she never met before opened the door and said, “Hurry up, Sampson. I’m next.”
Before collapsing in sobs on the witness stand, the girl testified that seven men had sex with her at The Collectors clubhouse that night. Robert Hale Herbst, 23, was “the last one on the train.” Hollen drove her home in the morning, had sex with her again, and then she immediately went to the police department to report the rapes.
Police raided the Clubhouse at 11pm the next day, arresting fifteen people in total, with many of the men belonging to either The Collectors or Hells Angels. Among those arrested were:
- Howard William Sampson, 22, of 1196 Liberty Road Petaluma, CA
- Stanley Louis Demartinis, 18, 210 Thomas Lane, Petaluma, CA
- Robert Hale Herbst, 23, of 124 W Robles Ave, Santa Rosa, CA
- Robert Blake Green, 21, of 634 Presley Street Santa Rosa, California
- Patricia Lela Williams, 22, of 473 1/2 Goodman Street, Santa Rosa, CA
- Kenneth Allen Preston, 19, of 1257 Poplar St, Santa Rosa, CA
- Lanny Lee Keller, 22, of 122 W Robles Avenue Santa Rosa, California
- Jennifer Yvonne Borden, 21, of 162 Bellevue Drive, Santa Rosa, CA
- Herbert J Borden, 26, of 162 Bellevue Drive, Santa Rosa, CA
- Lynne Charlene Jackson, 18, of 616 Ware Avenue, Santa Rosa, CA
- Paul Miravalle Jr., 22, of 4088 Porter Creek Road, Santa Rosa, CA
- Pedro Ramos Velles, 22, San Francisco
- Samuel David Miller, 21, Berkeley
William Sampson, Charles Hollen, and Robert Herbst were initially charged with child molestation for the “sex orgy,” while another man, Stanley Demartinis, was separately charged for having sex with the 13-year old before she ever arrived at The Collectors’ clubhouse. Why only three out of the seven Collectors who raped her were prosecuted is unknown. Charges against Sampson, Hollen, and Herbst were eventually reduced to “lewd and lascivious conduct” before they pled guilty to the even lesser charge of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
(Charges of drug possession against others arrested that evening were dropped for lack of evidence. Lanny Lee Keller, a Misfit turned Hells Angel, would be arrested that June for attempted murder when he and another youth hospitalized two men after attacking them with a hunting knife and length of chain outside The Grog Shop in Santa Rosa.)
Robert Herbst was sentenced to six months in jail and two years of probation. William Sampson and Charles Hollen each got six months as well. Herbst, often using the alias Rick Mattioli, would go on to have a career in auto theft that stretched across the early 70’s, before he moved out of state. Hollen, meanwhile, was later involved in a fight that lead to the death of 47-year old Robert Buhrer. Neither Herbst nor Hollen appears to have later been involved in the kind of sex crimes that might implicate them in the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders.
What sentence, if any, Stanley Louis Demartinis received for his role in the matter is unclear. In an op-ed titled The Right To Play God? his father loudly complained about “the police state” following his son’s arrest: “If this is the kind of justice and the kind of principles that we Americans have fought and died for, then those of us that fought and those of us that died, have surely fought and died in vain.”
Demartini’s unjustly persecuted son would be arrested again in 1969 for firing a .22 caliber rifle into the home of Jerry and Barbara Guyer at 513 Jefferson Street, Petaluma, then threatening them with knives after an argument. In 1970, he resisted arrest while under the influence of drugs, for which he received a six month sentence the following year. In 1972, he accidentally shot himself in the leg with another .22, this time at 513 1/2 Jefferson Street — the residence of Paul G. Chaney, the same guy who was carrying Seconal when arrested for arson with William Sampson’s friend, kidnapper-rapist Robert Allen Jackson. That same year, he robbed a Petaluma bar and tied up the owner; got arrested for possession of stolen property with Chaney; was charged with carrying a loaded revolver; and then by July got arrested again for felonious assault with Robert Jackson all the way in Richmond, Virginia—where he had presumably fled to escape the charges in Sonoma. In 1974, he sued the camp superintendent of the State Road Camp №9 in Lynchburg, Va, because, among other reasons, the prison lacked recreational facilities.
The point is: despite Demartinis’ ongoing criminal activity, he also appears to have been unavailable during the time period of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders.
Unlike the earlier raid on the Hells Angels hideout in Petaluma, this one seemed to have the effect of disbanding The Collectors. William Sampson, for his part, largely dropped off the crime radar after this, at least publicly. As noted already, his friends, brothers, and reverend father continued to have serious legal troubles throughout the 1970’s. And even though The Collectors were no more, Sampson’s other motorcycle loving friends—Scott Schubert, and Kenneth Allen Preston—simply joined another gang: the appropriately named Grim Reapers. Their motto?
“Ride, Rob, Rape, and Kill.”
By January 1968, Kenneth Allen Preston was in jail. According to the scholarly journal, hotcars.com, The Grim Reapers allegedly got their start around 1965 (or even 1959) when they were founded by three Vietnam veterans in Louisville, Kentucky. In addition to their love of Harley Davidsons, “there may have been yet another unifying factor here: allegiance to white supremacy, with some reports contending the Grim Reapers were established as a ‘whites only’ club that would grow to have ties to the Ku Klux Klan.” As recently as 2021, they were indicted for gun running and drug dealing—20 oz of cocaine, 4.5 lbs of fentanyl, 81 lbs of marijuana, and 238 lbs of methamphetamine—when 23 members of a Kentucky chapter were busted by the government’s Operation Reapin’ Benefits.
But the Grim Reapers of Santa Rosa were making headlines fifty years ago.
On the night of October 7, 1967, Grim Reapers Kenneth Allen Preston, Jack Brockman, William Miller, Jimmy Mezzanatto, and Reaper leader Johnny Lee Sommerhalder woke up Kenneth Duane Mulkey at his apartment and asked him to join them because “there were some guys looking for a fight.” Sommerhalder, who was carrying a .22 Ruger automatic pistol, had already been incarcerated once for savagely “stomping on the chest” and collapsing the lung of a teenager he said “snitched” on his drug dealing in Sonoma three years earlier.
According to Mulkey, when the guys they were looking for couldn’t be found, Sommerhalder suggested they rob a house in Montecito Heights, a neighborhood at the eastern edge of Santa Rosa. A barking dog at the residence changed their plans yet again, and this time they drove aimlessly looking for something to do when they spotted a parked Mustang on Alta Vista Avenue—a known lovers lane.
Sommerhalder attacked the driver, 19-year old Charles Kaufman, and pulled him from the vehicle while Brockman yanked the sweater of Kaufman’s date over head and immobilized her. (Both Kaufman and the girl were students at Santa Rosa Junior College.) Kaufman, a wrestler, flipped Sommerhalder over his shoulder into the street. Brockman then attacked Kaufman with a length of motorcycle chain, but Kaufman flipped him, too. Sommerhalder pulled out his pistol and—as Mulkey yelled “John, don’t!” — shot Kaufman twice in the back and once more in the head.
The Grim Reapers left Kaufman’s body on the side of the road while they abducted the girl in their own vehicle. They drove her up Calistoga Road to Porter Road, where she was stripped naked, blindfolded, tied up, and threatened with death. If she opened her eyes, they said, they’d drop lit matches in them. She could feel their leather jackets press against her as Sommerhalder, Brockman, and Preston gang raped her.
Mulkey, who later fled the state for fear of Sommerhalder, testified that the Grim Reaper leader instructed him to “take a turn,” but he lay atop her naked body on the ground and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’ll try to see you’re not hurt.” She later identified Mulkey by the texture of the sweater he was wearing. Sommerhalder returned, saying he wanted to cut off one of the girl’s breasts as a souvenir, but Preston cut off a lock of her hair instead.
Early that morning, two repairmen driving along Calistoga Road found the girl bound and nude just six minutes north of where Lori Lee Kursa’s nude body would be discovered five years later. It is assumed Kursa jumped from a moving vehicle to escape her abductors before they reached their destination.
The repairmen drove the girl to the hospital, where she was treated for her extensive injuries. Because she hadn’t seen her rapists, the girl later attended parties with Brockman, but “had no idea he was involved in it.” She survived to testify against them.
This was the second worst crime committed by The Grim Reapers that year.
Johnny Lee Sommerhalder had a younger brother. Richard Sommerhalder, 21, of 7506 Adrian Drive, Rohnert Park, CA was dating Suzanne Mulkey, the 19-year old ex-wife of Kenneth Duane Mulkey.
On January 11, 1968, using information given to him by Suzanne, Richard broke into the trailer home of her mother and stepfather, Shirley and Curtis Ackley. Richard stole $40 in coins and a .32 Smith & Wesson revolver, which he gave to Johnny as a gift. The next day, four Grim Reapers went back to the Ackley’s trailer looking for more:
- Johnny Lee Sommerhalder, 24, of 747 Frazier Ave, Santa Rosa, CA
- Kenneth Allen Preston, 20, of 1257 Poplar St, Santa Rosa, CA
- Thomas Lawrence Casewell, 22, of 102 Ripley Street, Santa Rosa, CA
- Ronald E. Long, 25, of 840 Butler Avenue Santa Rosa, California
They later claimed that men named “Scott and Bob” were also present. (Scott Schubert was a known member of the Grim Reapers, but was never implicated in the Ackley robbery, as far as I can tell.) The Grim Reapers had waited for the Ackleys to leave for dinner before they broke in and ransacked the place. But Curtis and Shirley, coming home separately, returned earlier than expected.
Curtis, 28, entered the trailer first. He was attacked, his hands tied behind his back, a pillow placed over his head, and was then shot four times in the head execution style.
Suzanne’s mother, Shirley, 34, arrived next. Her eyes were taped shut and a cloth wrapped around her head. She was slashed, stabbed, strangled, shot once in the neck, shot again in the head, and then raped. Her nude body was found, legs spread, on the floor of the living room by a concerned neighbor the following day. A knife was still sticking out of her body.
Johnny Lee Sommerhalder and the other Grim Reapers took jewelry, coins, and a cache of 14 weapons back to their clubhouse at 840 Butler Avenue Santa Rosa, CA.
Richard would later testify that it was Johnny who broke the news to Suzanne. She began crying but, like Richard, was very aware of the guns and other weapons nearby. While Johnny spoke with Suzanne, Richard inched closer to one of the guns in case he might need to use it. Richard escorted her away from the clubhouse, while Johnny reminded them that if anyone said anything, he’d know who it was.
But a random passerby had seen Sommerhalder driving away from the Ackley’s trailer that night, and told the police.
At 4am on the morning of January 14, 1968, eight deputies surrounded the Grim Reapers’ clubhouse. A knock on the door was responded to with gun fire, and a battle erupted between Grim Reapers and police that woke the neighbors. The motorcycle gang surrendered when a Sonoma County Sheriff’s Seargent shot up the house with a submachine gun. Police later learned that a homemade explosive device rigged inside a lightbulb had failed to go off.
Johnny Lee Sommerhalder and Kenneth Allen Preston were sentenced to death, in part due to testimony from Richard Sommerhalder. The death penalty in California was revoked several years later, and while Johnny remains in prison to this day, Kenneth was released in 1982. For his crimes, Jack Brockman got life in prison. Thomas Casewell and Ronald Long were charged with felony assault and possession of stolen property.
(In the midst of all this, on February 27, 1968 another ex-Collector, Robert Blake Green, 22, was arrested for the rape of a different 13-year old girl, who disappeared shortly after he was charged.)
As violent as The Grim Reapers were, and as similar as their crimes appear to both Lori Lee Kursa’s death and the killings of Evelyn Mackenzie and Elmer Cowles, most of them were in prison by the time the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders occurred.
Richard Sommerhalder, meanwhile, was convicted on drug charges on June 30, 1971 after he sold 93 capsules of LSD to an undercover officer in Fresno. Richard was sent to state prison, where he allegedly developed Nazi sympathies. He moved to Aptos, California and got an apartment a block from the ocean.
In July 1976, he was arrested for raping two women before he was arrested again that September for raping and murdering two other women, Vicki Bezore and Mary Gorman. Bezore had been stabbed twice in the back, puncturing her spinal column. Gorman’s arm was slashed. Richard Sommerhalder beat the women to death with a rock along the side of Highway 9. He’s suspected in the unsolved murder of Karen Percifeld, an Ohio woman who was visiting Aptos while he lived there.
Richard Sommerhalder was paroled in 1988 and moved with his brother, Dennis, to the small town of Bokchito, Oklahoma, where he supposedly spent his days drinking beer outside his trailer. In 1990, a local reporter wrote about Sommerhalder’s past, creating outrage in the community—not at the Nazi serial rapist murderer living in their midst, but at the reporter for exposing him: “Leave that poor old boy alone.” Sommerhalder died in 1994.
Yet again, despite his connection to multiple rapes and murders in California during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, he was sentenced to prison just six months before the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders took place.
Speaking of Oklahoma, let’s talk about that LSD.
John Griggs was born in Oklahoma, but his family moved to Anaheim, California when he was still young. In high school, he became the leader of a teenage gang called the Blue Jackets—“These were the guys who parents worried about just before they started worrying about hippies.” A greaser who liked to fight, John and his buddies spent their time chasing down guys from the San Fernando Valley and “beating their asses.” He graduated high school in 1961, the same year he got married.
He belonged, for a time, to the Street Sweepers, an Anaheim car club known for holding drag races while wearing German army helmets. Within a few years, he joined a motorcycle gang and they’d ride around town, smoking weed and robbing supermarkets. In 1966, Griggs heard about a film producer in North Hollywood who had in his possession a new drug that he wanted to try: LSD.
Griggs and his motorcycle gang rode up into Beverly Hills and stormed the producer’s home in the middle of a dinner party. The startled producer was reportedly relieved when he found out that Griggs only wanted the acid: “Have a great trip, boys,” the producer is supposed to have said, as the men tore off with his entire stash. “Jesus,” he added. “I thought it was something serious.”
That night, supposedly, everything changed. Upon taking LSD in the mountains above Los Angeles, Griggs abandoned his violent ways and embraced the peace and love of the hippie movement. As the sun rose that morning, each member of the motorcycle gang threw away their weapons and decided instead, they’d sell marijuana and LSD. In October of 1966, ten days after LSD was made illegal, Griggs incorporated his group as a church. They became known as The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, aka The Hippie Mafia.
The story is apocryphal, and I question its authenticity if only because it resembles so many other quasi-religious charlatans who claimed to abandon their evil ways after encountering God—God, in this case, being LSD. As one member of Griggs’ crew later put it: “If you knew us, we were holy men, spiritual warriors. If you didn’t, we were just a handful of traffickers. We were both.”
For all the true believers who thought that LSD would bring about world peace, the realities of illegal drug trafficking meant that Griggs would have to find manufacturers and distributors. Griggs teamed up with August Owsley Stanley III, a chemist who got his start making methedrine before he turned to perfecting a formula for LSD. Operating out of San Francisco, they became popular with hippies in Haight Ashbury, and through these circumstances, a curious arrangement evolved.
Owsley’s products were sold by the Hells Angels, so despite the violent clashes that took place earlier, the hippies and Angels each needed the other—“soon, they were churning out up to 25 grams of LSD worth $225,000-$375,000.” They calculated they’d need to manufacture 720,000,000 doses to provide enough for everyone in the world who might want to try it.
To expand the operation, labs were opened in Denver while an even bigger site was explored offshore in Nassau. But in 1969 they decided on a property a little closer to home: 1367 Wilson Lane, Windsor, California, just 13 minutes north of Santa Rosa up the 101. From a small house in Sonoma County, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was manufacturing Orange Sunshine (4,500,000 doses in a matter of months), a “branded” LSD that would be taken by everyone from Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, to the Hells Angels and Grateful Dead, to the hippies in Haight Asbury and Charles Manson. They were the largest distributor of marijuana and LSD in North America.
Then, on August 12, 1969, John Griggs overdosed on synthetic psilocybin at his hippie ranch in Idyllwild. That same day, police were looking into the alleged rape of two hippie girls on the compound by Hells Angels while they were simultaneously investigating the drowning death of a nude 17-year old acquaintance of Timothy Leary on the property. Whatever idealism that created The Brotherhood, imagined or otherwise, had gone wrong.
Tim Scully, the man who built the Windsor lab for Griggs, later reflected on his role in the whole operation: “Although LSD carried a message of peace and love for him and many others, Scully came to realize over the years that it was ‘more of an amplifier than a message carrier.’ Looking back, he says it was a mistake to make it widely available, ‘to scatter it to the four winds, so young people who were too young to have fully formed personalities were getting it.’”
Back in Santa Rosa, the police were cracking down on the drug scene. In January of 1969, numerous raids were carried out at multiple properties, including:
- Robert Blake Green, 23, of 922 Santa Rosa Ave, Santa Rosa, CA
- Richard Asa Green, 18, of 634 Presley Street Santa Rosa, CA
- Gary Anderson Odom, 19, of 3180 Calistoga Road, Santa Rosa, CA
- Maureen Elizabeth LeBlanc, 18, of 1715 Tahoe Drive, Santa Rosa, CA
- Benjamin Roscoe Phillips, 23, 1120 Yulupa Drive, Santa Rosa, CA
- Richard Paul Merlo, 19, of 405 First Street Santa Rosa, CA
- Michael Lee Jones, 19, of 18180 Comstock, Sonoma, CA
- Peter Mathew Martinez, 19, of 600 Baines Avenue, Sonoma, CA
- Joelle Lynn Mayton, 19, of 15162 Marty Drive, Glen Ellen, CA
- Walter Sidney Mayton, 20, of 15162 Marty Drive, Glen Ellen, CA
- John Peter Barnes, 23, of 6470 Warm Springs Road, Glen Ellen, CA
- Clay Gavin Clithero, 21, 18304 Carriger Road, Sonoma, CA
- Jeffrey Thomas Sedgwick, 21, of 252 Wilking Way, Sonoma, CA
Police charged them with everything from selling hashish and LSD, to methedrine, barbiturates, heroin and amphetamines. Some would only have limited rap sheets or avoided police attention in the years after. Others, like the Green brothers, had already been arrested for kidnapping or rape. Gary Anderson Odom appears to have used his parents home on Calistoga Road as a methedrine shop for years—he’d gotten out of prison in 1968, then was charged with assault in 1971, forged credit cards and armed robbery in 1972, heroin in 1975, and a string of other offenses until he was finally arrested for holding up a Taco Bell in 1984. While his long criminal history doesn’t appear to include sex crimes, it’s possible his activities on Calistoga Road attracted others who did.
And while this wave of drug distribution exploded across Sonoma at the same time as a fresh wave of kidnappings and rapes in the area, the perpetrators weren’t always motorcyclists and drug dealers—but the lure of drugs often helped.
On December 4, 1969, Kathy Patricia Sosic, a student at Sonoma State College, says she was kidnapped at gunpoint when hitchhiking from the library to her home in Cotati. The driver was 40–45 years old, 5'8", black hair, mustache, 200 lbs, and wearing a light cream colored jacket. When he turned the wrong way on East Cotati Avenue, she asked to get out and that’s when he pulled the gun. Kathy jumped from the car while it was going 30mph, but unlike Lori Lee Kursa, she only suffered bad bruises from her ordeal.
Less than six months later, 17-year old student Eva Lucienne Blau disappeared while walking four blocks from the dining hall to her apartment at 395 East Cotati Avenue. Her nude body was found in a field at Groves Drying Yard in Santa Rosa the following day, naked beneath her coat. Her hands showed signs of being bound. Police later determined the cause of death was due to an overdose of mescaline (which seems to me unlikely) or homemade LSD, possibly the same substance that had killed John Griggs. A red pickup truck had been seen where her body was found.
The next day, on March 14, 1970, the nude body of Marie Antoinette Antsey was found at Morgan Valley Road Lower Lake, California. Her cause of death, was also attributed to mescaline.
On March 27, a woman tentatively identified as Lisa Michelle Smith suffered a skull fracture after jumping, when the driver demanded sex, from a red and white truck going 50mph near Petaluma Bridge.
There were no arrests.
Two days later, teenage hitchhikers Charleyce Whalen and an unidentifed friend were forced to take pills and cocaine by two men who subesquently raped them. Charleyce was shot four times and her body dumped near Half Moon Bay. Bernard Mora, 39, and Lawrence Fontes, 43, were arrested for the crime.
The Press Democrat reported days later: “Interviews with coeds and other college students over the weekend disclosed numerous instances where men have attempted to pick up coeds at night near the campus and incidents where girls have been molested. Most of them have gone unreported to law enforcement.”
The year before Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber disappeared—the first supposed victims of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Killer— the sheriff reported that more than 100 rapes had been investigated in connection with hitchhiking: “Heaven knows how many haven’t been reported.”
It’s hard to keep track:
In the wake of these deaths, young women spoke up about the need for public transportation so they might safely get to work and classes: “Being a woman, I have been threatened with rape twice. Both times I have had to jump from moving vehicles to avoid danger. I am becoming fearful of hitchhiking, but as of yet have found no other means of transportation to school.”
A March 1973 edition of the Concord Transcript reported “15 kidnappings, rapes, and murders of girls in the past six months.”
Shortly after, another woman wrote in to advice columnist Ann Landers to detail her sexual assault while hitchhiking at the hands of a middle aged fatherly type. “I figured I’d better not fight him.”
So who was responsible for The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders? After poring over the records for weeks now, I think the real answer is scarier than Ted Bundy or Zodiac: it could have been anybody.
When, in The Truth About Jim, Sierra Barter looked at the violent sexual history of her grandfather, Jim Mordecai, she saw aberrant behavior she assumed was so extreme that he must have been a serial killer, an outlier. But the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Killings only stand out now because they remain unsolved. The truth is there were dozens, if not hundreds of crimes just like them in the same area before and after.
Like Lori Lee Kursa, women were jumping out of cars to escape from men who offered rides then tried to assault them. Lori died from a broken neck and exposure, but others managed to get away. Her body was left where others had been left before.
Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber went to smoke weed with an older man. They ended up in the same place that many men were taking girls to rape and abuse. They just didn’t come back.
Kim Wendy Allen and Theresa Walsh were nude and bound like other victims in the area, but they, too, were unable to escape their captors.
Carolyn Davis died of strychnine poisoning. A 1971–1972 Congressional Hearing disclosed that Seconal and other barbiturates (like the ones Carolyn’s sister had overdosed on) were, at the time, being cut with strychnine. Was she intentionally poisoned or did she react to a drug that she took willingly or that was forced upon her?
Each of their deaths, each of their assaults and injuries, is a tragedy. And their crimes deserve to be solved. The scary thing isn’t that these murders were freakish events carried out by monsters, but that they were almost certainly carried out by the sons, fathers, and husbands living in the area.
Whoever killed them would be 70 or 80 years old by now.
They might just be drinking beers on their front porch and shaking your hand in church.
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