Memorial walk held for Georgia Lee Moses, victim in decades-old cold case

A Santa Rosa girl whose murder has gone unsolved for more than two decades was remembered Thursday afternoon at Petaluma City Hall, where roughly 30 people gathered for a memorial walk on what would have been her 36th birthday.

Georgia Lee Moses was 12 when she disappeared on Aug. 13, 1997, last seen with a 25- to 30-year-old man near a white, four-door car at about 10 p.m. at Dutton Avenue and Sebastopol Road in Santa Rosa, authorities said.

Her body was discovered nine days later under a tree near a Highway 101 offramp in Petaluma. She was nude and had been strangled, police said.

Moses’ sister, Angel Turner, 30, flew in from Texas to attend the memorial walk, which she hoped would draw new attention to the unsolved murder, she said.

She remembered her sister as the caretaker of her three-person household, doing the laundry and learning how to pay bills with the Social Security checks that were sent to their mother, who was bipolar and had schizophrenia, Turner said.

“Whoever has responsibility in her death, they’re going to be held accountable and rightly so,” Turner said. “You took a life, so the proper thing if you take a life is that you answer to the criminal justice system.”

The gathering began at 1 p.m. at Petaluma City Hall, where a metal angel sculpture memorializing Moses has stood since 2012. Attendees looked at photographs and artwork of Moses displayed under a white canopy tent decorated for the birthday celebration.

Attendees, who were asked to wear yellow, then marched around downtown Petaluma chanting “Justice has no expiration date,” and other messages before returning to city hall.

Lea Fabian-Davies, 19, of Petaluma said they attended the walk to “show support for the justice that is clearly needed at a local level.”

Working with Turner, they also organized a candlelight vigil to honor Moses back in November.

“Just to see these people come out and show that they care, despite COVID, it shows there’s a lot of empathy within this community,” Fabian-Davies said.

Love and Light, a local group that was born out of the summer protests around law enforcement accountability and the deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police officers, helped organize Thursday’s event and spoke after the walk, as did Turner.

“As a community, it is a responsibility to remember Georgia’s name,” Love and Light co-founder Tavy Tornado told the group. “It is a responsibility we hold as a community to amplify her story and understand this is not … just a moment, this is a movement we do together.”

Local authorities and media have been criticized for not paying enough attention to the presumed kidnapping and subsequent murder of Moses, who is Black.

Just four years before Moses’ death, the area saw massive search parties and copious media coverage directed toward the disappearance of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, a white teen who as taken at knifepoint from her Petaluma home and later murdered.

Richard Allen Davis, a twice-convicted kidnapper with a criminal history that included multiple violent attacks on women, was arrested two months later, found guilty of Klaas’s murder and sentenced to death. He remains on death row at San Quentin State Prison.

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office’s Violent Crimes Unit is overseeing the agency’s investigation into Moses’ case, Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Juan Valencia said.

Every case involving a suspicious death or those that are ruled a homicide are handled with the same level of care at the agency, though investigations into more recent crimes are given priority, he said.

“It’s considered a cold case,” Valencia said of Moses’ case. “As detectives’ time becomes available, they spend time working cold cases. They go back, look through reports, reevaluate the evidence and come up with new leads or as new leads come in, they work those.”

The agency encourages anyone with information about Moses’ disappearance and death to contact the Sheriff’s Office at 707-565-2650, Valencia said.

Anonymous tips can be made online at the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office’s website under the “Contact Us” tab.

You can reach Staff Writer Nashelly Chavez at 707-521-5203 or nashelly.chavez@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @nashellytweets.