The Gypsy Hill Killings

Case background and investigation

The Gypsy Hill killings were a series of five murders of young women and girls in San Mateo County, California, in the first months of 1976. The victims were found in and around Pacifica, Millbrae, and Daly City, several of them stabbed many times, and the killings spread fear across the San Francisco Peninsula. The name derives from the Gypsy Hills area near San Bruno, where one victim's body was recovered. For decades the murders went unsolved, and it was long uncertain whether one person or several were responsible. The killings came at a time before DNA testing existed, when investigators had to rely on witness accounts, physical patterns, and painstaking record-keeping, and the files sat largely dormant for years.

The victims were Veronica "Ronnie" Cascio, 18, found stabbed roughly thirty times at Sharp Park Golf Course in Pacifica in January 1976; Paula Louise Baxter, 17, who vanished in early February and was found days later in Millbrae, stabbed, sexually assaulted, and struck with a concrete block; Tatiana "Tanya" Blackwell, 14, whose body was discovered that June; Carol Lee Booth, 26, found in a shallow grave near Colma Creek in South San Francisco; and Denise Lampe, 19, who was stabbed some twenty times in her car in a Serramonte Center parking lot in Daly City in April 1976.

The breakthrough came in 2014, when the FBI and local authorities, re-examining DNA evidence connected to a Reno murder, developed a genetic link to Rodney Halbower, a career criminal already imprisoned in Oregon for attempted murder. Halbower was named a person of interest in September 2014 and charged in January 2015 with the murders of Cascio and Baxter. He was extradited to California, and in September 2018 a San Mateo County jury — after deliberating little more than an hour — convicted him of both killings. In October 2018 he was sentenced to two consecutive terms of life without parole. Investigators also believe Halbower was responsible for the deaths of Blackwell and Booth, though he was not charged in those cases.

The case is considered only partially solved because the five killings were not all the work of one man. DNA evidence in the murder of Denise Lampe pointed to a different perpetrator, Leon Melvin Seymour, who was charged in November 2017 and later convicted of her killing. Halbower's case also carried a further legal consequence: the DNA work helped exonerate Cathy Woods, a woman who had been wrongfully convicted of the related 1976 Reno murder of Michelle Mitchell. Together, the convictions of Halbower and Seymour resolved most of the Gypsy Hill killings after more than forty years, though not every detail of the 1976 crime spree has been fully accounted for.