Cold Cases of the Golden Coast

On Wednesday, January 31, 1979, a deceased young man was found lying on the ground at Gompers Park in San Diego, San Diego County, CA. The decedent is unidentified, and is known as John Doe. He had died recently that same year, and his face was recognizable at time of discovery, though a more specific postmortem interval (PMI) has not been released. The cause of death is not stated in any sources. Gompers Park — officially Gompers Neighborhood Park — covers an area of 4.7 acres, and has a capacity of 250 people. It is located at 4926 Hilltop Drive in the Grantville neighborhood of San Diego, and is managed by the city. John Doe was a white male who measured in at 5'10 and 164 lbs. His age group and range on NamUs are listed as "Adult - Pre 30" and 18 to 25 years old, respectively. He had brown hair and hazel eyes. A black-and-white photo of John Doe's face is available on NamUs. John Doe was wearing the following clothing items: a white sock on his left foot; black un...

Yvonne Quilantang was born on July 11, 1957 in San Francisco to parents Terezo Vincent Quilantang and Evelyn Marie Quilantang (nee Leroy). Yvonne and her siblings were biracial, half white, half Asian: their father, Terezo, was an immigrant from the Philippines. Some sources from the 1970s mistakenly list Yvonne as Black. However, thorough research on Ancestry indicates that she was not Black, but instead Filipina. She was baptized Catholic. She was the youngest of six children: her older siblings are Sharon, Vincente, Michael, Linda, and Thomas; the latter was only two years older than her. Yvonne's father was a seaman. Her mother eventually grew unable to care for her, so Yvonne was "taken into a foster home, where she had lived almost since she could remember." She seemed to still be in contact with her birth family. From the June 24, 1973 edition of the  San Francisco Examiner   In early June 1973, Yvonne was 15 years old and attending Opportunity II High School. She ...

Rosa Vasquez was born on August 14, 1952 in Texas. According to one contemporary source, she may have grown up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  By 1973, Rosa, a 20-year-old Latina woman, was living at 834 Bush St in San Francisco, California along with at least one female roommate. She was working as a keypunch operator at the Letterman General Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco. Rosa was white and Hispanic. According to one source, at the time of her death she was 4'9 and 106 lbs, with brown eyes, medium-length black hair, and pierced ears. It is unknown what she was wearing when she was last seen alive. Rosa was last seen by her roommate, Frances Almazan, when she left their residence on Saturday, May 26, 1973 for the Memorial Day weekend. One source — an SFPD bulletin published in August of that year — indicated that Rosa was last seen alive on May 28th. Photo from the 1975 CA DOJ report. On the morning of Tuesday, May 29, 1973, the nude body of a young woman was found i...

John Calvin Daly Jr, 18, was originally from Cape May, New Jersey, though he was visiting California at the time of his death. John, who went by "Jack" among people he knew, was a student at Redlands University in 1968-69, "but he was not registered for the current semester." A few NJ articles call him a "former student" of the university. It is unclear if John's parents knew that he was not enrolled for the fall semester. On Monday, September 8, 1969, John was found deceased in the city of Monterey. He had been stabbed multiple times in the chest and abdomen. He was lying in heavily-wooded Don Dahvee Park, "a steep area of oak trees and brush," on the east side of Munras Avenue. He had been dead several hours when he was found by Phillip Martinez, a city parks & rec employee. One clipping said John was estimated to have been dead "since early Monday." John was found lying on his back in a brushy area beneath an oak tree. The mu...