Initial Inter-Agency CA List by SCSO, May 1974

From 1974 to 1975 the King County Sheriff's Office (KCSO) worked with agencies in California (as well as other western states) to investigate whether each state's recent unsolved female homicides (UFHs) were related. Many, many files and records were generated during this collaboration, many of which list different combinations of possibly related UFHs. 

The list of likely victims was eventually narrowed down to 22: fourteen in CA — including seven SRHM victims — and eight in OR and WA (primarily KCSO cases). This investigation culminated in the CA DOJ publishing a report on the 22 victims in February 1975; that report is available here.

I am interested in these files because many, if not all, of the CA victims are relevant to this blog. Furthermore, this is, as of September 2025, one of the — if not the — only official set of records I've been able to get my hands on for many of these cases, as California's Public Records Act (PRA) deems investigative files as exempt from disclosure, so I have been unable to obtain any when submitting PRA requests to the actual respective agencies.

By the second half of 1975 it was determined that the cases under KCSO jurisdiction (as well as many others) were committed by serial killer Ted Bundy, though none of the CA cases have been attributed to him. 

Despite this, KCSO — unlike many CA agencies, including CA DOJ — not only retained all their files generated during this interstate investigation, but have also made them available among its other Bundy files in a Dropbox through the King County Archives. Due to the large volume of records in a semi-disorganized fashion, I have gone through and separated the relevant ones into related chunks, including the one below. Many of these files that I am sharing specifically originated from Box 25, Folder 11, "924-25-11 California Criminal Intelligence" of the King County Archives' Dropbox.

A full list of all files pertaining to the above that I have made available on this site can be found on the sidebar of this blog under the title KCSO File Index. 

The record below specifically consists of pages 55, 63-64, and 69-70 from Box 25, Folder 11, "924-25-11 California Criminal Intelligence" of the King County Archives' Dropbox. 

The first and second images consist of a letter sent on May 11, 1974 from the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office (SCSO) to other jurisdictions in CA regarding unsolved female homicides (UFHs); sent alongside this letter was a list [the third image] of both SCSO cases and other UFHs that the SCSO had managed to find out about. The fourth and fifth pages are a list of all of the agencies that were sent this letter, as the listed UFHs fall under their jurisdictions (+ CA DOJ).

This set of records seems to be the first correspondence between agencies to compare their UFHs, which expanded into other states and eventually led to the publication of the 1975 CA DOJ report. Copies of this packet were eventually, c.Aug. 1974, sent to the KCSO.

Prior to being uploaded to Dropbox, these files were partially redacted by King County officials in accordance with laws regarding what can or cannot be disclosed when responding to a public records requests. On this blog post, below the original images that were taken straight from the KCSO Dropbox, is a copy of the third image, on which I have added notes regarding the contents of redacted information. I have determined the contents of the redacted information — primarily victim names — based on date, age, location, etc. All text in Helvetica/Arial/etc font is my work, and is representative of what I strongly believe to be the original contents of the files. 

Unredacted version of list

* Has since been solved.

** Elaine Davis's body was found in the ocean near Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz County, CA later the same month that she went missing, however she wasn't identified until 2001.  

*** Full name is Marie Antoinette Anstey.

**** Donna Lass's skull was found near Emigrant Gap in Placer County, CA in 1986, but was not identified until late December 2023.