The date: December 20, 1968. The time: 11:25 p.m.
Stella Medeiros is driving on Lake Herman Road, a lonely dark country road just outside of Vallejo, California, that leads to Benicia. The rear and side windows on a parked Rambler station wagon sparkle as her headlights sweep it. A young man’s body lies beside the car; a girl lies about 30 feet behind the rear bumper. She is on her right side, facing the road. Blood is everywhere. Mrs. Medeiros hits the gas and speeds off to Benicia. On the outskirts she locates a Benicia police car. She honks her horn and blinks her lights. She reports what she saw.
In a few minutes Benicia police are in control of the area. It is but a gravel turnout to the entrance to the pumping station. Apparently it is used by local teens as a petting spot. Yet it is a bit surprising on a night like this. There is a record low in temperature of only 22 degrees.
At 11:52 p.m. the call comes into to the Solano County Sheriff’s Office. Responding officers are Butterbach and Waterman. Lake Herman Road is their jurisdiction. When they arrive, the Benicia police show them the scene. They lift their wool blanket off the female victim. The victim is Betty Lou Jensen, 16 years old. She is dead, shot 5 times in the right of the back, apparently while fleeing the assailant. Blood splattered her path from where she lay to the side of the car where the boy, David Faraday, 17, had been found. She must have been next to Faraday when he was shot and then ran away toward the road. David Faraday has been removed. He was still alive, breathing faintly despite a gunshot to his head. A chalk outline marks the area where his body had fallen. His left foot had almost been touching the right rear passenger side tire. He was facing away from the vehicle, perpendicular to it. A large pool of blood still marked where the head had been. He had been found with his hands up by his head. They and the sleeves of his shirt were bloody. Curiously, his class ring was almost removed from his ring finger. It hung on at the tip only, held there by the tip of the middle finger. He was currently en route to the hospital.
The general arrangement of things was recorded. The station wagon was parked facing Easterly. The passenger side front door was open all the way. The others were closed and locked. Several shell casings peppered the ground on the passenger side of the car. They were .22 caliber. In all, 9 were collected. One, curiously, was about 20 feet away from where Faraday had fallen. The back passenger side rear window had been shattered by a bullet, which penetrated it at the bottom and angled into the floorboard. A bullet hole was in the top just above the back seat passenger side door.
At 12:05 a.m. December 21 Detective Sergeant Leslie Lundblad of the Solano Co. Sheriffs arrived. Landblad asked Butterbach and Waterman to go get a statement at the hospital from Faraday. Upon arrival at the hospital they discovered that the young man had been pronounced Dead on Arrival.
The detectives now had to paste things together from what they had before them. The shell casings show that the killer stood by the passenger side of the car, away from the road. Faraday had been shot close range through the upper left ear and into the head. (There were powder burns on his ear). Jensen was hit by the force of 5 .22 caliber bullets in the right back, and must have been tough enough to keep going until she fell. This is evident is that she fell backward, despite that in running away momentum would have been to the fore. Three of the bullets passed through her. One exited the left breast and left a hole in the front of her dress. Another ricocheted through her body and came out at her panty elastic and lodged in her underwear. The other came out her stomach and fell down her dress and was found in her “blood splattered” path. Butterbach considered the shots to have a remarkable grouping.
Nine casings were recovered. Eight bullets were accounted for.
On the face of it there was no reason for the crime. There was no theft. There was no sexual molestation. There was no murder weapon. Faraday hadn’t gunned her down and then shot himself in the head. Somebody else had been involved. But the gravel was too frozen to show footprints or even fresh tire tracks.
Witnesses would help bring some clarity to a probable sequence of events. Homer and Peggie Your provided some interesting information. About 11 p.m. they passed the pumping station, coming from the Benicia way. Their lights dazzled the windshield of the Rambler. Inside she could see the boy, Faraday, at the wheel, and Betty Jensen with her head leaning on his shoulder. Faraday put his hands on the wheel when the Your’s lights swept them. The Yours didn’t go far down the road. He worked on laying pipe and was merely out with his wife making sure all was well. They pulled into Marshall Ranch down the road to do a U-turn and go back to Benicia. Here their lights swept a red pick up truck with wooden sideboards. It was parked along the fence, about 25 feet down on the road to the ranch, facing out toward Lake Herman Road. Two men were standing by. One was 25 to 30, had on a wool cap, a hunting jacket and a long flashlight. He was curious enough to shine the flashlight into the car at Peggie Your. The other man had a rifle. Peggie told her husband to get “the hell out of there” because one had a gun. They drove back to Benicia and noticed the Rambler in the same position.
The two men would later be identified as Robert Connley and Frank Gasser. They were out raccoon hunting. They arrived at the Marshall Ranch area around 9 p.m. and left a little after 11 p.m. They were just getting back in their truck when the Yours drove into the driveway to do their U-turn. They were able to recall some significant events. They remembered that when they passed the pump house entrance to go to their raccoon spot at Marshall Ranch, they saw a white impala, about 1959, 1960, hardtop 4 door parked in the entrance. At the precise moment they passed, a truck was coming out of the pumping station gate. Sheriffs confirmed that this was Bingo Wesher, who tended sheep on the eastern part of the property. He, too, recalled seeing the Impala. He also saw Gasser and Connley’s red pickup go by.
After their encounter with the Yours, Connley and Gasser give us more pertinent information. Loaded up, they pulled out and drove off toward Gasser’s ranch, heading in the Benicia direction. It was between 11:05 p.m. and 11:15 p.m. Connley reported that the Rambler was in a very different position, toward the south side of the pump station entrance. They both returned to Gasser’s ranch and hung-out for an hour or so.
Mr. James Owen next comes into the picture. He, too, contacted he police. At 11:20 p.m. that night he had driven past the entrance to the pumping station, coming from Vallejo, going toward Benicia. He noticed 2 cars at the turnout. One was the Rambler station wagon. It was parked where the earlier witnesses, Homer and Peggier Your, had located it, facing easterly, not where Connley said it was parked. Parked along its passenger side, about 5 feet from it, was another car. He could not identify it by model or year, but it was a dark car, not too big, not compact, little chrome finishings. Curiously, he did not notice anybody in either car or anybody about.
One quarter of a mile down the road he heard what he thought was a gunshot.
Taken together, the chain of events show that James Owen passed by extremely close to the shooting.
Due to the fact there was no motive, the report of young William Crow was taken as relevant. Earlier that night, sometime between 9:30 p.m. and 10 p.m., he was driving his girlfriend in her new sports car. He had pulled off at the pumping station turnout and was adjusting the carburetor when a blue car, possibly a Plymouth Valiant, drove past heading toward Vallejo. It stopped in the middle of the road. Then it started backing up. It backed up slowly enough to appear menacing. Crow hopped in the car and sped off. The Valiant, amazingly, pursued, which meant the driver had to have turned around. Moreover, it also followed him at a high rate of speed. It did not try to overtake him, but remained pacing at an acceptable distance behind. Crow turned off on the road to Benicia. The Valiant continued on. He thought there were two white males in the car.
Continuing investigation by the Sheriff’s department revealed no possible motive for the killing. This was Betty Lou Jensen’s first date. David Faraday was new to her life. Nothing tied the two to anything that would motivate the joint killing. Faraday supposedly knew someone who was pushing dope and was allegedly going to turn him in. This contretemps was possibly overheard at the IHOP on Tennessee Street in Vallejo. But it was not confirmed in the actual Sheriff’s report. But more plausibility was accorded the idea that a lovesick boy might have been jealous enough to take vengeance on Betty Lou. There was that strange fact that Faraday’s class ring was almost removed from his finger. But no proof could be found to implicate the secret admirer. The end result was an unsolved killing. Suspect was unknown; motive unknown.
This wasn’t new. The 1960s saw America inducted into the crime of pointless murders. The Boston Strangler had shocked the nation. Illinois saw bold stabbings and beatings of people in their own homes, one victim was even a senator elect’s daughter. Murders were no longer the exclusive provenance of cheap hoods, mob gunsels and bank robbers. They occurred without reason. They plagued the middle class, and the killers faded away into obscurity. San Francisco, too, was in the throes of the counterculture movement. Hippies, Yippies, all sorts of strange people were flocking to the city and living in love-ins and communes. Society was quite worried about drug use and your now all-too-common everyday wacko.
There was, of course, no reason for the detectives to suspect the beginning of a serial killing spree. The investigators in the first of what becomes a serial killing spree are always at a disadvantage, for none know that the crime will lead to more. They must pursue angles and avenues they otherwise would not bother with if they already knew the serial killer’s MO. The Sheriffs did an excellent investigation here. They may have drawn stick men, but they got down the measurements of significant points of the crime scene down to the inch.
The evidence they put together allows us to draw a certain chain of events, a chain that will become more relevant when it became apparent that a serial killer was beginning his spree. Police photos, sketches and evidence show that the Rambler is not parked up against the fence as some police sketches have hitherto shown. One picture is particularly valuable.
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