Sheriff’s officials check for link between recent cold case and infamous Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders

A break in a 25-year-old cold case may also lead to a solution in the infamous Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders case from the 1970s, The Press Democrat has learned.

Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Juan Valencia confirmed Thursday that investigators are looking into whether Jack Alexander Bokin can be linked to the murders of at least seven young women and girls in Sonoma County between 1972 and 1979.

Earlier this week, authorities said DNA evidence had positively identified Bokin as the man who raped and killed Michelle Marie Veal of Union City in 1996 and dumped her body near Rohnert Park.

Bokin, who had a long history of violent sexual assaults, had been in police custody since October 1997, when he was arrested in another case that was investigated by police in San Francisco.

A judge sentenced him in 2000 to 231 years in prison for that case, according to the Sheriff’s Office. He was convicted on charges of kidnapping, kidnapping with the intent to commit rape, rape of a victim incapable of consent, rape by force or fear, mayhem, aggravated mayhem, two counts of oral copulation of a person under 14 years of age, false imprisonment and attempted murder.

He was in custody at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation medical facility in Vacaville and he died Dec. 4 from aspiration pneumonia, according to the Solano County Coroner’s Office.

He was 78 years old.

Some of the cases Bokin was associated with bear striking similarities to the Sonoma County cases. In addition, Bokin’s parents owned a home near Santa Rosa at the time of the 1970s murders.

“We’re definitely looking at him for those cases,” Valencia told The Press Democrat.

From early 1972 to mid-1979, the bodies of seven girls and young women were found in rural Santa Rosa, buried or dumped along steep embankments or in creek beds. All were found nude. Some had been raped, strangled or hogtied.

Kim Allen, 19, a Santa Rosa Junior College art major and Ursuline graduate, was hitchhiking from her job in Larkspur to class. In March 1972, her body was found off Enterprise Road.

The victims

Lori Kursa, 13, a Cook Junior High eighth-grader in Santa Rosa, had run away from home. Her body was found 30 feet down an embankment on Calistoga Road in December 1972.

Herbert Slater Junior High students Maureen Sterling, 12, and Yvonne Weber, 13, were dropped off at the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. Their skeletal remains were discovered in December 1972 on Franz Valley Road.

Shasta County resident Carolyn Davis, who was 14 or 15, was last seen by her grandmother, who dropped her off at the post office in Garberville. She disappeared in February 1973 and her body was discovered in July on Franz Valley Road, where Maureen and Yvonne were found.

Theresa Walsh, 23, was hitchhiking from Southern California to Garberville to spend Christmas with her family and 2-year-old son. Her body was discovered in 1973 in Mark West Creek.

A friend of Jeannette Kamehele, 20, was about to pick her up on April 25, 1972, at a Cotati Highway 101 on-ramp when the vehicle in front of him pulled over and she got in. Her remains were never found.

The last discovery occurred in July 1979 when hikers found skeletal remains west of Calistoga Road, about 100 yards from where Lori Kursa was found.

She was only described as a woman around the age of 19 with red or auburn hair and contact lenses. Investigators concluded the body did not belong to Kamehele.

Mike Brown, a retired Sonoma County sheriff’s captain, was a violent crimes detective in 1980 and was among several officials who joined the investigation over the years.

He told The Press Democrat that he recalled several people had been looked at as potential suspects. Among them were the Bay Area’s Zodiac Killer and notorious serial killer Ted Bundy.

Zodiac was eventually ruled out, but at the time, Bundy’s involvement “was never proven one way or another,” Brown said.

Nor, at the time, was it clear if any of the killings were even linked.

“Was it one person or were there several people who were committing these crimes?” Brown said. “That was never conclusively proven one way or another.”

Veal, the 1996 victim, was 32 when she was killed. Her body was found on July 15, 1996, by a survey crew along Stony Point Road north of West Railroad Avenue on the southern outskirts of Rohnert Park.

Her body was in brush next to a barbed-wired fence off the side of the road, Sheriff’s Office spokesman Juan Valencia said.

Investigators haven’t determined the relationship between Bokin and Veal but they believe the pair met somewhere in the Bay Area ‒ possibly San Francisco ‒ before Veal was brought to Sonoma County.

Valencia added that when Veal’s body was discovered by investigators it showed no signs of decomposition; despite this, authorities never determined how long she had been dead.

“Violent Crime detectives conducted an extensive investigation; all leads were exhausted,” the Sheriff’s Office said in a Facebook post on Wednesday, recounting the early days of the case. “Despite their best efforts, the investigation went cold.”

In April, detectives sent DNA evidence found on Veal to the Serological Research Institute to be examined using the latest biological testing technology, the Sheriff’s Office said.

The institute, a nonprofit testing laboratory based in Richmond, notified the Sheriff’s Office last month that the DNA from the Veal case matched Bokin’s.

Bokin’s DNA had been saved by the FBI in its DNA database known as the Combined Index System in the United States, the Sheriff’s Office said.

You can reach Staff Writer Colin Atagi at colin.atagi@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @colin_atagi