The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders have captured the interests of many True Crime aficionados. The possibility that a serial killer was responsible for the murder of 7 or more young girls near the small town of Santa Rosa during a period of less than two years creates quite an opportunity for sleuthing. The enigma of this case is that these murders could all be unrelated and were just some of many young women who died at the hands of sexual predators while hitchhiking in the greater SF Bay Area in the 1970s.
Hitchhiking was very common in the area at the time but it created opportunities for predators and the Hwy 101 corridor, that went right through Santa Rosa, was a particularly good area for hitchhiking. The region was considered very tolerant of the hippy lifestyle. While the number of murdered young women who fit this pattern was clearly higher in the Santa Rosa area than other parts of the Bay Area, the availability of young women hitchhiking in that area was also much higher. In the days before DNA, the bodies of young women dumped off of isolated roads usually lacked any clear markers or signature. Law Enforcement could never be sure which ones were connected. There were plenty of known SKs who operated in that part of the state at the time as well as a few unknown ones. There were certainly some predators who did it once or twice and stopped.
Fred Manalli lived in Sebastopol, a few miles west of Santa Rosa at the time and taught at Santa Rosa City College. On August 26 1976, he died in a head-on crash on a local highway. Apparently, in the wreckage were some drawings of sadomasochistic activity including some that appeared to represent Manalli, dressed as a woman, engaging in bondage/torture activity with a girl who bore a resemblance to Kim Allen.
Debra Silva, who created the web site The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders
http://www.santarosahitchhikermurders.com/, got hold of a letter he wrote to his literary agent saying that he had been questioned by the police about the Kim Allen murder and he was thinking of using the experience for a writing project. This is all very interesting and it has generated in a lot of speculation that Manalli may have been the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murderer, or at least the killer of Kim Allen. His name has also been bandied about as the Zodiac Killer. From what I can tell however, the Sonoma County Sheriff Dept has not considered him a serious suspect.
It seems to me that the Greater Bay Area in California like the Houston-Galveston Tx Area had a high number of young girls who were missing or murdered in the 1970s and many of the cases were never solved. The difficulty in solving the cases was that many if not most of the victims engaged in hitchhiking and bodies usually turned up, highly decomposed over a wide geographic area.
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