LOST COAST HIGHWAY-Gray George

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the Mendocino teens? Why did the teens go unidentified for so long? Were their murders linked to a series of unsolved homicides in the neighboring county, filled with gripping interviews and previously unreleased details about the Mendocino murders. Lost Coast Highway is the inside story of a shocking, multi generational tragedy. It is the story that the media won't tell you, and the bureaucrats didn't want you to know. The book they were featuring this evening is Lost Coast Highway with

my special guest, journalist and author Gray George. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Great George, Hi Dan, thank you so much for having me on tonight. Thank you very much. We had a great time last time with Black Knight Gold Coast, so welcome back. Let's talk right away because this is such an involved story and such an incredible tale. Let's start with how you came to write this book. You talk about writing Black Knight Gold Coast, and then you

were doing some research and the Dough Network. Tell us how you came to this story and Lost Coast Highway.

the central features of that book was familial DNA testing. Anyway, as part of researching Black Knight Gold Coast, I interviewed a law professor at UC Davis named Elizabeth Joe, and during the course of our interviews, she started talking about a new forensic procedure that had really come into vogue in the past few years called familial DNA screening, which allows law enforcement agencies to look for genetic similarities between DNA recovered at crime scenes and DNA profiles that are

stored in the National DNA Data Bank. Anyway, I didn't know that much about familial DNA screening before speaking with her, so after our interview, I decided to look into the matter a little bit more, and I found out that familial DNA screening really has two applications in the arena of law enforcement. One of those applications is suspect identification

and the other is identifying unknown bodies. And before I started researching the subject of familial DNA screening, I really had no idea just how pervasive the problem of unidentified decedents is. Every year, from coast to coast and around the world, law enforcement agencies find the remains of human beings whose identities they don't know, and because I had no idea of the scale of the problem, I decided

to start researching it a little bit anyway. To make a long story short, my research led me to this website called the Dough Network, and the Dough Network features just tens of thousands of profiles of unidentified decedents. Some of these decedents were small children, some were elderly people, some were middle aged people. Some of these people were found in big cities. Others were found out in the middle of the desert, were out in the middle of forests.

So as I was as I was writing Black Night, Gold Coast, I spent a considerable amount of my downtime just reading through the various profiles on the Dough Network. They were horrific in their detail, but at the same time they were really fascinating. They really opened my eyes to a sort of an esoteric side of the American criminal justice system. So as I was reading these profiles on the Dough Network, some of them just really stood

out to me. And one of the profiles that hit me the hardest was this profile that concerned teenage boy and a teenage girl who were found up in Mendocino County back in the summer of nineteen seventy nine. These were two white kids. One was estimated the boy was estimated to be about twelve or thirteen years old, the

girl was about thirteen or fourteen years old. And I spent a lot of time myself when I was young up in Mendocino County, and as I when I read that profile, it just immediately hit me that how strange that case was, how unusual it was that two children that age would just disappear without a trace, and then over the course of thirty five thirty six years would no one would have uncovered their identities. So that's how

I originally got involved in researching Lost Coast Highway. It was actually an extension of the research I was doing for Black Knight Gold Coast. Now you say you.

nineteen seventy nine. I really wasn't at Liberty at that time to investigate the case in all that much detail. I mean, I knew the case was tragic, and I had certain questions about it, but I was obviously I was in the middle of writing Black Night, Gold Coast

at the time. I had to finish that project. So when I finished Black Night, Gold Coast, I ended up taking a week off, and during that week, thoughts about the Mendocino case came flooding back into my mind, and I decided to take some time that week and just explore the case in a little more depth. And as I was exploring the case and reading old newspaper clippings about it and so forth, I just began to wonder more than ever why these teens had not been identified.

I mean, wasn't someone out there, wasn't a or a sibling or someone in their community aware that they'd gone missing. I just I couldn't fathom the circumstances under which two children that age would go missing and no one would notice. I couldn't figure out why there were no missing persons reports.

I could find on the case. And literally, in some cases that meant just, you know, driving down a street and residential community and looking for a guy who's out mowing his lawn and pulling my car over to the curb and getting out and talking to him. Other times it was striking up conversations with people in local coffee shops.

But at the end of the day, after going up there and after really beating the bushes as hard as I could, I did start to develop contacts with people in that area, and one contact leads to another, and eventually I did start to meet people in the local law enforcement community, a couple of whom we were willing to go on record with me in the book and not just give me information on background. So uh, that was that was really the genesis of my research for Lost Coast Highway.

the small town of Willets. So for your listeners who aren't really familiar with the geography of northern California, we're talking about an area that's about one hundred and forty one hundred and forty five miles north of San Francisco, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. This is a very sparsely populated area of our state. It's a part of the state that's covered by really dense, heavy coastal forest.

So the victims in the Mendocino case were discovered almost by chance out on this very very remote highway called Highway twenty when their remains were found about halfway down this vertical thousand foot cliff. Only one item was found with their bodies, and that item was a single earring. It was shaped like a little bird. It was made out of a tortoiseshell material, and for years and years and years, that was the only clue to the identities

of the two Mendocino victims. Well, when I was up there beating the bushes up in Mendocino County, you know, prowling around Yukayah and Fort Bragg and Willetts and these various towns up there, I started talking to some of the locals and one of the cases they remembered was this case of a number of female hitchhikers who had been murdered in Sonoma County back in the nineteen seventies as well, just a few years before the Mendocino murders happened.

And so I started researching the Sonoma County case. I should point out that Snoma County is the county directly south of Mendocino County along the one oh one corridor. So as I was as I was researching that case, I discovered that in several of those cases in Sonoma County, the only item found with the victim's remains was a

single ear ring. And as soon as I saw that in this report that had been generated by the Snoma County Sheriff's office back in the early seventies, that's when that's when the light bulbs sort of went off over my head, and I realized that some pretty critical information has probably been missed in the Mendocino investigation. And as I was talking to various law enforcement people up there,

I was more or less able to substantiate that. In other words, I think that Mendocino County law enforcement probably had the clue they needed to at least connect those unidentified victims on Highway twenty to Sonoma County. And of course when the Mendicino County, when the Mendicino teens were finally identified, it did come to light that they were from Sonoma County.

an autopsy was performed. The problem was the medical examiner couldn't really glean too many details about the teen's identities because they were so young, and because they were just skeletons by the time they were found, and because no

clothing or anything was found with their remains. So the Mendicino Sheriff's Department decided to bring in an anthropologist a forensic anthropologists to examine the remains and to try and ascertain additional details about the identities of these two unidentified teens. And so the anthropologist goes to Ukaiya and he examines the remains and he said, as okay, one of the bodies in this case belongs to a boy. He was about twelve or thirteen years old at the time he died.

He was white. The other skeleton in this case belongs to a girl who was about thirteen or fourteen years old at the time of her death, and those were the initial conclusions reached by the anthropologists. So, of course, for years and years after that, the detectives in the Mendicino County Sheriff's Department, through no fault of their own, were looking for a boy and a girl who had gone missing from some other jurisdiction in the late nineteen seventies.

Of course, by twenty fifteen, when the bodies were finally discovered, it came to light that one of the victims, the one who had been identified as a boy, was actually a girl. So all the time the Mendicino detectives had been looking for a boy and a girl who had gone missing, they should have been looking for two girls. And I wanted to know why that mistake was made. Obviously that was a pretty egregious error, so I researched

how forensic identifications are made on adolescent skeletons. My research ended up leading me to one of the one of the top people in the field right now. He's a professor at Western Carolina University, and he told me, in no uncertain terms that anthropologists should never attempt to estimate

the sexes of skeletal victims. He said, the reason is because until about the age of sixteen or seventeen, possibly even eighteen or nineteen, male and female skeletons are virtually identical in terms of the contours the pelvic girdles, the

structures of the rib cages, and so forth. And during, you know, during our exchange, I asked this anthropology professor and researcher back at Western Carolina University whether or not that was sort of the standard operating procedure back in nineteen eighty when the anthropological assessment was done on the Mendocino teens. And he said, yeah, he said, you know, we've done this for a long time. We've known for a long time that adolescent skeletons are hard to distinguish

by gender and that that should not be attempted. So he was really pretty flabbergasted that the anthropologist back then had even attempted to make definitive gender assessments of the Mendocino teens.

And so he does this interview just a few days after the Mendocino teens were found, before they had even been assessed by the anthropologist yet, and the sheriff of Mendocino County tells this reporter for I think it was the Yukaya Daily Journal that the best quote unquote, and I'm quoting here, the best guess of his detectives is that the remains of those two teens belonged to a boy and a girl. Now, I doubt that that is a problem with that. I doubt that the same mistake

would be made today. But obviously, making public on the record guesses to a reporter about the genders of two unidentified homicide victims posed enormous problems for the investigative trajectory of this case. And it also, I believe might posed problems with that anthropological investigation. Maybe the anthropologist was eager to confirm the guesses of the sheriff. Maybe he wanted

to favor with the sheriff. I'm just guessing there. I don't know that for a fact, but it seems sort of suspect to me that the sheriff makes this off the cuff guess about the genders of the Mendocino murder victims being a boy and a girl, and then suddenly, you know, a couple months later, an anthropologist reaches the conclusion that the remains do belong to a boy and a girl. It seems suspect to me, at least, and I try and go through that in a pretty significant amount of detail in the book.

shared some sort of biological relationship. They weren't sure if they were a brother and a sister, or if they were maybe two first cousins or something like that, But it finally came to light in two thousand that the children were not biologically related. A forensic dentist re examined the remains in two thousand and he determined that the

children were not biologically related. So that completely changed again the trajectory of the investigations, and now no longer were Mendocino detectives looking for two kids who were related to one another. They were looking for two kids who were not related to each other. And I should also point out that the forensic dentists with lucky landslods.

the FBI. They examined the case, They examined the case and the facts are very odd, but again no progress. And then you talk about July eighth, nineteen eighty nine, this ten year anniversary of the discoveries, and a local news station does a story and the viewers were shown this what we mentioned, the bird shaped ear ring now and the broadcast was across the North coast, and one of these viewers was a seventeen year old girl named Kelly Graham. Tell us about Kelly Graham, what she recognizes

and what is her response? What does she do?

to the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department. Well by nineteen eighty nine, ten years after the discovery of the teen's bodies or the teens skeletons, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department has still made no progress with their investigation of this homicide. So there's a short news segment that runs on the case. It's one of these periodic updates news stations do just to remind the public that there are two unsolved teenage homicide victims out there and they would like anyone with

information to come forward. So this broadcast of the case goes across the North Coast, And when I say the North Coast, I'm talking about the area of the part of California that's sort of north of San Francisco all the way up toward Oregon. A broadcast is disseminated across the North Coast that discusses the general facts of the Mendocino homicides. And one of the people who's watching the newscast that night as a young woman from the town

of Forestville, California. Her name is Kelly Graham. As soon as Kelly sees that bird shaped earring on the news report, she knows immediately who the two Mendocino murder victims are. Her own sister, Kerrie Graham, and her best friend, Francine Tremble had gone missing in nineteen seventy eight, just a

few months before the Mendocino teens were discovered. So as soon as the broadcast is over, Kelly Graham, as she explained to me during our interviews, immediately picked up the phone called the Sheriff's department and said, look, I think those two kids, those two kids you have up in Mendocino County are my sister and her best friend, Francine Tremble.

The person on the other end of the line asks her a few general questions about it, and Kelly explains that it was her sister and her sister's best girlfriend who had gone missing in December of nineteen seventy eight. The Sheriff's department on the other end of the line says, oh, sorry, we really appreciate your call, but you know what, we know that the two Mendosino teens are actually a boy and a girl. So appreciate you calling. Thanks, but we

can't help you. This isn't your sister and her friend. So that's the way that whole thing played out.

end up disseminating an online bulletin to that effect. I think it's worth noting, because we're covering so much ground here, that technology was changing pretty dramatically over the course of this case. There was no Internet back when the case happened in nineteen seventy nine, and there was no internet

all the way up until the early two thousands. But by the time the Internet was starting to go mainstream around two thousand, law enforcement agencies started uploading profiles to the National Center for Missing an Exploited Children website and various other websites, and in these online postings, the Mendocino teens who were still unidentified were described as hitchhiking runaways from the Midwest, and nothing, absolutely nothing happened on their case.

The detectives of Mendocino County could find absolutely no cases of any teenagers who had gone missing who matched the descriptions of the Mendocino teens. And finally the case just went absolutely ice cold, and it was ice cold all the way up until twenty twelve when the BBC, a foreign television station no less, decided to do an updated story about the case of the Mendocino teens.

And what they did as part of the special is they exhumed the skeletal remains of the Mendocino teams. They packed them up in boxes, they flew them to Enova Alexandria Hospital near Washington, d C. And they and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was able to coordinate a cat scans of the skulls these two unidentified victims, and the cat scan technology obviously was very sophisticated. It was able to reveal contours and dimensions of the victims'

faces that would not be observable to the naked eye. Well. As soon as those cat scans were complete, they were forwarded to a forensic imaging specialist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He's men named Joe Mullins and he used computer software to be able to sketch in these very lifelike composites of the two Mendocino victims, and one of the sketches was of a boy with

very pointy chin and kind of almond shaped eyes. The other composite was of a girl who was in her young teens, just like the boy, and she had kind of a round face and very open, expressive eyes and kind of thin lips. It was really sophisticated technology. But I think in my mind, one of the most significant aspects of the BBC Slash National Center broadcast on this case was what happened at a Nova Alexandria hospital. As the technicians in this scan suite we're unpacking the skulls

of the Mendocino victims. They ended up finding this extraneous tooth packed into the packed into the boxes, and they couldn't tell exactly where the tooth came from. They knew the tooth wasn't as old as the as the Mendocino teen skulls, so they examined it really closely and they tried to get a sense support it came from. Nobody

had any idea where this tooth came from. And I should point out that in the course of my research, I actually spoke with a captain in the Mendocino Sheriff's Department, and I asked him about this tooth where he thought it came from, and he just sort of shrugged his shoulders and says, well, you know, we think it probably got mixed into the remains somehow when they were packed

up here in storage in Yukaya. And I appreciated his candor, and I thought he was a good guy, but you know, at the same time, it just kind of gave me a sense of how how cavalier the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department was about this case. You know, he seemed totally this This captain seemed notal totally nonplussed by the idea that the remains of two teenage homicide victims, unknown homicide victims had somehow been mixed in with the remains of

some unknown person. And to the best of my knowledge, the person to whom this extraneous tooth belongs has never has never been identified. So anyway, to make a short story long, I think that the BBC's involvement with the National Center formiscann exploited children in terms of developing, this special reveals a lot about the case, not just the composites, but it also, I think unintentionally sort of reveals some information about the handling of this case that doesn't really say great things.

had no idea where the girls had gone. The families had always been told that the girls were runaways, even though they were both in their very young teens and had absolutely no money at the time. So Carrie had always she had never been able to stop thinking about her missing sister. So in nineteen eighty nine, Carrie sees this news broadcast. She tries to call the Sheriff's department. She's told no, sorry, we you know, we're looking for a boy and a girl. We appreciate your call, but

we know it's not your sister and her friend. So by twenty twelve, Carrie Kelly is even more curious than ever about the fate of her sister Carrie and Carrie's friend Francine. So one day Kelly is watching TV and she sees this BBC broadcast and lo and behold it in the broadcast involves the same case for Mendocino County that Kelly had seen back in nineteen eighty nine, and Kelly sees the online the composites that Joe Mullin had developed. She sees the bird shaped earring.

immediately knew it was her sister. She said that Carrie, her sister's front teeth looked exactly the same back in the seventies as the teeth on that skull did, and she knew immediately that was her sister. But Kelly didn't know exactly what to do after she saw that broadcast. She didn't know if she should call the Sheriff's department again. She didn't know if she should keep her mouth shut.

She didn't know if she tried to call somebody, you know, she would be laughed at and dismissed like she had been in nineteen eighty nine. Well, finally, Kelly starts researching the details of this BBC broadcast, and she learns that the broadcast was done in coordination with the National Center for Missing un Exploited Children. So, finally, in a last ditch effort to get some kind of closure on her sister's very odd case in disappearance, Kelly picks up the phone.

She calls the National Center for Missing an exploited children, and the reception she received at the National Center from Missing Exploited Children was diametrically different from the one she'd

received when she tried to call the Sheriff's department. The National Center immediately recognized the importance of Kelly's information, and over the course of several months, they put Kelly in contact with multiple people in the law enforcement community, out of state law enforcement officials so that Kelly can explain her circumstances to them, and finally, through this long convoluted series of events, the out of state law enforcement officials

end up prevailing upon the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department to submit the submit for DNA testing the Mendocino teens remains, and to collect DNA from the family members of Carrie Graham, who was Kelly's sister, and Francine Trimble, who was Carrie's best friend. The DNA samples are sent down to the University of North Texas and within a couple of years,

the positive identifications are made. The Mendocino teens were Kelly, were Carrie Graham and Francine Trimble, two girls who had gone missing from Sonoma County in December nineteen seventy eight, whose families never knew what happened to them, whose families had been raked with worry, as you can imagine, for thirty six years, And finally, in late twenty fifteen, the identities of those men of the Mendocino teens are finally discovered through familial DNA testing.

their backgrounds and I contacted both of their families. I conducted very, very extensive interviews with multiple members of both families, and what I ended up learning about Francceine is that you know, in some ways she was an unlikely victim. In other ways, it was like her entire life was somehow destined for this type of oblivion. Franccene comes from an extremely nice, well spoken, well educated family up in

Marin County. I've gotten to know them very very well over the course of my research for this book, and I should point out that getting to know them in a lot of ways was really the high point of my experience writing this Book's grandfather was a decorated combat veteran in World War Two who worked for many years as an investigative reporter for San Francisco newspapers. Later, he went on to a successful career as an executive with

Pacific Telephone. Francie's grandmother was a I don't know if I would be exaggerating to say that she was a musical prodigy. She was an extremely accomplished pianist who taught chiano lessons for many, many years in the Sandrafell area. The only quirk in Francine's life is that her mother ended up getting pregnant when she was a student at Sandrafell High School back in the nineteen fifties, and obviously back then there was a huge stigma attached to single motherhood.

Francine's mother and father were married, but the marriage dissolved pretty soon thereafter. Francine never knew her father. Her mother's life ended up spiraling out of control in the nineteen sixties and france Scene was placed in foster care. Anyway,

by the nineteen seventies. The mid seventies, when Franccene was about twelve years old, her mother was finally able to regain custody of her and by that time, Francine's mother, who again had grown up in very very comfortable, affluent circumstances in Marin County, Francine's mother is now living in this shack, this dilapidated little shack out in the rural

countryside of Sonoma County. Francine goes to live with her mother, and not long thereafter, Francine meets a girl in her neighborhood named Carrie Graham, and Francine and Carrie start spending a lot of time together as they make that transition from childhood into adolescence. Francceine and Carrie, of course, like most kids do, like I did, certainly, they start pushing their boundaries a little bit more and they start taking

greater risks with their safety. And not too long after they met, Francine and Carrie started hitchhiking, and one day in December nineteen seventy eight, Francine and Currie decided to hitchhike into Santa Rosa, which was about twelve miles from this small town where they lived, and the girls were never seen again.

so that's dismissed. And then you talk about a very important story in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and it speaks of it spoke of a possible connection with the Grahame and Trimble murders and a series of co ed murders from the same area in the Santa Rosa Seven girls and young young women were found in rural areas near Santa Rosa nineteen seventy two to midst nineteen seventy nine.

Tell us about what you consider really solid press coverage, local press coverage, what was the national media response, and tell us more about this Santa Rosa Press Democrat story.

favorable information about this case. But after the press conference was over, local media decided to go out and file stories on the case, and I think the best story that was written post press conference was this one by a woman named Glenna Anderson for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, and this story mentioned the fact that a few years before Carrie and Francine went missing from their hometown while hitchhiking, there had been a number of other murders in the

Santa Rosa area in Sonoma County, and in each case, a young female had disappeared without a trace, and then later her body was found off in the rural countryside. While that story kind of came and went in the Press Democrat again, I think it probably resonated with a certain segment of the North Coast population that had been around for years and years and years and remembered the case. But Carrie and Francine's case got relatively little exposure in

the national media. I know Fox News ran a story on it. I know that the story was featured in an Australian broadcast. But really at the press conference, there were no national newspapers. There were no media organizations from the Bay Area or from Los Angeles that had gone up there to cover Sheriff Hollman's press conference. It was know in many ways that press conference was much like

Carrie and Francine's life was. It was a fairly a spartan affair that was attended heavily by their family members, but really was just only attended by a few local reporters from up there in Yucaiah and Santa Rosa.

the past. Carrie had run away from home in the past, and so her parents, who had also raised two other children, both of whom had run away during their teenage years. Carrie's parents were not too worried when she ended up vanishing. They figured that Carrie was off staying with friends. Fran Scene, on the other hand, was a very quiet girl. She was a very polite girl. She came from very adverse economic conditions. Like you pointed out, her mother, Chrissy Walsh Tremble,

had no money in the nineteen seventies. Despite the fact that Chrissy had grown up in relative affluence, she was on welfare by the time Franccene came to live with her in the mid seventies. Anyway, when fran Scene was always very diligent about going home at the end of the night, regardless of whatever she was doing, she would always go home because her mother did not have a telephone and fran Scene didn't want her mother to worry

about her. So after December fifteenth or December sixteenth, nineteen seventy eight, when Franccene didn't return home, her mother, Chrissy automatically knew something was missing, something was wrong. She knew that something had gone wrong with her daughter, and so Chrissy drives down to a local market. It's a local market that's still there today in the small town of Forestville where they live. It's a place called Spears Market, and Chrissy goes to the payphone there. At Spears Market,

she starts making phone calls. The first person she calls is Carrie's family, and she asks if they've seen Francine, if Franccene is staying with Carrie that night, and Carrie's mother explains to Chrissy, no, sorry, Francine is not here. In fact, she and Carrie left last night and neither of them have been around here since. Well. Of course, upon hearing that neither girl is around, Chrissy's stomach automatically drops.

She goes home. She looks around Francene's room. She notices that Francine had not taken any clothes with her, and she also noticed something else that was even more troubling to Chrissy. Chrissy notices that Franccene left her favorite ring on her bedside table, and Chrissy knows that if Franccene was playing to leave for any prolonged period of time she would have taken this ring with her. So Christy is pretty frantic after she sees that ring. So she

goes back down to the payphone at Spears Market. She gets on the horn with the Snowma County Sheriff's Department. The Snowma County Sheriff's Department at the time, like law enforcement agencies all across the country and all around you know, North America. I think they were of the opinion that when children go missing, they were most likely runaways. It's no secret that, especially here in California, there was an enormous runaway epidemic back in the nineteen seventies, especially the

late seventies. So Chrissy goes down to the payphone. She calls the Snoma County Sheriff's Department. She says, look, my daughter went out last night. She didn't come home. She's a good kid, she's never been in any trouble. Can you help me find her? What can you do? I'm frantic, And they say, look, don't worry, ma'am. Your daughter has just probably gone to stay with a friend for a couple of days. We need you to calm down, We need you to go home. And just wait for her

to come back. So, you know, Chrissy has really no choice but to take their advice. Chrissy's car was an old clunker. It would barely make it down to the end of the street. Christy had no money. She couldn't go out and mount a search on her own. So

she goes home and she waits for fran scene. And this is mid December, against the sun is setting early and as as it's getting dark, and this this very cold, dark patch of forests where Chrissy lives in this little shack with franccene and her son, Chrisy gets increasingly concerned. She's very worried, so she goes back multiple times to call Carrie's mother to find out if Carrie's mother has

seen anything. She goes back to the payphone to continue calling the Snowma County Sheriff's department to ask if they have gotten any word on Carrie and or franccene, or if they'll come out and file a missing person's report. They continue to tell Chrissy, no, sorry, ma'am, we can't do anything. We you know, our hands are tied. We you know, we can't go out and look for every every kid who doesn't come home. And so that's where Chrissy was left. Christy was left more or less without options.

She was absolutely frantic when Franccene disappeared. She knew something was dreadfully wrong. She suspected the worse. She waited a little while to call her parents. She didn't, obviously, Chrissy did not want to burden her parents back in Marin County with information that Francine had gone missing. But finally she had no choice. Chrissy had literally worried herself sick. She had caused two ulcers to open up in her stomach, and her father went up there and her father took

Christsy to the emergency room. And while Chrissy was in the emergency room being treated for these bleeding ulsters, Chrissy's mother picked up the phone and started calling every law enforcement agency she could think of, and those law enforcement agencies told her the exact same thing they'd told Chrissy, that Kerrie and Francine were probably runaways, that they had just taken off from home, that she didn't need to worry that kids were running away all over the place,

and that she didn't need to be concerned. She should just sit back and wait for the girls to come home and not bother law enforcement because law enforcement was too consumed with more pressing investigations. And that's where things sat for years and years and years. But you're absolutely right, Dan, I mean, the attitude toward runaways and toward missing people and toward missing children was just totally different in the

nineteen seventies than it is now. I think there were really three cases that had a major impact on the public's attitude toward missing persons and law enforcements attitude toward missing persons, and they all happened immediately after Carrie and Francine went missing. One case was Aton Potts's disappearance in New York City in nineteen seventy nine. Another one was the very high profile kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida in the summer of nineteen eighty one.

And the third is the disappearance of a paper boy from West des Moines, Iowa that happened in nineteen eighty two. His name was Johnny Gosh and Eton and Johnny have never been found. Adam Walsh was obviously his severed head was found in a drainage canal. But those three cases really elevated the issue of public children to the level

of public discourse. And before that, law enforcement was the standard operating procedure for most agencies, unfortunately, was to you know, write off missing children as runaways, and that was sort of the path of least resistance for law enforcement. And you know, I think that in a lot of cases law enforcement was right. I think that kids were runaways. But in this case, obviously the outcome was much different, and no action was really taken immediately when the girls went missing.

involved these two girls, Marine Sterling and Avon Weber. The mother drops them off at seven thirty at night at the ice arena. She comes back at eleven o'clock and Marine and Yvonne are nowhere to be found. The mother gets out of her car. She goes into the ice arena. She looks all over the place. She can't find the girl. She goes into the snack shop, she goes into the bathroom. She walks around the ice arena. She looks out on

the sidewalk. She looks out in the parking lot. The girls are absolutely nowhere to be found, So the mother is worried. I mean, Marine and Yvonne, from everything I could gather, they were very nice girls. They were not the kinds of girls who would just run off, especially considering that they had no clothes, no money, nothing. The mother is terribly worried, so she contacts the other girl's mother. They go down to the police station in Santa Rosa,

which is the seat of Sonoma County. It's the largest city in Sonoma County, and they file missing persons reports on their daughters and they are told the same thing that Chrissy Tremble and Margaret Graham who is Francine, who is excuse me, Carrie's mother were told in the late seventies. This mother is told that her daughter is a runaway. If Vonn's mother has told this, Marine's mother has told this, and they're told to go home and sit and wait

for the girls to come home. And again at the time, I think it might be a little bit harder for some contemporary listeners to appreciate just what it was like back in the early seventies. But in the early seventies, you know, there weren't show was on network television every single night about serial killers. There weren't there.

go along with what law enforcement wanted. Law enforcement, the Santa Rosa Police Department wanted those parents to just go home and be quiet and wait for their daughters to return. And that's what the parents did. I mean, I can only imagine they worried themselves sick after Marine and Ivonne disappeared, but nothing happening. I should point out too that this

is not a condemnation of contemporary law enforcement. I spoke with a sergeant in the in the Santa Rosa Police Department in the course of researching this book, and he told me, he said, look, Gray, he said, you know, every time a missing person's case gets called into my unit, and by the way, he's the gentleman who handles all the missing person's cases in Santa Rosa, his unit does He told me, we take these cases very seriously, and he said there are laws on the books now that

mandate how we respond to these cases. He told me, you know, if a case like Marine Sterling and von Weber's happened today, patrol officers would immediately roll out there to the ice arena and take a statement from the mother, And because of the girl's ages, a detective would immediately be assigned to the case. Marine and yvon would be known as what would be known as what we call today high risk victims because of their very young ages. And so this this type of case would be handled today.

But yeah, that's essentially the upshot of Marine and Yvonne's case.

very remote Kirby road called Enterprize Road. And as they're traversing Enterprise Road, they find this patch of shade near a small creek bed and they pull over to the side and they decide to let their bikes cool down. So as their motorcycles are cooling down, John Blin and his friends just start wandering I don't know, twenty or

thirty feet up the road. And as they're wandering up the side of the road, John Bly happens to look off the east side of the road and he sees what he thinks is a mannequin down near the bottom of this creek bed that's about twenty feet below the roadway. And the way he explained it to me. He turned to his friends and he said, hey, guys, look at that mannekin down there in the creek bed. And he said, and I quote, you know, as soon as those words were out of his mouth, he knew immediately that it

must be a homicide victim. So John bly decides to walk down and he examines the body. He confirms that it is the nude body of this young woman who appears to be a female in our late teens. He sees deep, dark black bruises circling the circumference of her neck, and at that point he knows he's definitely looking at

the body of a homicide victim. So he runs up, jumps on his motorcycle, leaves his two friends there to wait with the body, and he roars away a couple miles to a farmhouse and calls the Snoma County Sheriff's Department, who immediately respond to the scene out there on Enterprise Road.

listeners are seasoned veterans of the true crime genre. Of these real life murder cases, I have to say that the details of Kim Allen's murder are probably the worst thing I have ever read. Kim Allen had been murdered by ligature strangulation, and the coroner was able to determine that Kim was not strangled all at once. Instead, she'd been raped at some point, and then the person or persons who murdered her had wrapped a soft ligature around her neck and pulled the thing tight so it would

cut off her air supply. Kim, by the way, I should point out, had been bound at the wrists and angles during her strangulation, and they were able to determine that by the very very deep, severe bruising on her wrists and angles. So as this person is strangling Kim Allen with a ligature, he waits until she just about blacks out, and then he releases the tension on the ligature so she's able to suck more oxygen into her lungs.

And then after just a couple of minutes or after a certain period of time, after she's been able to catch her breath, he pulls the ligature tight again strangles her again, and the coroner determined in really horrific detail that this strangulation torture process had gone on for at least thirty minutes before this young woman, this young college student had expired. And you know, I think we can only imagine what it must have been like for the

victim in that case. Then again, you know, maybe we aren't able to fully appreciate how just how horrible that type of a murder would be.

troubled life. You find that she stayed with friends for a couple of weeks and then vanished around November twentieth or twenty first, nineteen seventy two, and tell us when she was discovered and what were the conditions of that body when they found her.

down to the valley floor. He looks over the guardrail and he sees a chalky white body about forty or fifty feet below the guardrail, and so he runs. He contacts the Sheriff's department. The Sheriff's department responds to Kalistoga Road. They get out of the cars, they go down the embankment that they look at the body, and when the body is finally taken back to the morgue, gets identified as this thirteen year old girl, Lourie Lee Cursa and

detectives are mystified by her murder. They can't figure out even how she died. Two of Lourie lee curses cervical vertebrae had been really badly dislocated, and that broken neck could have contributed to her death. That was the finding of the corner. But the most compelling finding of the autopsy and the ensuing investigation is just how similar Lorii Lee curses murder was to Kim Allen's murder out on

Enterprise Road. I mean, here you had two young females, both dumped in the nude, both dumped down all most vertical embankments, both dumped out in the middle of nowhere on these little known roads that no one but a local would even know how to access. So it was at that point that sheriff's officials started looking at a potential connection between the cases. I mean, and again, this is a time when the term serial killer did not

even exist. The Sheriff's department at the time did have reasonably that these two cases might be linked to one another. And when they found out that both Kim Allen and Lori Cursa had were seasoned hitchhikers who had disappeared while hitchhiking, that was when the alarm bells went off, especially within the broader community.

back to one of their homes. They alert law enforcement. Law enforcement response to the scene. They end up combing this embankment, this very steep embankment, and this very rural road, and they end up finding that there are two skeletons out there. Both skeletons belong to children. Of course, they couldn't determine the genders of the children because of their ages, but they could tell that these were young kids. They find big clumps of law ung hair with the victims,

so they determine that they're probably girls. And as the sheriff's officials are searching the steep embankment off Franz Valley Road, they made two really crucial discoveries. One of the discoveries is a necklace, a gold crucifix necklace that's found sort of along the shoulder of the road directly above the embankment where the bodies are found, where the skeletons are found. And the other is a single earring that was found with the remains. And obviously it's unusual for someone to

just wear a single ear ring, especially back then. So sheriff's officials ended up clearing all the brush off the side of that hill. They sifted, they sifted earth, they picked through sticks, they picked through down trees, They looked everywhere they could find for that second earring, couldn't find

it anywhere. So again, now they have a total four homicides in Sonoma County, all of the involve young females, and the first one and anyway, when they take the two skeletons from Franz Valley Road back to the morgue, they end up discovering that it's Maureene Sterling and Yvonne Weber, who had been missing since the previous Stebruary.

potential link. Them. Similarities between these cases that I mentioned in the book were all my byproducts of my own research, and there are many, many manymo similarities between these cases. But yeah, I don't think law enforcement ever fully explored those because if they had, I don't think it would have taken thirty six years to identify Kerrie and Francine as being residence of Sonoma County.

similarities between all the cases. So you know, obviously all of the cases involved young females who had been murdered and who had been dumped down very steep embankments out in the middle of nowhere. The geography of all of these areas is virtually identical. We're talking about very remote roads out in the middle of nowhere, and all of them were All of these roads were situated beside very steep embankments. So those are obviously some of the PRIMARYMO

similarities between the cases. In terms of geographic similarities. Yeah, I mean, they're all kind of northeast of Santa Rosa, they're all in Sonoma County, They're all within just a few minutes of each other. So yeah, those are a few of the similarities. And I go into much greater detail in the book. So if anyone's interested in getting a really comprehensive understanding of them and signature and geographic

similarities between these cases. Definitely check out the book because I go into it and excruciating detail.

were committed by the same person. But yeah, So, the last victim in Sonoma County is found in July of nineteen seventy nine, and they end up establishing that she was probably murdered in nineteen seventy three or nineteen seventy four. Then there's this gap of five years, and there is no record of any young women going missing in Sonoma County.

No more bodies are found in Sonoma County. It appears that this horrific series of murders that was taking place in the early nineteen seventies comes to a screeching halt, and law enforce is continuing to investigate it, of course, but they're never able to identify the person responsible for these murders. So then in December nineteen seventy eight, Carrie Graham and Francine Tremble disappear from Sonoma County, and the following summer, their skeletons are discovered up in Mendocino County.

And you know, it just occurred to me that that's a major difference. In the early seventies, all of these victims, all of these young females, were being dumped up northeast of Santa Rosa, or east of Santa Rosa in the case of Ken Allen. And then you have Carrie and Francine, whose murders are virtually identical, right down to that single earing being left with their remains. They're dumped eighty miles

to the north in Mendocino County. And as I was thinking through the logistics of the case, I said geez, you know. I mean, if it's the same guy who's responsible for all these cases, why wouldn't he just take Carrie and Francene out and dump them out there somewhere east of Santa Rosa like all of the other victims. Who's to whose murders they were identical? And then it hit me that, you know, now, it could be a case of someone, some guy from somewhere going to prison

for five years. Let's say around nineteen seventy three or nineteen seventy four. He's in prison for five years, not on a murder beef. It could be anything. He could have been in there on a rape charge. He could have been in there on a robbery or burglary charge something. Anyway, he's in prison for five years, he gets out. When he gets out, he ends up facing certain stresses in his life. He sees Kerry and Francine out hitchhiking on the side of the road, so he picks him up.

He murders them, but he doesn't want to dump them out east of Santa Rosa, where he dumped all the other victims back in the early seventies. He knows that if he dumps them out there, law enforcement is going to know that the murders have resumed, and maybe they're able to put together the timeline of his release from prison, or you know, there's some series of events they're able to identify him as a suspect in the case. So where does he go? Well, the only freeway that runs

through Santa Rosa is the one on one. So it occurred to me that if you go south out of Santa Rosa on the one on one, go down to Marin County, which is very suburban, and then south of that is San Francisco obviously, which is a very urban area. On the other hand, if you go north out of Santa Rosa on Highway one oh one, you go into Mendocino County. Like I said before, it's a very rural county. Lot of isolated forest out there, perfect place to go

dump a body. And so it occurred to me that if someone wanted to throw off law enforcement, if there's a five year hiatus between murders, and he doesn't want the murders of Francine and Carrie to be connected up, it would be very clever of him to go dump these bodies in a neighboring county, particularly a county that's not known for having an ultra aggressive law enforcement presence. Mendocino County is probably best known in pop culture as

the center of a lot of marijuana growing activity. It's not a place, you know, where law enforcement is ultra aggressive, So it would be a pretty good place to dump a body back in the nineteen seventies. And anyway, that is complete conjecture on my part. I'm not saying that's a definitive, definitive explanation for why Carry and Francine ended up there, but I think it's something worth considering in the context of the case as a whole.

that time. He was still very young. He went out there and he told me he had a heck of a time trying to find the exact spot where the skeletons were out in the woods. But finally he was able to figure out where the bodies were and he was able to summon help to the site out there and get the skeletons collected from up in Mendocino County well. As part of my research for this case, I reached

out to him. Of course, most of the detectives who worked the case at the time had been dead for decades by the time I even learned about this case, so I ended up reaching out to Roy Gorley, and anyway, we decided to meet up up in Sonoma County this past summer. In fact, it was almost exactly a year ago, and I met up up there and while I was there, he told me more about his career and by just

sheer coincidence. In the early nineteen nineties, about halfway through his career, he decided to transfer from the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department and go to work down there. And when he's working in the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department, he ends up working in the

violent Crime Unit, which investigates homicides in Sonoma County. So one day, he said it was sometime in the midnightties he didn't know exactly when he was going through and reviewing some cold cases in the homicide unit of his department, and he came across the hitchhiker murders, and at the time he didn't really he didn't make the connection, the possible connection between the hitchhiker murders in the Santa Rosa area and the two skeletons found up on that he'd

found up on Highway twenty back in nineteen seventy nine.

Of course, about sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years had passed between the two events at that point, so it's probably not surprising he did not make that connection anyway, Like I say, I decided to go up and meet Sergeant Gorley for lunch one day this past summer, two summer of twenty sixteen, and while we were having lunch, I decided to just kind of lay out my thesis about the possible connection between the Graham Tremble homicide up there in Mendocino County

and the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders. And you know, my thinking at the time was, look, I'm not a detective. I'm not a member of the law enforcement community. I don't know if it would be wise for me to go out write an entire book about a potential link between these cases when I might not know what the

heck I'm talking about. So at lunch, I laid out all the connections between these cases that I saw, all the connections in terms of modus operandi, all the geographic similarities between the cases, all the signature similarities as far as the earring and other factors were concerned to Sergeant Greley, and I'll never forget, you know, as we're sitting there and we're talking about the similarities between these cases, you know, his face took on this very serious look, and I

could tell, you know, when he started nodding along with me. I could tell that the potential connections I saw between these cases were probably more than my own overactive imagining running away with itself. So after I got done laying out all my information for him, he said, yeah, he's like, you know, I think you're making some excellent points. And he's like, it's too bad that that wasn't looked at back at the time, because it's possible these girls could

have been identified. It's possible that that's an angle we could have worked in terms of looking for a connection between the Mendocino County skeletons and the murders down in the Santa Rosa area. And after lunch, he and I decided to go out and inspect one of the sites. He had never been out to Franz Valley Road, the site where Carolyn Davis, Marine Sterling, and von Weber had been found back in the early nineteen seventies. So he and I drove up there and it was just it

was a swelteringly hot day that day. I mean, he is standing in the shade. It was well over one hundred degrees. He and I get out of the car, though, and we're standing back up in this remote wooded area on the side of this isolated road. There are no houses around, there are no buildings around. I'm sure it probably looks more or less the same today than as it did back in the early seventies when the girls were dumped up there. But as we're standing there, we

were both just kind of quiet. I was just sort of lost in my own thoughts, and I could tell I suspect that he probably was too. And after a few minutes, I said, you know, what do you think? And he said, you know, I'm just sitting here looking at the way the embankment falls away from the edge of the road, and he said, you know, now that I'm looking at it, he said, this looks almost identical to the place where I found those two skeletons up

in Mendocino County back in nineteen seventy nine. I said, well, what does that tell you? And he looked at me with this expression of untrammeled sincerity on his face, and he says, to me, you know, Gray, this had to be the same guy. He's like, it must have been, just the way this looks, the earrings, the similarities between the cases, the victimology. He's like, you know this, it must have been the same guy who did all of this.

So yeah, it was really an extraordinary statement, and he provided me with a lot of really invaluable help in putting this book together and making sure that it was accurate.

magazines from the nineteen seventies. They were really popular in the nineteen seventies. They weren't pornographic, at least they weren't explicitly pornographic, but I remember, you know, seeing covers of those online and that sort of thing, and they often involve themes of torture, and it was a fairly common trope among those detective magazines that that type of bondage configuration was used. So anyway, yeah, both of these young

women had been bound hand and foot. A noose had been connected to their ankles, the noose had been put around their necks, and then the whole idea of that bondage configuration is that as the victim's legs tire, they can't keep their knees flexed anymore, so they have to try and straighten their legs as blood clots form around their knees. And then of course, as the bound victim tries to extend her legs, the noose ends up strangling

around the neck. And there were two victims who were found bound in almost exactly the same way using that bondage configuration in Sonoma County. One of the young women was found not too far from Franz Valley Road in December of nineteen seventy three. The other one was found It took years and years and years to find her, but she was found just a few feet from where

Lori Cursa was dumped up off Calistoga Road. And by the time they found that young woman, of course the ropes were still looped around her body and her neck. But you know, she was just a skeleton. She'd been dead for almost a decade by the time they found her body in nineteen seventy nine. So yeah, you're right,

it was a torture device. I think it speaks to the psychopathy of the offender who committed these crimes, and it just speaks to the overall depravity of what happened in Sonoma County back in the nineteen seventies.

missing person. But the last time she was seen, she was seen getting into this pickup truck driven by a guy who was described as a white male, maybe in his twenties, between twenty and thirty years old. He was driving a brown Chevy pickup and Jeanette Camma Heey was never seen again. We don't know if that's the offender. Obviously, that could have just been some good samaritan who was

giving her ride. And that's one of the confounding things about this case is every lead sort of makes you wonder, well, you know, this, is this a true lead or is it just a red herring? But yeah, so she was seen getting into that brown pickup. Also, around the time Lorii Cursa disappeared, a witness reported seeing a young blonde girl, and of course Lorii Cursa was a young blonde girl sitting in a pickup truck with a guy with bushy hair up near the summit of Kalistoka Road, near where

Lori Curs's body was found. So it makes you wonder if maybe the same person who picked up Jeanette Cammi Healy had picked up Lorii Cursa and murdered her. I don't think that. In fact I met that lead did not go anywhere, but it was just it was just one more fascinating detail in this case that could potentially point potentially and I use the word potentially there very strongly. It could potentially point to the identity of the offender in this case.

enforcement who don't think these cases are connected. Or they don't think they should have been They don't think that they should have been investigated as part of the same potential murder series. But I end up, you know, describing the Green River Case, or I end up alluding to the Green River Case in Lost Coast Highway, because I think it's a real blueprint for how to solve this type of murder investigation. As most of your listeners are aware, I'm sure the Green River Case was a case that

started back in nineteen eighty two. Authorities up in the Seattle area were finding corpses of young women, young murdered women all over the Seattle area, and the authorities up in Washington State had no idea if all the murders were connected. In fact, there were people in the FBI and various psychological experts around the country who said that, no, these are the work of multiple killers. You need to

be looking for multiple guys. But what the King County Sheriff's Office finally decided in the Green River case is that they it was incumbent upon them to investigate all these homicides as the work of the same offender so they could cross reference the suspects and the leads that were developed in one case with potential leads in another case.

In other words, by cross referencing all of those suspects in each individual Green River homicide, they could potentially find links that they might not identify if they were investigating each specific each Green River homicide in a vacuum. And I think that was an absolutely brilliant move on the part of the King County Sheriff's Office up in Washington.

If they had investigated each of those prostitute murders in the Seattle area in the early eighties as the work of separate offenders, it's very possible that Gary Ridgeway, the suspect in that case who was ultimately proven to be the Green River killer through DNA, I think there's a good likelihood that he never would have been identified. The only reason he was identified is because the King County Sheriff's Office in Washington worked so diligently to cross reference

leads between these cases. And I think that's what has not been done in the case of the Graham Trimble homicide of Mendocino and the hitchhiker murders in Sonoma County. I think that the Green River homicide investigation provides almost a perfect blueprint for how to potentially investigate these cases up in Sonoma County. If the cases are investigated separately, it's possible these law enforcement agencies may not share critical information that would point to one suspect, or there may

be some piece of evidence that's missed. But yeah, I definitely think a coordinated investigation along the lines of the one in Washington State for the Green River investigation might pay off big dividends in this case, and in fact, it might be the only way to reach any to achieve any real justice in Carrie and Francine's case and the cases down in Snowma County.

for decades and not be identified. And by the time I finished researching this project and writing about this project, I think I have my answers. I think one reason is because there was not a lot of community engagement back at the time I fran Scene and Carrie went missing from their small town, this very very small town of less than three thousand people out in the middle of nowhere, and their friends never even knew they were missing.

Their school officials never raised a stink about it. Law enforcement didn't fill out missing persons reports on the cases. An exhaustive investigation was never done. You had two girls who disappeared from this tiny, small town out in the middle of nowhere, and it barely raised an eyebrow among the people of that communities. There was no real outpouring of support for looking for these girls. So I think that's one thing that contributed to them going unidentified for

thirty six years. I think another thing that obviously contributed to it was the technological limitations of that time period. The Internet was non existent when they disappeared. There were no DNA databases, there were no national organizations that could help coordinate the collection of DNA and biological materials to

help identify unidentified decedents. And I think one of the other big reasons here, and I know i'll catch flag for this, but I think another big reason is I think law enforcement really dropped the ball on this case. I think a potential link between the between the Mendocino County murders back in the late seventies and those orders that were virtually identical down in Snoma County should have been investigated in depth, even if these cases are completely

not related. If law enforcement had identified the similarities between the cases and then they had searched for missing children from Sonoma County, I think there's a good chance they might have identified Carrie and Francine much sooner than they did. I don't think it would have taken thirty six years. It should not have taken thirty six years, But the failure to investigate a link between those cases is a

tremendous failure. Of public policy. The failure to solve these cases is a tremendous failure of public policy, and I think all of us should call on the lawmakers in this state, the power brokers in this state, to investigate resources in this. You know, we had a number of young women right here in this state slaughtered back in the nineteen seventies. The person who did it has never been held accountable. Families were shattered as a result of this.

The heartache of Francine's family was just overwhelming. Kerrie's family was overwhelming, The families victims in Snowma County overwhelming. They deserve justice, and I think it's time to invest significant resources in this and investigate a connection between these cases that might just lead to a suspect.

on and talking about this incredible case. I hope to speak to you again real soon.