Cheri Jo Bates

Case background and investigation

Cheri Jo Bates was an 18-year-old freshman at Riverside City College in Riverside, California. According to the Riverside Police Department's Cold Case Unit, her father, Joseph Bates, reported her missing at 5:45 a.m. on October 31, 1966; she had left a note at home the previous day saying she was going to the college library. At about 6:30 that morning a passerby found her body in an alleyway near Terracina Drive and Fairfax Avenue, beside the campus. Her death was ruled a homicide.

Bates had been stabbed and slashed. Published accounts of the investigation state that her Volkswagen Beetle, parked near the library, had been tampered with so that it would not start, and investigators concluded that her attacker had disabled the car in order to approach her. A man's Timex watch with a broken strap was found near her body, along with a shoe print. ABC7 Los Angeles reported that she was found roughly 100 yards from the car.

About a month later, typewritten letters headed as a confession were mailed to the police and to the Riverside Press-Enterprise, and in 1967 handwritten notes followed. Those notes, and a 1971 letter in which the Zodiac referred to activity in Riverside, led to years of speculation that Bates had been an early Zodiac victim.

Riverside police have rejected that theory. According to the department, an anonymous typed letter arrived in April 2016 from someone who admitted writing the handwritten notes as a teenager and called them a sick joke. In 2020, DNA recovered from a stamp identified the author, who police said had no involvement in the murder or in the Zodiac crimes. In August 2021 the Cold Case Unit stated that it does not regard the Bates homicide as Zodiac-related. When a private group publicly named a deceased man as the killer later in 2021, a police spokesman told reporters there was no evidence to support the claim, Patch reported.

The department has said that DNA developed from crime-scene evidence belongs to a male, and that detectives believe the killer was probably someone from the Riverside area. ABC7 reported in June 2026 that a 1982 police report described an unnamed person of interest who has never been arrested or charged, and that an earlier DNA comparison did not produce a match.

The case remains open. Riverside Police Chief Larry Gonzalez told ABC7 in 2026 that evidence is being re-examined with current DNA and fingerprint methods. A privately funded $50,000 reward was announced in 2021, and a friend of Bates has since offered $100,000 for information that resolves the case.