Thanks for sharing, Susie. Great news. There’s always hope…

Amen!! So great to hear!!!

This is an older article about the case, nevertheless many details in it. Plus below the foto of this ‘guy’.. Cathy Woods served 30 years for him. To be honest: For this guy, death penalty would definitely be a great idea (e.g. the bamboo method..).

Gypsy Hill killings in San Mateo (stabbings, in 2015 (!) the killer was found to be Rodney Halbower):

"It was 4 a.m. that stormy February day when an officer knocked on Sgt. Ron Caine’s door. He had a baffling case. Paula Baxter, 17 had vanished. She had left Capuchino High School about 8:15 p.m. Her car was found three blocks away, but there was no sign of her. Two days later, her body was found. Capuchino’s head majorette had been sexually assaulted, stabbed repeatedly and killed when a concrete block crushed her skull. The body was covered with leaves and left in a grove behind a Millbrae church. Evidence tied Baxter’s murder to that of 18 year old Veronica Cascio a month earlier. Cascio had been assaulted, stabbed 32 times, then dumped in a creek bed at the Sharp Park Golf Course in Pacifica. Both victims had long brown hair, parted in the middle. In the next four months, three more young women were found stabbed to death in North San Mateo County. All had long brown hair, parted in the middle. Ten years have passed since the murder, but they still haunt Caine, a Millbrae police sergeant, and everyone else who tried to solve them. The killer was never found. Cascio was last seen at 6:10 p.m. Jan. 7, 1976, at a bus stop in Pacifica. Her body was found late the next morning, about 200 feet away. She had been dead 12 hours. Baxter disappeared four weeks later. A friend saw her leave Capuchino, heading for her Millbrae home. “There was no indication there was anybody lying in wait in the car,” Caine recalls. “I have no idea how the suspect found her.” Baxter was stabbed with at 3-inch knife; Cascio with an 8-inch knife. Police never found either weapon. Eight weeks went by before the next murder. At least that’s what police thought. About 9:30 p.m., April 1, Denise Lampe walked to her car at the Serramonte Shopping Center in Daly City. Her 1964 Ford Mustang had no inside door handles. Lampe was found a half-hour later, inside the car. The 19-year-old Broadmoor resident, who worked at Serramonte, had been stabbed to death. The murder was obviously different from the first two. Lampe was not a high school student, was not killed in an isolated area and was not assaulted. But she looked like the others, and police theorize the killer may have been frustrated in his efforts to take her to an isolated area, ten attacked when she resisted. “It was obvious she put up a fight,” recalls Daly City police Lt. Jim Mendiara. “ I believe it was involved with the other cases. There was none before, then a series, then nothing more.” Mendiara says the door handles apparently had been removed by Lampe earlier, but wouldn’t say whether he thinks the killer was waiting in the car. If he was, it would have been almost impossible for Lampe to escape because of the missing handles. Police found fingerprints inside the car, but have been unable to identify them. The murders ended then. All that remained n that spring of 1976 were two grisly discoveries. Carol Booth, a 26-year-old who could have passed for a teen-ager, had disappeared March 15 on her way home from work. She had long brown hair, parted in the middle. On May 4, two boys walking along a dirt path near the Kaiser-Permanente Medical Canter in South San Francisco found Booth’s body in a shallow grave. She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed repeatedly, apparently on the night she disappeared. A pattern had emerged. One young woman had been killed in each of the first four months of the year, in the first half of each month. Now it was the first half of May. Each murder was in a different city, moving counterclockwise from Pacifica to Daly city. Those patterns and the victims physical similarities were almost all the police had to go on. Booth’s murder added little because she had been dead two months. Earlier evidence led police to believe the killer was a white man with brown hair, probably right-handed and strong. Hair samples from the Cascio and Baxter cases could have helped if police had a suspect, but couldn’t lead them to anyone. Semen samples proved the killer had type O blood. More than 40 percent of all white males have type O blood. Police agreed the victims were chosen randomly, so they could not establish a motive. All they could do was watch the pattern and hope for a break. A month later the pattern broke. Back on Jan. 24, no one had been too concerned when Tanya Blackwell didn’t return to her Pacifica home after visiting the 7-Eleven on Manor Drive. “She would often take off for a day or two,” Pacifica police Capt. Bruce Rivers recalls. But when she failed to return after a few days, her family reported her as a runaway. But as weeks and months passed with no word form Blackwell, police and family members began to worry about the 14-year-old, who matched the general description of the four murder victims. The fear became reality June 6 when two boys found her body, covered with leaves, in the Gypsy Hills area of Pacifica near the summit of sharp Park Road. Blackwell also had been stabbed to death. Rivers says her wounds were almost identical to those of Cascio, Pacifica’s first victim. Blackwell apparently was killed right after she disappeared, more than four months earlier. Police couldn’t even tell if she had been assaulted. But her murder broke the pattern. She was killed in the last half of the month, in the same city as Cascio, and outside the counterclockwise path. Police were left with five victims, all with long brown hair, parted in the middle. They could find nothing else connecting their lives or deaths. “Nobody ever came up with a suspect they could put their finger on,” Caine says. “We’re still not coming up with anything. This is an impossible case that has gotten worse.” Detective Bob Robinson spent more than a year investigating the Pacifica cases. Police took hair samples from 256 potential suspects, trying to match those found in the Cascio and Baxter cases. The detective even looked at the San Francisco Zodiac murders to see if they might be linked wit the local cases. Two Zodiac victims were young women who were stabbed repeatedly. Zodiac used to brag in detail about his murders, then said in a 1969 letter that he would no longer reveal whom he had killed. He boasted in later letters of killing far more people, but mentioned no specifics. Robinson says he doubts any connections between the local murders and Zodiac. None of his known victims was sexually assaulted, but at least three of the local victims were. Three men convicted of multiple murders in other areas during the 1970’s could not have been connected with the San Mateo County cases. Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy and David Carpener all were I custody at the time of the local murders. Meanwhile, Mendiara hunted for Lampe’s killer. He went across the country looking at similar cases, but found nothing to link them with the local killer. More recently, he ran the fingerprints he had through the San Francisco Police Department computer and another advanced computer operated by the state. In both instances, he came up empty. Robinson moved to Southern California in 1981. No one else in Pacifica has found any new leads. “Unless someone comes in and throws himself at us,” Rivers says, “there’s not much we can do.” Someone almost did. In April 1984, a Texas jury sentenced Henry Lee Lucas to die after he was convicted of the 1979 sex murder of a hitchhiker. It was the third time Lucas was convicted of killing someone. In a videotaped confession, he claimed to have killed 360 people, using “most every way but poison.” He said some were in California. Lucas was brought to San Mateo County to see if he cold convince police he had committed the 1976 murders, but he couldn’t. Lucas said later he hadn’t committed as many murders as he claimed. “I think he was trying to make himself the largest mass murderer in the United States,” Caine says. He believes Lucas made the claims simply to postpone his execution. Like Robinson and Mendiara, Caine doesn’t need to refer to his files for the details of the cases. They remain in his memory. He also remembers the emotions, especially from Baxter’s murder. Those emotions and Caine’s obsession with solving the case finally got to be too much for him. He had to take a week off work, just to get away. “She was a good girl from a good family,” the sergeant recalls, “I had a daughter that age.” Ten years later, Caine still hasn’t gotten away from it. “I’d give my retirement,” he says, “to get that son of a *****.” San Mateo Times, May 7, 1986

https://eu.rgj.com/story/news/crime/201 … 411443002/

QT