u/mvincen95

Cayce Lynn McDaniel vanished from her home in Milan, Tennessee, in the early morning hours of August 16, 1996. The 14-year-old had attended a back to school party at the Double Springs Cumberland Presbyterian Church earlier that evening. A chaperone drove her home and dropped her off at approximately 12:30 a.m., watching to ensure she made it safely inside the house. Her mother, Cindy, arrived home between 1:30 a.m. and 2:00 a.m. to find the house completely unsecured and her daughter missing.

The scene inside the home indicated Cayce was getting ready for bed before she was interrupted. The back door was left slightly open, and the television in her bedroom was still turned on. The clothes she wore to the church party were laid out, suggesting she had already changed into her pajamas. A snack of cookies and milk was left untouched on the floor. There were no signs of a struggle. Her favorite new shoes were also left behind in her room, leading investigators to believe she left the house barefoot.

Because Cayce frequently spent the night at the homes of her friends, her mother did not immediately contact the police. She instead chose to call around and search the area with a family friend. Law enforcement was notified about ten hours later. The case was initially slowed down by the tendency of police at the time to classify missing teenagers as runaways. The untouched snack, the open door, and the lack of footwear pointed away from a voluntary departure. The lack of a struggle led police to believe Cayce voluntarily opened the door for someone she knew. As the investigation continued, police released multiple sketches to the public. One sketch featured a man who was supposedly seen with Cayce at a Walmart and a fair. Another sketch was produced by a psychic. National attention was eventually brought to the investigation when the case was featured on the television show Americas Most Wanted.

The case went unsolved for over two decades. Suspicion eventually focused on a man named Finis Ewin Hill, whom Cayce knew as Uncle Pete. On the night of the disappearance, Cindy and her boyfriend attended a party where Hill was also present. According to Cindy, Hill made unwanted sexual advances toward her. When she threatened to tell her boyfriend, Hill became angry and left the party shortly before Cindy did. Cindy harbored strong suspicions about Hill shortly after her daughter vanished. Investigators believe an angry Hill drove to the house seeking revenge, found Cayce home alone, and gained entry because the teenager trusted him. His wife initially provided an alibi for his whereabouts that night, but it was later proven false. Hill also had a documented history of violence, having previously tried to abduct a woman from a car wash in Jackson, Tennessee, in 2001. Hill was arrested shortly after getting out of prison for that crime, when in 2018 he was caught in a federal sting traveling across state lines to meet a fictional minor for sex. The McDaniel family endured another tragedy while waiting for answers when Cayce's father, Ronnie, died in a house fire in 2003.

In October 2019, Hill was indicted for first degree murder and rape in connection with the disappearance. The case did not go to trial. District Attorney General Frederick Agee announced a plea agreement in August 2022. Hill entered an Alford plea and accepted a 15 year prison sentence. This type of plea allowed him to avoid a trial without formally admitting guilt. Prosecutors stated that Hill shared some details about the crime in exchange for the plea deal. They noted that his information left no doubt of his guilt. He also supposedly provided information on where Cayce was buried. Law enforcement has released very little public information about Hill’s statements.

Rest in peace Cayce.

The papers made some interesting connections between this Jane Doe and various other grisly murders in Northern California in the 1990s. Most notably the case was tied to the 1994 murder of Sharalyn Murphy as both were similarly dismembered. Murphy’s body was dumped in Calaveras County, with no clothes, jewelry, head, or hands. With each victim the head was not located. The papers tried to link each victim to serial killer Cary Stayner, but there didn’t seem to be much to make of the theory.

This case could also potentially be related to the 1992 murder of Veronica Martinez, whose decapitated body was found in El Dorado County. That case was speculated to be linked to the 1991 kidnapping-murder of Cindy Wanner, which was recently solved.

This Sutter County Jane Doe is said to be white, between 24 and 32, about 5’6 and 115 pounds, with a hysterectomy scar on her abdomen. There is no listing of her on Namus. It appears that Sutter County does not have any Does listed.

The year 1956 was a busy one for detectives in Delaware. The state had seen only five murders the previous year, but that number ballooned to seventeen that fateful year. Only one of those cases would go unsolved, however: the murder of 22-year-old mother Alberta Cousins. Alberta, who was two weeks away from giving birth to her second child, had been reading in Valley Garden Park in Wilmington when she was shot through the heart by a phantom sniper. This August will mark six decades that this case has remained unsolved.

Alberta had married her childhood sweetheart, Lauren, after the two grew up together in Mercer, Pennsylvania. They had moved just that May after Lauren was hired as a research chemist in Delaware. Their son, Douglas, was staying with Alberta's parents in Pittsburgh until after the new baby was born. Early on the afternoon of August 23, Alberta left her home at the Monroe Park apartments to visit the park, which was a regular habit for the young mother.

She had been reading in a sunny spot in the grass near the parking lot when she was apparently startled by a shot fired at her. Detectives believe she had gathered her book and shoes and started running toward her car when she was struck through the heart by a .22-caliber bullet. She fell dead near the road, gunned down in the middle of the day in an active park.

Some park visitors later recalled hearing "several" shots that afternoon, but no one saw the shooting itself. Some had even seen Alberta’s body over the next few hours—as early as 2:20 p.m.—but thought she was simply asleep. It seems the shooting happened quickly after Alberta arrived, likely within thirty minutes. A park police sergeant found her just before 6:00 p.m. while patrolling the park before it closed. Her husband returned home from work to find her missing and asked a neighbor to drive him to the park to see if she had car trouble or the like, only to discover that the police had just arrived.

The police worked quickly to search the park. According to one article, the shot was apparently fired from a wooded area about 135 feet from her body. It is unclear whether detectives found shell casings, but it does not appear they did. The next day, divers searched for the weapon but came up empty.

Newspapers quickly jumped on the salacious story, going as far as to print photos of Alberta’s body at the crime scene. Few details can be discerned from them today, but she appeared to have been running, and her belongings were scattered about. The papers continued to follow the story for years, though there was little new information to report.

The police seemed to have worked tirelessly to solve the case. They ruled out those close to her—including her husband—tested countless .22-caliber weapons in the area, and interviewed dozens of suspects in the following years. Many articles show detectives investigating various similar perpetrators from multiple states. Reports repeatedly suggested police couldn’t rule out the possibility that the shooting was accidental and that Alberta had been mistaken for an animal by a hunter; however, this seemed to be a tactic to coax the shooter into coming forward. The circumstances strongly suggest this was a calculated attack, and on a woman who was visibly pregnant.

Alberta’s husband was understandably crippled by the loss and took their young son, Douglas, back to Pittsburgh to live. An article from the 1980s notes that Douglas had no memory of his mother and didn’t learn the details of her death until he was twenty-five. His father had remarried when Douglas was three. Douglas reflected that his entire life would have been different if it weren’t for that fateful bullet, but he also stated that he is at peace with it. He believes a deranged individual committed the crime. I cannot find Douglas online today, it appears his father Lauren passed away in 2024.

Sadly, this is a case that was almost impossible to solve then, and it almost certainly is now. When reviewing cold cases, it is often the story of the phantom shooter that leaves the police with the least to go on. Rest in peace, Alberta Cousins; you and your family deserve justice.

——

This write-up was sourced through archival newspaper research, as there is essentially no mention of this case elsewhere on the internet. I strive to bring attention to unknown cold cases.

In April 1995, 14-year-old Randee Ashby was a much-beloved daughter, sister, and friend. She was a good student, described as “happy-go-lucky,” who loved music, hockey, and her life in Kalamazoo, Michigan. When she was murdered the day before Easter while babysitting at her sister’s home, it shocked the entire community.

Randee’s sister, Rebecca, needed to run some errands in preparation for the holiday and left Randee with her three children at 747 Stuart Avenue in Kalamazoo. A few hours later, Rebecca returned home to find her children locked in an upstairs bedroom, a stereo missing, and Randee’s body in the basement. Randee had been sexually assaulted, strangled, and stabbed.

The case didn’t make much progress initially. Eyewitnesses apparently saw a thin, white male with a goatee and a ponytail leave the home. Investigators gathered a list of potential suspects, but they were overly focused on the eyewitness description. As a result, it took them five years to come back around to one particular suspect: Tommie Sykes III.

Sykes was a low-level criminal who had received a 15-year sentence for larceny shortly after Randee’s murder and was behind bars when investigators interviewed him. Sykes knew Rebecca, had tried to date her, and had even wanted to rent a room at her house. Rebecca had helped him out when he was down on his luck. Because Sykes was Black, investigators initially discounted him as a suspect due to the eyewitness descriptions. However, when detectives eventually sampled his DNA, it perfectly matched the semen found on Randee’s body.

Sykes had initially denied any connection to the crime, but his story changed when confronted with the DNA results. He had used Jeremiah Black, a friend with whom he was staying at a shelter, as his alibi. Now, both men implicated each other in the crime. Black, ironically, matched the description of the skinny white man leaving the scene.

Both men recounted various, conflicting stories about whether the sexual contact with 14-year-old Randee was consensual, who committed the actual killing, and whether a sexual assault occurred postmortem. Regardless of the grisly details, Sykes was found guilty at trial and sentenced to life in prison. Black struck a deal that would see him serve 25 to 50 years. It seems Black could soon be released from prison; as of now, however, he is listed as currently incarcerated on the sex offender registry.

Randee’s family denounced the men at sentencing. Sadly, Randee’s father, Robert, died during the five years it took to get answers in her case. Rebecca said she had tried to be a friend to Sykes and felt a profound sense of betrayal. How could two men assault and murder a 14-year-old while she was babysitting? It is the stuff of nightmares. Rest in peace, Randee Ashby.

While this case did receive substantial local newspaper coverage, it has received little attention from the larger media. A Google search for Randee yields almost no relevant results. No Facebook posts seem to mention the case, and no podcasts or platforms have told her story. It is a sad reality that there has been so little mention of Randee in the last twenty years. I hope this post can change that.

On February 26, 1992, Dr. Ruth Haut scheduled a last-minute 7:30 p.m. appointment with a new patient, supposedly named "Michael Greenwell," at her chiropractic office in Kissimmee, Florida, just south of Orlando. When she failed to return home that night, her live-in girlfriend drove to the office and found that the telephone line had been cut and Ruth was missing.

Later that night, a haunting figure was captured on surveillance video using Haut’s ATM card about 90 miles away at a bank in Vero Beach. The suspect was wearing latex gloves and a hooded sweatshirt tied tightly over their face. Investigators determined the subject was short, with height estimates ranging from 5'2" to 5'6". The subject did not successfully withdraw money from Haut’s account.

The next day, a child on a school bus spotted Haut’s body in an orange grove near St. Cloud, Florida, about 10 miles from where she was abducted. She had been stabbed repeatedly. Investigators found substantial evidence near the scene. They documented tire tracks from B.F. Goodrich tires normally found on small pickup trucks, and collected a small portion of a latex glove, duct tape used to bind the victim, and a cassette tape box for the obscure artist Billy Thorpe. A footprint from a Reebok sneaker was also found at the scene.

Detectives dug into the patient who had scheduled the last minute appointment with Dr. Haut. The phone number the supposed patient left was not legitimate, and the only person by the name of "Michael Greenwell" who lived in the area was the famous Boston Red Sox left fielder. The appointment appeared to be a ruse to get Dr. Haut alone at night.

The violence of 1992 was far from over; in fact, in November alone, there would be three more unsolved murders. This began on November 2, 1992, when 39-year-old Mary Ellen Wise was abducted from her home in Vero Beach. The suspect forced Wise into her own vehicle and drove about 50 minutes away to Melbourne, Florida, to withdraw money from an ATM. Later that same day, Wise went to a different bank back in Vero Beach to cash a check. The teller noted that Wise—with whom the teller was friendly—pulled up to the farthest drive-thru lane to process her transaction. The teller did not notice an assailant in Wise’s vehicle.

On November 8, Wise’s body was found by a lake close to the city of Fort Pierce. She had been bludgeoned to death. Investigators noted that blood was found in Wise’s garage, and her two large guard dogs were locked inside her home. It appeared that the assailant attacked Wise while she was doing laundry in her garage. A red robe was found stuffed into Wise’s mailbox. Her boyfriend did not recall Wise owning that robe.

Just a couple of weeks after Wise’s murder, a salesman was targeted at a ticket booth off US-192 near Kissimmee. On November 21, Antonio Zuco was working when an assailant murdered him inside the bathroom of his business. Cash was taken, though few other details are available in this case.

On November 30, in the early afternoon, Bonnie Goodson was found beaten inside the truck accessory store where she worked in Kissimmee, Florida. Despite efforts to save her life, the wife and mother died later that night. She had been attacked with a roofing tool.

On January 22, 1993, a young man walked into the Maple Leaf Motel off US-192 to discuss buying tickets to local parks. Abruptly, he threw a cup of hot coffee in the face of the motel owner, Hamid Jebailey, before attacking him with a tire iron. In the struggle, the young man produced a pistol, which Jebailey was able to wrestle away from him. The attempted robber was shot in the calf during the altercation and made a slow attempt to hobble from the scene. When police arrived, they identified the attacker as 24-year-old Curtis Huff Jr. After Huff’s photo was shown in the paper, another victim, Patricia Bennett, identified Huff as the man who had hogtied and robbed her at her ticket booth the previous summer. He was eventually sentenced to twenty years in prison for the attempted murder of Jebailey.

Huff had a troubled record by 1992, having already served time in prison in Indiana for another string of robberies. The similarities between Huff’s attack on the motel owner and the unsolved murders were not lost on investigators. In 1995, he was named as a suspect in Haut’s case. Huff owned a small truck that matched the tire tracks left at her scene, and a cassette tape corresponding with the one found at Haut’s crime scene was found in his vehicle. Huff was only 5’4", matching the individual seen on the ATM footage. He was noted to be an avid baseball fan, which could account for the "Greenwell" alias used to make the appointment. A pair of Reebok sneakers found at his father’s home in St. Cloud, where Huff was living, matched the footprint found at the crime scene. Additionally, Huff’s girlfriend at the time lived just blocks from Haut’s office. Despite all of this evidence against him, Huff has never been charged with Haut’s murder.

Huff’s connections to the other cases were striking as well. He worked selling tickets to local attractions, similar to Zuco; in fact, it was stated that Zuco’s business card was in Huff’s wallet when he was arrested. Huff had also purchased his truck bed cover from the same store where Goodson worked. Furthermore, Huff’s family had lived near Mary Ellen Wise’s home in Vero Beach and supposedly knew her. Huff allegedly knew that Wise was scheduled to receive a settlement of over a million dollars for a car accident she had been in a decade prior.

Huff served only twelve years of his twenty-year sentence for attempted murder and was released in 2005. Some have suggested he could be connected to the 2006 murder of 87-year-old Helen McPherson in Vero Beach. McPherson was beaten in her home, and her house was robbed. Huff was living about a mile away at the time.

Not much has been said about Huff in the last two decades. In 2019, he was charged with a felony for fraud related to a workers' compensation claim, but the outcome of that case is unknown. Also in 2019, the Osceola Sheriff’s Office announced that Huff is no longer a suspect in Haut’s case, though they did not explain why. Many in Haut’s circle, including her girlfriend at the time, have pushed back against this claim, and other investigators have noted he remains a suspect in the other cases. Haut’s relatives have suggested detectives are trying to cover up their past mistakes in the investigation.

The similarities in the four cases are striking, especially those between Haut and Wise, as well as between Zuco and Goodson. Why have investigators not been able to solve any of these cases? It is rare to see a suspect as strong as Huff in a string of such brutal serial killings released back into the public. He is likely free at this moment. Rest in peace, Ruth Haut, Mary Ellen Wise, Antonio Zuco, and Bonnie Goodson.

——

This write up was primarily sourced by the podcast True Crime Garage’s episodes “Suspect #1” (Part 1 and 2), as well archival newspaper research especially by writer Henry Pierson Curtis with The Oriental Sentinel, the Scribd document upload by Laura Barns, and a 2019 Vero Beach article by Ray McNulty. Thank you for reading

Located just south of Orlando, the town of St. Cloud was a quiet community with a small population in 1979, making the sudden violence that struck on the afternoon of June 21 all the more shocking. Norma, a 28-year-old wife of a local Nazarene minister Jim Page, was home alone with her young sons. Norma was from West Virginia, and was close with her sisters. She adored her two young sons, 4-year-old Adam and 2-year-old Steve.

Norma was known to be cautious and had installed extra locks on the inside of her doors to keep strangers out. Despite these precautions, a motorist recalled seeing a stranger follow Norma through her back door as she tried to close it in his face. It remains unknown why this witness seemingly did not report the scene to authorities.

The intruder overpowered her, forcing Norma and her boys into the family car to cash a $213 check at a local bank before returning to the church parsonage. Once back at the home, the attacker locked the children in a room before beginning his assault. Her four-year-old son later escaped to a neighbor's house, screaming that a man with a gun was hurting their mother, leading police to a horrific scene where Norma was found nude, bound to a bed, and stabbed over 30 times in what investigators described as a thrill killing.

The stranger vanished, and for thirty-one years, the case went cold. The initial investigation was deeply flawed. The St. Cloud Police Department had not investigated a murder in more than twenty years. The police chief left town the very next day for a statewide meeting, leaving an officer in charge who had never handled a homicide. The chief even resorted to consulting psychics from a local spiritualist camp for leads, and it took weeks before the department finally asked for help from the local sheriff's office and other neighboring agencies. Despite these early missteps, the department made one crucial decision that eventually paid off: they meticulously collected and properly preserved the biological evidence left behind by the killer.

In 2010, this decades-old evidence was analyzed using modern forensic capabilities, submitted to a national database, and yielded a definitive match. The killer was identified as Steve Bronson, an individual from a prominent local family, who had completely evaded suspicion in 1979. Bronson was a highly violent offender who had already spent over twenty years in some of the toughest prisons in Florida and California for various crimes, including kidnapping, rape, and an armed shootout with deputies. Steve apparently went by the name “Nancy Sue”. Their time incarcerated was marred by severe abuse, leading them to file a federal lawsuit alongside other inmates against the state. A magistrate sided with Bronson and the other plaintiffs who sued over corruption and sexual violence at Glades Correctional Institution. The magistrate recommended $30,000 in damages for Bronson, who stated that they were repeatedly raped and that for him, prison was "like a slave market.” Despite this history of victimization in the penal system, their own capacity for violence was undeniable. When confronted with the irrefutable DNA evidence in 2010, Bronson confessed to the 1979 murder, callously telling investigators they simply "went crazy" on the young mother.

However, the elation of an arrest quickly deteriorated into profound anguish for Norma's family. They had hoped to see the aging offender face trial, but that would not be the case. Bronson, now in his 60s, had suffered progressive, untreatable brain damage and paralysis from multiple strokes over the preceding decade. Over a series of agonizing court hearings, multiple medical experts testified that Bronson was legally incompetent to stand trial due to his severely deteriorated physical and mental state. Their defense attorneys requested the first-degree murder charge be dropped so they could be moved to a nursing home. In June 2012, following an appeals court ruling, a judge ordered Bronson's release from the county jail, and they were transferred to a nursing home in St. Petersburg, Florida. While public records do not readily confirm their exact date of death following this transfer, Norma's family was left with the agonizing reality that an innocent mother's killer would spend his final days living in comfort and receiving professional medical care instead of answering to a jury for death.

This case has not received substantial attention over the decades. Surprising this never caught the attention of a “48 Hours” or the like. This write up was sourced with archival newspaper articles. I hope that Norma’s family has found some relief in knowing the identity of her killer, even if they received little justice. RIP Norma Page.

Houston in 1979 was a city defined by a massive oil boom and a staggering murder rate. With over 500 homicides that year alone, the police department was completely overwhelmed. But even in a city earning the grim moniker of "Murder City," a specific two-month span of violence terrified the public in a way nothing else had. Between July and October, five young people were slaughtered with a horrifying signature: the killer,or killers, nearly or completely decapitated them. The nightmare started at the Orchard Apartments, a sprawling complex in Southwest Houston filled with young professionals. Alys Rankin, a 33-year-old single mother and secretary, was found dead in her unit after missing work. The scene was chaotic. She had been sexually assaulted, bound with an electric cord, and stabbed. Whoever did this also took a gruesome trophy, completely decapitating Alys and taking her head from the scene. Because her door wasn't forced open, she likely knew the person or had simply left it unlocked. Just two weeks later, the violence struck the exact same complex. Mary Calcutta, a 27-year-old clerk living just a few floors away from Alys, was found butchered on her bathroom floor. She had been terrified by her neighbor's murder, even talking to a friend about barricading her front door. She fought hard for her life, but was sexually assaulted and stabbed so many times she was nearly decapitated.

Right around the time police were pulling up to Mary's apartment, another horrific discovery was made nine miles north. Twenty-six-year-old Doris Threadgill was found in her townhome, her throat slashed so deeply her head was barely attached. But Doris's apartment told a completely different story. It was perfectly clean with no signs of a struggle and no sexual assault. Two wine glasses and an ashtray near the sink hinted she might have been entertaining whoever ended up killing her. Then, after a six-week quiet period, a teenage couple vanished during a Wednesday night date in October. The next morning, 17-year-old Joann Huffman was found shot to death face-down in Watonga Park. Soon after, police found her 18-year-old boyfriend, Bobby Spangenberger, stuffed into the trunk of a white Dodge at a nearby used car lot. Echoing Alys's fate, Bobby was completely decapitated, and his head was nowhere to be found. Neither teen had been robbed.

For over 45 years, the debate has raged on: was this the work of a single, highly deranged serial killer, or a horrifying coincidence during a historically bloody year? The sheer rarity of decapitation in murder cases heavily suggests one phantom killer collecting trophies. Yet, the inconsistencies in the crime scenes—like Doris's unforced entry and Joann being shot instead of stabbed—make it hard for investigators to definitively tie them all together. Houston cold case detectives are still looking for answers today, recently unsealing old evidence boxes in hopes that untouched items, like the cigarette butts left in Doris's apartment, might finally yield a modern DNA profile. Until science or a guilty conscience breaks the case wide open, the families are left waiting for justice.

Rest in peace to Alys Rankin, Mary Calcutta, Doris Threadgill, Joann Huffman, and Bobby Spangenberger. You are not forgotten.

This case was primarily sourced off this well reported documentary by ABC13 Houston and reporter Courtney Fischer.

On the night of September 27, 1970, sixty-two-year-old Paul E. Brown was working the midnight shift as a Pinkerton night watchman at the Certain-Teed Products Company in Richmond, California. The World War II veteran sat at his desk inside the plant's brick guardhouse, reading a newspaper. Shortly after midnight, a sniper fired a single .223-caliber bullet from an M-16 military rifle. Fired from roughly seventy-five feet away, outside the plant's eight-foot perimeter fence, the high-velocity round tumbled upon piercing the closed window. The bullet struck Brown in the jaw and throat, killing him instantly. Police found him slumped over his desk, still clutching a pen, with his cash untouched. Investigators ruled out robbery and began searching for a sniper.

With the Bay Area already deeply uneasy from the recent Zodiac Killer attacks, the fear of another calculated serial shooter operating in the region was immediate, though short-lived. Two days later, an anonymous tip led Richmond police to eighteen-year-old Willie James Turner Jr., an AWOL Marine staying at a home a few blocks from the crime scene. Turner was arrested after trying to flee out the back door. Investigators recovered the loaded M-16 rifle, which Turner had stolen from his military base in Hawaii, broken down, and smuggled back to California in a duffle bag.

The ensuing legal battle, however, proved complex. Turner's first trial ended in a hung jury, with eleven of twelve jurors voting to convict him of murder. During his second trial, the defense argued that Turner and three friends had gone to the industrial tracks to fire the stolen rifle while under the influence of LSD. Turner's lawyers claimed he dropped the weapon while hallucinating, and one of his companions actually fired the fatal shot. The defense suggested these friends then convinced a highly intoxicated Turner that he had pulled the trigger. Unable to definitively prove who fired the gun during the drug-fueled outing, a jury deliberated for just two and a half hours before finding Turner not guilty. As soon as Turner left the county jail, military police arrested him on the courthouse steps to face a court-martial for desertion and the theft of the government rifle. It was a dangerous era in California, proving that a crime perfectly resembling the calculated work of a psychopathic serial killer could ultimately just be the reckless fallout of a drugged-up kid. No further information regarding Turner's ultimate fate following his return to military custody is publicly available; if he is still alive today, he would be around seventy-four years old. Rest in peace, Paul E. Brown.

This write up was sourced with archived newspaper articles, it has never appeared on the Internet before. There are limited sources for the case, for instance no photo of Willie Turner was available.

Shortly before 3:00 p.m. on September 16, 2008, a Liberty Elementary School bus was traveling past the vacant Tagus Ranch restaurant near Tulare, California. A student pointed out the window into the high brush just yards from a local resident's home. In plain view of Highway 99 commuters lay the partially undressed body of 16-year-old Molly Ervin.

The harrowing discovery terrified the young passengers, with children crying in the aisles as the bus driver alerted authorities. Despite finding a partially undressed teenager discarded in a field, Tulare County investigators initially reported no signs of foul play. It wasn’t until an autopsy the next day that the case was ruled a homicide by strangulation, with the coroner estimating the home-schooled Visalia teen had been dead for 10 to 12 hours.
Retracing her final hours, investigators determined Molly was last seen alive the day prior at the Hills Cottage Apartments on K Street. Witnesses corroborated one consistent detail: she had a brief conversation with someone inside an older white pickup truck before getting in and driving away.

Detectives interviewed over 250 people, but the investigation was severely stonewalled by individuals who intentionally lied, provided false names, and gave conflicting accounts. Police eventually concluded her killer wasn't a random highway predator, but someone within the local crowd she associated with.

That same local crowd anchors the most confounding element of Molly’s case: her direct connection to another unsolved murder. Exactly nine months earlier, in December 2007, 23-year-old Nicole Phillips was found dead along the embankment of the Tipton overpass, less than 16 miles from where Molly was dumped. Prior to her murder, Phillips was last seen walking with an unidentified man at 3:00 a.m.
The parallels are staggering. Both were young women, both died from asphyxiation—Phillips by suffocation, Ervin by strangulation—and both were discarded along the exact same rural Highway 99 corridor. Most importantly, the two women were known friends or acquaintances.

Despite this glaring geographic and victimology overlap, the Tulare County Sheriff's Office abruptly abandoned the theory of a serial offender. Investigators formally severed the link between the two friends, maintaining that the murders are entirely unconnected and the work of different killers. When law enforcement dismisses a connection this strong, it typically signals they have a very specific, uncharged suspect in mind for at least one of the cases—someone whose alibi definitively precludes them from committing the other.

Hoping to bypass the uncooperative witnesses and shake loose new leads, local Crimestoppers produced dedicated television segments for each case. These broadcasts aimed to leverage public pressure and reward money to finally break the wall of silence surrounding the two friends.

Yet, nearly two decades later and despite a standing $6,000 reward, the cases remain completely cold. The man walking with Nicole Phillips at 3:00 a.m. remains unidentified, and the driver of the older white pickup truck has never been brought to justice.

Rest in Peace Molly and Nicole, you and your families deserve justice.

“People anonymously e-mailed copies of the photos to the Catsouras family with misleading subject headers, in one case captioning the photo sent to the father with the words ‘Woohoo Daddy! Hey daddy, I'm still alive.”

It’s a dark world we live in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikki\_Catsouras\_photographs\_controversy

This is the case of Todd Winkler. I’d share more but any mention of anything potentially troublesome risks the video being removed.

On August 9, 1967, seven-year-old Cecilia Renee Barili and her six-year-old sister Roberta Ann vanished while playing near their home in an integrated neighborhood in Altadena. At the time of their disappearance, the girls were wearing blue Capris and blue-and-white striped T-shirts. Roughly eighteen hours later, a resident discovered their bodies in a weed-filled vacant lot in Watts, approximately twenty-five miles away from their residence and near the famous Watts Towers. Both girls had been sexually assaulted and strangled with yellow and white scarves wrapped around their throats. Law enforcement officials noted that the victims appeared to have been carefully placed at the scene rather than simply dumped, which led detectives to investigate whether the location was chosen specifically to provoke a racial incident during a period of high social unrest. The girls' father, Richard Barili, dismissed the idea of a racial motive, maintaining that their own neighborhood was friendly and integrated.

The primary suspect was Anthony David Dontanville, a thirty-five-year-old former Pasadena City parks employee. For context regarding the racial undertones in the case Dontanville is a white man. The prosecution’s case against him, led by Deputy District Attorney Joseph P. Busch Jr., rested heavily on the testimony of Everett May, a friend who claimed Dontanville confessed to him in a bar by saying "I did it" in reference to the girls killed in Altadena. Dontanville's first trial in November 1967 was remarkably brief, lasting only a day and a half before the defense rested without calling a single witness; he was subsequently found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to the death penalty. This conviction was later reversed due to inadequate representation, leading to a month-long retrial in April 1968. During this retrial, Dontanville was represented by high-profile attorney Charles Hollopeter, who would later represent Charles Manson. Hollopeter attacked the credibility of the confession witness and drew literary parallels to Albert Camus’ The Stranger, arguing that Dontanville was being unfairly judged for his unconventional character rather than hard evidence. In April 1968, the jury acquitted Dontanville of the murders.

While acquitted of the murders, Dontanville remained behind bars due to a separate conviction for the molestation of a six-year-old girl in El Monte, which occurred just four days before the Barili sisters were abducted. In March 1969, he was sentenced to an indeterminate term of one year to life as a mentally disordered sex offender and was initially sent to Atascadero State Hospital for treatment. However, medical staff there officially found him unsuitable for treatment, and he was returned to the regular prison system to serve his sentence. The case also triggered significant political fallout, causing a rift between Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty and District Attorney Evelle Younger over the decision to grant a retrial. After 1970, Dontanville largely disappeared from public records, and because of his status as an untreatable offender, it seems likely he remained in custody or under state supervision until his death. Today, the murders of Cecilia and Roberta Barili remain officially unsolved, as no other suspects were ever charged following Dontanville's acquittal.

This case was frustratingly difficult to research. Understanding the full context of a case nearly sixty years old is always a tall task. Unfortunately, it seems that unless this case receives some renewed attention it will never be officially solved. Dontanville seems like a good suspect, at the very least he is a severe deviant, but the Barili girls deserve true justice.

By 1974, the Zodiac Killer had faded into the background of Northern California; he had not sent a letter since 1971 and had not committed a murder since 1969. However, on January 29, 1974, the San Francisco Chronicle received a letter that has since been dubbed the “Exorcist Letter.” In the letter, the Zodiac—whom modern standards might deem the ultimate edgelord—offered what is quite possibly the worst movie review in history: “I saw + think ‘The Exorcist’ was the best satirical com-idy that I have ever seen.” He followed up with a reference to the play The Mikado, and his typical threats and taunts.

This caught the eye of William Peter Blatty, the author and screenwriter of The Exorcist. Blatty later wrote a follow-up book titled Legion, which he eventually adapted into the film The Exorcist III. Blatty based a fictional serial killer in the book, “The Gemini,” on the Zodiac. The character itself doesn’t actually have much overlap with the real-life killer, aside from writing letters to the police and operating around San Francisco. This fictional character opted to murder with a bizarre yet surgical efficiency—decapitating victims, draining their blood, and mutilating them.

The Exorcist III subsequently became a favorite of multiple serial killers. This included Jeffrey Dahmer; his would-be victim, Tracy Edwards, testified that Dahmer played the film for him on VHS. Edwards escaped Dahmer’s clutches that night, leading to the killer’s arrest. However, it is the obsession of serial killer Danny Rolling, known as The Gainesville Ripper, that is most relevant to this story.

The film was released on August 17, 1990. Just one week later, Rolling began a four-day murder spree that remains one of the most brutal the country has ever seen. In that short period, he killed five college students, four of whom attended the University of Florida. The case became infamous for its gruesome details: one victim was decapitated, and the scenes were staged for maximum shock value. While the murders shared similarities with those depicted in the film, claiming the movie directly inspired the killings remains dubious.

After his arrest, Rolling claimed he was possessed by a demon he conveniently named “Gemini.” It seems that while Rolling was likely inspired by the film, he primarily wanted to establish an insanity defense. It didn't work; Rolling was eventually executed by lethal injection in 2006.

Just as Blatty had been inspired by the Zodiac, the story of the Gainesville Ripper caught the eye of screenwriter Kevin Williamson. He began writing a script inspired by the Gainesville murders titled “Scary Movie,” which eventually evolved into the 1996 horror classic Scream. While the script changed significantly, the key concept of a sadistic killer stalking students in a small town remained.

While the connection isn't exactly linear, the butterfly effect at work here is unsettling. Personally, I wouldn’t suggest watching The Exorcist III; it’s nowhere near as good as Scream, and it almost feels like a satirical comedy compared to the original. I guess the ultimate takeaway is to not trust serial killers for movie reviews.