FORGOTTEN SACRAMENTO MURDERS-David Kulczyk

by Sacramento's greatest nation. The murders that shocked Sacramento two generations ago are now only remembered by a handful of people, but during its time, they startled Sacramento to its very core, including the original Boogieman, who in nineteen fifty six murdered a young boy in a downtown movie theater's men's room, the Mad Basher of nineteen forty one, who disappeared after his spree, only to reappear in nineteen fifty six to

kill five more. Teenager Raymond Alatschaw grew tired of his abusive father, so he killed him, his new wife, step brother, and grandparents in nineteen forty three. From nineteen forty nine to nineteen fifty one, hobo Lloyd Gomez murdered eight men in hobol camps up and down the Central Valley. His conscience caught up to him after he murdered a fellow

hobo for a couple bottles of beer in Sacramento. The despicable Robert Nicholas, the c SU Sacramento graduate who murdered his three small children in nineteen sixty four and was astonishingly paroled in nineteen seventy seven. This evil man stewed in hatred for his ex wife, murdering her. In nineteen eighty five. He died in prison. The unsolved double murder of grocery store clerks Philip Latimer and Michael McCandless in

nineteen sixty five. In nineteen fifty eight, Sacramento media was turned on its head after local television personality Ogden Miles was found murdered in a stubble field near Antelope. A violent same sex tryst doomed the married father of two. Sacramento has a long and sordid history of murder, beginning with the murderous founder John Sutter. Who taught thought nothing of killing Native Americans, to the recently captured Joseph DiAngelo,

who is accused of being the Golden State Killer. Sacramento has a reputation for creepy murders. The book that were featuring this evening has Forgotten Sacramento Murders nineteen forty to nineteen seventy six, with my special guests, journalist and author David Kolchik. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for a greenious interview. David Kolchik, Any, thanks.

and all that, and it's a great city. It's it's basically in a forest. So yeah, so our Golden State murdered the east Side rapist that happened in the neighborhood right where I live now, and my wife was about twelve years old and it was happening, and you know, that's when everybody got steel doors for their front door and all that. And you know what, everyone knew he

was a cop before any of this even happened. And he talked about the East Side killer, everyone would say, oh, he was a cop, he was a cop.

nineteen fifty eight. So, like I say, a sixteen year gap, let's talk about the Mad Killer of nineteen forty one. And you have the victims as Raman Revaz and Alfred Reid, and then three John does one, two and three.

There's a lot of little channels out here for irrigation for all the fields and stuff. And even now they find people, you know, decomposed and the slow, you know. But in nineteen forty one it got a little crazy because five of them showed up, actually more than that, but five of them for sure that were beaten to death. And the summer in nineteen forty one, first guy they found, he was outside of the town. He was too decomposed to identify, and they believed him to be Mexican or

Filipino heritage, about twenty years old. He'd been dead for a while, about eight months now. In August twentieth, they found Davis Rancher Elford Reed, and he was by this bridge. And oddly enough, the area it's still pretty pretty rural. It's still Sacramento, but it's very rural area by the airport.

And they found these shepherds found this guy, Elfred Reed, and he was all beat up and broken up and everything, and he was able to tell the police that he had been drinking with a man under the Ice Street bridge. There's only like two bridges in Sacramento in the Ice Street bridges. One of them road in a car bridge and it's one hundred and something years old. So these the hobos and people, well, it's right next to Old sac and Old Sentramento now is a state park in

the California system, and it's all made up. So it's a Wild West town. And that only happened since the seventies. For one hundred and thirty years, it was where you would go to pick up a hooker, or to buy heroin, or to drink crazy or whatever you wanted. It was like the den of vice or red light district. And

since they fixed it up, they tore down there. We had all these you know, facides on it, tore it off, and there's like the Old West asides and so now it's like where you go for you know, you take visitors to check out. But back then it was a real dangerous place where where homeless men got loaded out of their gorge. So they were drinking under the bridge and me the guy was going to give him a ride back to his ranche and he took him the

wrong way and beat an inch of his life. After the police and the ambulance came, they didn't know but a few yards away from that guy was another victim named John Sanders, who was found just like an hour after the ambulance is all left. It's kind of you think about police and the way they do things back then. You would think that they would form a circle and

you know, and secure the crime scene or anything. But you know, here's six seven feet away was another guy and they didn't even see him because of the tall grass and stuff. You know. So they find that guy and he was pretty messed up too, and but evidently he said that he bought about o wine and the next thing he remembers waking up in the hospital, he was really beating up the read guy, the first guy

they found. And a couple of days later and that Sanders guy recovered and left Sacramento, and uh, you know, an other days, I find that very odd, just as a journalist that journalists wouldn't have you know, got a hold of them and given him a few drinks and find out his side of the story. But it wasn't like that in those days. So just the four days after Reading Sanders were attacked, Ramond Revez shows up not too far away from where the other crime scene was

and he was already dead. While it was missing. He'd been in the water for a couple of days, some other bodies showed up. There's one this one of the john Does kind of became famous because this story. I heard of this story quite a while ago, like when I first moved to Sacramento, and it was written down

in some websites and stuff like that. And this they found, along with this guy with a felt hat from L Style Shop on K Street, and you know, they tried their best to try to figure out where, you know, who this guy was, but they never could. The funny thing is that later on, maybe twenty years ago, L Style Shop was like a underground punk rock nightclub. So you know then when I found that, I was like, hey, L Style Shop. Oh so yeah. The newspapers had a pretty good d D with it. They called them the

insane Slayer, the mad killer, the basher. They were always in competition for each other, the union and to be and the police said they mean it their top priority. But then again old Sacramento, Uh, during that time, just before that time, it was exposed that a bunch of police officers actually owned some of those buildings that were you know, whorehouses and illegal gambling joints and stuff. So the cops didn't really want to dig too much into

their little money making area. Pearl Harbor happens and the guy disappears. Nobody dies after that. So there's always been this thought that this guy, because he was extremely strong, he was like a gorilla. He beat these people to death. And there's a big thought that he was a Air Force member, because Sacramento had two major Air Force bases on its north and south side, Matherfield and McAllen Field. McCallum Field is where the two Little Raiders planes were

all outfitted and very major place. Mather was a big training base for navigators. And this guy disappeared and they never saw They thought maybe he was in the military, and when the war happened, he got transferred out. No one ever, It's a stop, just like that.

it up as a case. I've been too involved in Californian crams to really especially in those days, to believe you know, police actions, because you know, back in those days, he became a police officer because you know, Uncle Joe's kid couldn't find a job after he got the army. You know, it was kind of a last resort job. It wasn't a career where he went to college for like it is now.

the proson for it. But in nineteen fifty seven, in March, Walter Wayne Eins, thirty seven year old dairy truck driver who was very conscious of this guy who's gotten never missed work, and all his customers loved him. He went missing on March eighth, nineteen fifty seven, and that's the time when things start melting around here and the rivers start getting a little wild and things start getting green by March and Sacramento, so he didn't show up for work.

A couple of days later, they found his bran new pickup truck parked outside of Auburn, California, which is about forty miles up the American River and up by eighty two. This guy was not an outdoorsy guy. There was like no reason his family were just they were like, what would is, what would he do be? What would he be doing up there? You know, nineteen fifty seven, people weren't out hiking around in the woods like they do now or for the last thirty years or so. You know,

that wasn't something that average people did back then. So on March thirtieth, almost like three weeks later, fisherman discovers his bloated, battered body in the American River about five miles downstream from this truck. And he had a crease in his forehead, and they, you know, didn't know what to do about. You know, it's like this a murderer, Is this a drowning? His wife received some mysterious phone calls. It said that the authorities now killed your husband and

things like that, and she has changed her phone number. Then, in August fourth, Dwayne Darwood dow which can you believe that name? Darwood wown so he knew he actually knew Ams. They lived just a couple of blocks away from each other, and we're pretty close in the age. He's three nine year old salesman and he was seen cashing a check at a bottle shop and he was supposed to be going to church about a month month and a half later, they find him strangled in a remote area not too

far from the American River. It was all wild back then, it was all just rachland. Now there's a lot of houses and things there and you know, subdivisions and roads and all that, but back then it was still very wild. Actually, where I live right now, just until nineteen sixty was hopfields in the entire area for miles and now it's like wall the wall houses. So he had been beaten at death. His skull larycs were fractured. Now I find this really odd. His wallet laid on the log and

there's an empty bottle or wine bottle on top. Bit So for that long, no one, six weeks, no one even went around that area. I just find that so, you know, so different than what it is like now. And another thing, uh, there's no mention of them doing uh dusting for fingerprints on the wine bottle, which I found that. It's like, well there's another you know, cop misunderstanding.

So then just a few weeks later, on September actually just three days after they found Dowed, Charles Schrader has an eighteen year old Coast Guard reservists and he he uh told his mom, He's gonna hitch like it's another part of town, northern part of the town called Real Linda. Uh see some friends and he was found his body naked in the American River next day, just not too far from the river. It's head was Bashkin So November ninth, Thomas O'Dell. He was a seventeen year old sailor from

Yuba City. It's about thirty miles north of Sacramento. He joined the Navy to Sea of the World and he ended up being stationed at Treasure Island, which is just underneath the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. So he's like stationed in one hundred miles from where he grew up. Manga Zoo the world. He was found almost decapitated and naked in a ditch off Ardent Way, Yeah, two hundred feet from fair Oax Boulevard, which is now is like a total populated place. Back then it was field at Gus.

He was killed with a meat cleaver and his spinal cord was severed at the base of his neck. Now he was found naked and then the police they said that these weren't sexual assaults. They stressed that in the paper and by the late fifties they could actually say stuff like that. But I was wondering, you know what happened here? The sailor, that Odell guy. He was all

over town that day in Sacramento. People saw him all over the place, and it just made things really confusing and complicated for the police because they had so many places they had to run down, so many leads they had to go after, but they couldn't find out much more. He was seen with people that looked extremely different from each other, and there was no like one set person

he was with. So on April twenty fourth, nineteen fifty eight, Mary Jokum spown their husband, Jake, he had a junk yard essen stopping them to get something on the way home from the store, and he got distracted, lost track of time, and when he drabbed home in his house, his wife was gone, the house was dark, and he wasn't He wasn't too perturbed. He drove to their favorite hangout, the Pioneer Club, which was a bucket of blood places. I had another chapter about a murder that happened in

a year club. It was I've talked to some old timers and they were like, I wouldn't even go into that place, you know, and now it's like an overpass. It was like so evil they'd put an overpass over it. So, but she was over at that club with her with her brother in law eman a beer, and that place was it was like their local tavern. They had a very large extended family and they all bar hopped together

and things. And so Jake saw she was there and she was safe and that, and he just went home, didn't think anything of it, and she wasn't home when he got up the next morning. He thought, well, you know, maybe she's at a friend's house, or maybe she's at you know, his sister's house or something like that. And she didn't call them or anything. So they had no kids. They were married for fifteen years and they had a

pretty easy going relation ship. They liked to go camping and hunting and bowl together, and they really had their extended family. They really did a lot of stuff together, especially drink. So you know, they everybody in the family was like looking for it was like, wow, what happened. You know. Mary worked at a paint store too, and was like well liked and did a great job, and you know, like she was this you know, bar bar person really bad, you know, So he was driving around.

He spent one weekend looking for when she was at. When she went there, she was wearing her hair and curlers and a scarf over had like they used to do back then, So it's not like she was out, you know, looking for a hot date or anything. So by five days later, Jake was ready to file missing report and the police showed up at his junk yard and they found her body. East Levee Road, which which is the only probably has the crow flies, five miles

from from where they lived. It was an isolated lover's lane type place, and she was found with her throat slit and their underwear ripped off her skirt. She was obviously raped and stuff. Just a pretty bad mess. And she was also on vand stage as a decent Uh, she was decomposing pretty bad. That was in April too, which is it's starting to worm up there. No, that was in November. Yeah, and yeah, so she was a mess and Jacob really upset, you know, he's you know,

you can't figure out anything. Woman that lived nearby said that she saw a dark and green, older model car sitting out there. But because it was a lover's lane place. She didn't pay much attention to it. Now, the mad Basher was also reported driving a like olive drab, older dan type thing, which makes you think military, right, So yeah, so they couldn't find a thing about it. Later on

that year, some school kids found the charred wallet. We always have grass fires here, so that's not unusual, and it had money in it and some receipts and her driver's license and things, and there was a mystery they never did find. They never solved any of those crimes at all, those five And I find it very odd that I just stumbled across it myself as I was doing this research and put this together that I think that it was the same mad Basher from nineteen forty

one and sixteen years gap between the murders. So either he was a life in the military and he's transferred because of World War Two coming on, and maybe he was transferred back towards the end of his career to the Sacramento which happens a lot. You get lustered out in Sacramento, San Francisco and stuff. Those older cars that were green could have been a military, might have been an MP or something. Like that, but no one has ever found No one has ever solved any of those crimes.

Of either of the two sixteen year instances, they had a lot of common Six of the eight were middle aged men and the last two were sailors, and they were like in uniform, So he might have had some kind of thing against them, either because of the military or because they were sailors, or who knows, mean because they were young and dumb, and because he obviously hunted his prey. But I think Mary Yoakum, I think that was doing in because she's the only female involved in it,

and she was like thirty six years old. I think that this guy like had a hatred for everyone, and I think him seeing her, the strong, independent woman walking to her car from the parking lot of the Pioneer Club, you know, hair up in curlers and you know, not all dressed up or anything, I think it might have might have done something to them to make them go

off and kill her. But I think it's too too close that that she is part of the whole link with the other murders, and that happened sixty years ago. There's no way it would be a life these days.

varied motivations. If you have the woman and then you have you know, I mean, at least for profiling, I say, well, that would lead people into different conclusions, wouldn't it.

the war. So maybe you know she recognized them, or you know he recognized her, because that's how they founders, because their fingerprints are and file the military.

took a job there. And uh before before he was in college, he was in real estate and he also worked at McAllen Air Base and been a social worker, so when he was also in the Air force too. He could never could never stick to one thing. He would get fascinated by a subject of religion or a political belief and he would learn everything about it and become radicalized with it, and then he'd get bored with it and leave it. Leave it aside and go on to his next kick. So the subjects he was obsessed

with was military, aircraft, history, biology. He rejected his Catholic upbringing, became a communist, atheist, Marxist. Then he became a Nazi and start having a big racist uh ideas. His first wife was Norman Jean Laura, and they all lived downe the north side of town too. She got tired of she divorced a ma and a kid, and he paid

his child's port and then everything could. He was deep down inside he wanted to have custody of his two kids that he had with her, and so he worked a couple of jobs, did all kinds of things to make more money just so that he can afford an attorneys to get more custody or to get total custody. So he ends up marrying this woman named Charlie's Morehouse

and everyone called her Lisa. She was fifteen years old high school student when he got married, and they had one daughter named Wasssiti, and they lived in a pretty crappy apartment. It's still a crappy apartment. And he worked three jobs just to get money for his attorney and things. And in May of nineteen sixty four, his new wife, Lisa had enough. She wasn't see and she was still

in high school. She was a senior in high school with a two year old baby, and she said she wouldn't move back home with her parents and stuff.

So the next day, it was a Saturday, and Bob went to his first wife's, picked up the kids and said that he was going to take them to get their photographs with their with their step step daughter too. So she dressed up the kids in their best clothes and he drove away, all three of them, four of them altogether, three kids. They went to the toy store and spent ten bucks on him. Had a lot of money back back then for toys. You know, Frisbee was

like sixty eight clves. So after they went out to eat and he got toys, they drove to the end of a dead end road not too far away from his inlaws. He opened the trunk and asked children to jump inside to find the key that he had lost. The kids jumped in there. He pulled out a thirty eight caliber revolver and shot each in the hat twice a little this one got four bullets because he had to he wanted to empty his gun twice. He shot him.

All they had clothes trunk and went to Lake Tahoe and they drank and gambled and danced and went back to their motel room and early in the morning he got he had a panic attack. They took him to the hospital and he admitted to the police of what he had done, and there everyone was really shocked by this. He had three children. The guy shot his three children in the hat multiple times in the trunk and then he left the car abandoned, uh, just sitting there to

be found. A pretty hideous crime and it really shook up the town a lot. So he uh a psychiatrist, Uh, there's you know, this is the usual riga memoran one and said he was insane and said he couldn't have been insane. But he had a jury. His jury was made up of eight father mothers, and four fathers of one single person on the jury that didn't have kids. They found them guilty, sentenced them to death, and he

appealed to predict. In nineteen sixty seven, his sentence was reduced to light and then they got rid of the death penalty, and when nineteen seventy two for like eight nine years, and they parrolled him in nineteen seventy seven, which is just unbelievable ten years. He got ten years killing three children. Yeah, so yeah, it's just you know, outrageous. So he gets out of prison and he's stalking his second wife, Lisa. She had gotten remarried and took her

husband's name and everything. They had four kids, and by nineteen eighty five she was a stream from her husband and they live in an apartment with other kids. The kids were like three sixteen, and from all reports, she was just a person who would go out of her way. She was a very religious person, and she would have prayer sessions in her house from people in her or in her apartment, from people that were just down their luck or whatever human bad in her apartment building. Somebody

needed to ride, she'd give him a ride. And then this is what got her. So Nicholas got this self admitted alcoholic Pasquale bean Tony Lanini, and they asked him. He asked her to set up a meeting with her and gave him thirty dollars in some free booze. So this alcoholic guy, he asked Lisa if he can help her help him move, and she was like, yeah, sure. So she met him in front of a grocery store at eleven am and she had her son in the

back seat. He was only three years old. So he directed her to drive down this alley and told her to stop behind his apartment building, and he got out and left, and Nicholas comes pulling in, blocks her car, gets out and starts punching her and the little kids in the back seat just screaming, you know. And Nicrow stopped, went back to his car, got a gun and fired two shots in chairs and killed her. First shot killed her, and she lived long enough to tell the police that

it was her ex husband and shot her. And they arrested the DN Tony Lino within twenty four hours. And he's slaying like a bird. Of course, he was a pathy. He didn't know that she was gonna he was gonna murder her. He just thought that he wanted to talk to her, so he did that little trick there. So Nicholas he ends up on the FBI Tenmost Wanted lest He's gone for oh about a couple of months, about six six months. They find them in New York, Pennsylvania.

He fought exhibition all the way. They brought him back to Sacramento. They had to move the trial to Santa Clair County, which is down San Jose, And they said it was a case called the nationwide uproar with law and order types and They used him as an example of people being soft on criminals, you know, and in one case this is where they actually were soft toned criminal that guys should have never been allowed out of prison ever. So yeah, the truth thought came out, and

it's true. There were a couple of witnesses. There's a father and son who were in their backyard like cleaning weeds, and they witnessed the whole thing too. The police found dozens of notebooks in his apartment, rambling essays about how he planned and killing both Lisa and and Norman Jean Laura, his first wife in as well as a married couple that he believed had turned them in for film abroad.

He was a steaming angry man. He had went to his daughter's grave and daughter Heidi's graves, and he was unimpressed with her tombstone. He had given his her mother five thousand dollars. He wanted all his children buried together. But you know, that's that's how out of touch he was, you know, with this reality. And yeah, he wrote all over the place in his books, in the world around me as a jungle, I can trust no one, rely on, no one confide, and no one I am alone in

my struggle against the world. Abandoned, betrayed, and brutalized. Is it any wonder I am a barbarian that I am? Sure? Boy? So yeah, Yeah, he got he got found guilty and he died in prison seventy one. He died in nineteen or two thousand and three, eighteen years after he married Lisa, or after he murdered Lisa in thirty nine years after he murdered his three children. Yeah, I agree with you about the world that being there.

family event that's interrupted by the oldest daughter. Tell us what his daughter Angela or his wife Angela and the daughters are seeing on February nineteen forty six, what they avoid.

to get away from this guy. So he moved to Brighton, which right now is California State University, Sacramento. Beautiful campus, you know, just like you'd see anywhere, you know, stadiums and all that, lots of trees, But in nineteen forty eight, it was kind of like where people went to burn their garbage and the dump things in The mean line to Southern California for the Union Southern PACIFICA goes right

through there. It's a mejor railroad line. Back then, they had steam engines, so there's flints to smoke and sit and dirt all over the place. It was not even it wasn't even that back then. It wasn't even that far out of Sacramento, but it seemed like a world away. It was extramely about few miles from where I live right now. So back then it was just like shacks and mud and people had gardens and you know, probably trailers and just whatever. It was this kind of halphazard place,

some light industry things like that. He lived in a shack that the newspapers described as a garage, and he was about half a mile from the American River. And he worked as a farm labor dishwasher. He worked at a cement pipe factory. He got lonely, so he went back to his hometown Ira Puto, Mexico, which is south of Mexico City. It's quite quite a distance, and he sweet talked a local woman there twenty eight euro of Berti Komas and then coming back to Sacramento to live

with them. He told her lies that he was, you know, doing good and he had his own farm and blah blah blah. You know. So in June nineteen forty eight, he smuggled her over the border near Callexico, California, which is famous now for well now for the border things that are happening, but also because of that band Calelexico's one of my favorite bands. You ever heard them? Great band?

like springtime June. There's no dams on the river back then, so the American River is right and high, and the Sacramento River was Her body washed up twenty five miles downstream. A couple of weeks later. The other body parts they didn't find. So after a few months, you know, they find the body and they were like, oh, what's his body? You know see that a lot, especially back then, you know, it's like body found in slough, body founding river. So a few months later we got tired of living alone.

He returned to his hometown, found another female to bring back, and she was in her twenties, Maria Pordo, and he said that she was a successful man and come to me to Sacramento and so she did. They cross the border near Cawlexico. They ran to the Sacramento and instead of going Rachel his house like he did the first time, they seated at a hotel down in the west end of Sacramento, which was near Folk sac and the west

end was where all the nightclubs were and things. It was destroyed when they put I five through the town. They put it right through that neighborhood and destroyed it. So they stayed there for a few days, where he acted like he was rich and he was spending money, so they hired a cab. A couple of days later, they took a cab back to Breton, and when she saw the neighborhood, she recoiled. This according to the cab driver, she got really angry and she saw where she was

where they were living. They actually had a physical fight while they were getting out of the car and dragged her into his house and he killed her right away. Took the same hammer and over the head, grabbed his axe again, chopped up her head, legs, arms, and took two trips back to the river, tossed her body parts in there, and then he went to sleep. Next day

he cleaned up the place and burned a mattress. So her body was found pretty quickly and met too far away, like boy, let's say half a mile from where he dumped her, right by the Ice H Street bridge. And the other types of revealed that she was alive when she had decapitated. So they were wondering if there's a connection with the other torso that they found. There was a woman that lived. She was a neighbor of Corrales Ira Anderson, and she really she's pretty good. Interviews in

the papers and stuff, and her picture and stuff. She kind of looked like a nineteen forties old pitty like she had happened a movie and stuff, and she had heard her girlfriends told her about, well, aren't you feel bad about all the murders happening around here? She was like, she didn't know, and and they hurt she. They told her, and she remembered seeing Carls beating up the woman and

burning the mattress and they never saw her again. And he said that, oh, she won't be here for too long, you know, And she said, oh, what have you afraid? She's not here anymore? So she said, you know, she said, she never saw these women leave the company. She saw them go in, and she she was afraid of you know, if they didn't find the evidence, and she'd be living

next door to this guy, you know. So she was very careful about it that she did tell the police and they went and they discovered the bloody double bladed axe, six inch knife on the table. Everything is just sad blood resid do on it. And they took them downtown and dragged the river and they found the rest of Burdeaux. They found her head, she had her hair was still

had a ribbon tied in it and everything. And he pleaded that guilty and ended up getting charged with a second degree two canceled second degree murder and found a guilty sentence inm to death and he walked calmly into the the gas chamber. No one claimed his body when his wife was when he checked down his wife after they found out as sim she was still terrified of the guy. Wow, So here you talk about no right, oh, go ahead, No, I'm done with that one.

want to get beaten anymore. I mean, so, yeah, you always have to be a little a little suspicious before, like nineteen sixty four when they said that they got a confession out of them after a certain amount of time or something.

years ago. Uh, Delinda. She was a young woman, married, beautiful, just beautiful. She was twenty two years old, five foot one, you know, one hundred and ten pounds, just a little thing, and she worked at a packing company which is now I five goes right to the middle of it. But on April twenty eighth, nineteen fifty, which is my birthday, actually eight years later, where she worked, they got a phone call and this guy said, this is Nick Diaz.

I want to talk to my wife. And they said, well, she's on the line right now, but we'll leave a message for and she'll call you, you know, when she gets her break. And he said, tell her he's been a murder in her home and for her to come back home right away. So they thought, well, okay, well go tell her that. So when she got the message, she appeared startled and immediately left. She ran out, ran

out the door, and was never seen again. The night watchman guy was last one to see, said about midnight, her husband Nick, was out at a bar and they bumped into a coworker of hers and he says, hey, how are things going. You know, Delanna? You know we heard there was something happened at home, and he was like, well, you know, what are you talking about. There's nothing going on. And then he thought, well, her mother was sick, and maybe she got a call from her sister brother saying,

you know, mom's really sick, you better come home. And her parents lived in what's now real suburban Sacramento, but back then it was pretty real. So he just thought, well, she obviously just ran off to her months, you know, and it was late already. It was after midnight when he found out, so she wasn't home. He just thought, oh, I'll just call in the morning because it's obviously who she is. She's been a close knit family, you know, Mexicans. They've

been in the country about ten years. She had like eight brothers and sisters and stuff. So he called there when in the morning and they said, oh, she didn't she didn't come here at all or anything. So he went to the police, and the police handled it pretty quietly. They thought, you know, maybe it was a marital spat or something, and there wasn't any leads though. They were like, this is very odd and they you know, the guard

was the last person to see her leave. It's her description is she had long, dark haired green eyes, stood five to two with one hundred and twenty five pounds, and when she left she was wearing a red flowered bandana, a black skirt, yellow sweater, and a short dark green jacket. Pretty pretty stylish even today, you know, especially for going to work. So those two had been married for a couple of years. When they first got married, they moved to San Jose, but they got tired of the crime.

Their their apartment was attempted to be broken in a couple of times, so they has moved back to Sacramento where their family was. Anyways, they lived downtown. As really nothing, you know, they were just a married couple. Was anything different. They were Catholics and you know, they celebrated the things together and then so the police couldn't find out anything about it. They they questioned the as or husband because you know, they always figure that it's going to be

the husband that kills her. And they even had you know Brunning, an inspector from from Berkeley, the famous pop Elbert uh Raydal who invented a bunch of the techniques that police use to look for clues and things. He was he was not, you know, he was not the person. So at the same time, the women at the packing plant, you know, they're all edgy because you know, one of their coworkers got murdered, and so they started walking groups after work. You know, they got off working like late

at night. So they started walking in groups, and onetime some guy came up and uh told this one woman to get in their car, and these women like chased the guy off or when they're lunch buckets and stuff that the guy was. What happened was actually funnier than what I wrote, you know, but what really happened, it was like they were like, now I'm going to take any youth from that guy. So, you know, they tried, they checked out everything. They could not find anything, any

clues why she would disappear. Her husband thought that she had been abducted and raped, and that she was with her Catholic guilt and old world sensibilities that she was embarrassed to come back home. But on November twentieth, nineteen fifty, they found two teenagers were pheasant huntings in the south side of town and they found her remains. She was pretty much a skeleton with some skin and hair on it. She was killed unknown location and then dumped in the field.

They'd dragged her. There's still evidence of her getting dragged from the car about twenty feet and thrown face down into the tall grass. And she had skull fracture from a single blow of a blunt instrument. She had some rings on they she was identified by dental records and she had just recently gone to the dentist before she disappeared.

They had never caught the people that did this, and they had no idea, you know that it wasn't like her husband or her or their families were involved in any kind of criminal endeavors, you know, where like maybe they'd say like, oh, well, this is the revenge saying or something, nothing like that. She was it was just out of the plow as if they were like, uh, somebody like stalked her, you know, and saw her as a target. You know, she's just she's just a you know,

vegetable packer, lettuce pack her in a factory. You know this. One woman pained a few years later that she knew right around that time she had been in some business and she saw in the back room there was a naked woman, unconscious laying back there and a couple of men, and turned out that she had been in the mental hospital. And she said that the doctors wouldn't believe her either, But then her mother came out and said that, you know, she had she'd been in and out of mental hostels

all her life. The cops went and checked out the guy, and everything cleared out. They never found out a thing, even with the FBI involved, they never found out who murdered that Linda Daaz.

of that message to him. I just thought it was odd that he wouldn't do that, because certainly if he would have, then he wouldn't have concluded that, well, maybe she went to her mother's and maybe she didn't leave a note, and maybe she didn't take anything with her. And then his reason when he said, well, I think maybe she'd been sexually assaulted and she was ashamed, and so maybe she would stay away and not want to

see her parents. I don't know. Today. If I was a law enforcement i'd go, we better sit this guy down because that kind of language of ashamed, and I don't know, it just seems like not much of a theory, but in very interesting coming from the husband.

I guess he would be about eighty five now. But yeah, just does seem weird that you were she was which direction she was going to go and did they did they know her? Did they pull up in a car and say, Delinda, come on, they'll take you there. We're going to go to the hospital or whatever and peeled off and and yeah. And no one knows how long she was held before she was murdered or which you know. But I agree her husband was a little too nonchalant about the whole things.

want to know more information. So very very interesting and yeah, very very very mysterious and suspicious. How again, like you talk about how the police acted back in the day, and then the disort of incomplete information that can be found sometimes in how this was just incredibly just like you say, parole after ten years, even it's hard to fathom how they've justified that. So incredible, David.

our local newspaper. Yeah, like it, like it happens every day or something. You know, it's like wow, because you would think that would be his front page news now when it happens across the country.

boy in the downtown movie theater. We all all have. It seems like it's occurred everywhere, but this is the original story. So I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Forgotten Sacramento Murders. For those that might want to take a look at the other two crime books that you have. Can you tell us about website or Facebook page that you might have.