by Mark Hewitt
The lead detectives of this most mysterious case attempted to sneak in a short, but well needed, break for Christmas. They desired to celebrate with family, open gifts, and catch up on sleep. Instead, Lundblad spent the day reviewing statements and evidence. He went over their findings with Sergeant Jack Oller, an investigator in the Fairfield Office of the Sheriff’s Department. All too soon, any break was over and the detectives were again gleaning from the community what little scraps of information they could find.
Detective Lundblad visited Hogan High School on Thursday, December 26 at just after 11:30 in the morning. He was met there by Principal Lee Y. Dean, Sharon (who had shared locker #1003 with Betty Lou), and Sharon’s mother. His intent was to collect any notes or personal property of Betty Lou’s, perhaps retaining something that would move forward the investigation into her murder. Nothing found in the locker was of evidentiary value. Pencils, textbooks, and articles of clothing were given to the principal, who was free to pass them along to the deceased woman’s family.
Sharon revealed to the detective that her friend also had a private locker in gym class, an alternate location where personal items could be stored. Mr. Dean promised to examine this locker too, but likely not until Monday at the earliest because, surprisingly, he did not possess a pass key for that area of his school.
Later examination of Jensen’s private papers brought to light an ominous note which appeared to be in Betty Lou’s handwriting (especially when compared to other material that was obviously in her handwriting). The note, found in the last page of a binder and retained for evidence, read as follows:
DO YOU KNOW A KID NAMED RICHARD BURTON?
I WAS GOING WITH HIM, UNTIL 2 DAYS BEFORE
THE INSTALLATION. HE STILL PHONES ME, AND IS
THREATENING ME TO KEEP AWAY FROM DAVE.
HE SAID IF HE’S EVER CLOSE ENOUGH TO DAVE, HE WOULD
PUNCH HIM ONE IN THE TEETH. I TOLD HIM TO LEAVE ME
ALONE, IF HE KNOWS WHAT [IS] GOOD [FOR] HIM.
***
In early January, prior to the resumption of high school classes, Principal Dean called the detectives to report that Betty Lou’s gym locker contained only shoes, hair spray, and an archery score card. Nothing that would assist the police.
Upon examining Jensen’s note and considering other information gathered, Lundblad decided to speak again with 16-year-old Ricky. His alibi may have been iron-clad, but he now had a clear motive—and was at least accused of making threats to one of the victims. The detectives had to consider the possibility that he might know more about the attack than he was admitting. A meeting was arranged for December 28 at 1:00 p.m. at the Sheriff’s Office.
Ricky arrived at the appointed time with his parents. He was read his Miranda rights once again. Once again, he expressed a desire to waive his rights and speak with the detective in order to do all he could to aid the investigation. By all outward appearances, he had nothing to hide.
He was confronted by a statement that his acquaintance, Daniel, had shared with the police that he, while washing his mother’s car, displayed the car keys and bragged that he was going out Friday night. Calmly, Ricky explained that he wasn’t sure exactly what day it was—he washed the car a couple of times a week—but it could have been Wednesday or Thursday. He denied saying that he was going to get the car Friday. He did acknowledge that he had surreptitiously taken the car on a previous occasion but that he had been found out by his mother.
He also denied having seen Faraday on Friday. He claimed that he never made any threats to his face, though he may have told Betty Lou that he would tell her parents that she smoked, but only because he did not approve of it. When shown Betty Lou’s note from her notebook, he was surprised she had written it. He acknowledged that it was her handwriting. He was not upset by what he saw, and shrugged it off by saying that he could have made the remark about punching Faraday during a telephone conversation with his former girlfriend.
Lundblad urged Ricky to clear his name by taking a polygraph examination. Ricky asked what the results would reveal if a person were nervous, as though he were trying to buy time. The officer said that an operator would explain the procedure. The accused young man agreed to take the test, and his parents gave their consent. Arrangements would be made, he was told. He would be notified. The next morning, however, Ricky’s father telephoned and reported that his son had decided not to take the examination. He explained that Ricky was just too nervous. Besides, they all knew that he was innocent. He was obviously home at the time, a fact to which many witnesses could, and did, attest.
***
On December 27, Lundblad and Butterbach met with an upset young couple from Napa. Their tale was provocative, and provided another possible lead for the investigation into the attack that occurred seven days earlier. Larry, aged 20, and his wife, Linda, who was 18, sat down with the investigators at 11:00 in the morning to recount their experiences from the previous night. While Larry was at work at a Standard Oil filling station on Imola Avenue—he worked the night shift from midnight until 8:00 in the morning—he was visited by a former neighbor, named Pete, who had once lived in the same apartment complex as the couple. The time was 1:45 a.m.
Fifteen minutes later, the detectives were told, Pete showed up at the couple’s home. Linda let him in, since he was known to her and her husband. Once inside, Pete asked her, “What would you do if I raped you?” Thinking quickly on her feet, she responded that she would pound on the wall and her neighbor would telephone the police. Changing tactics—if there was indeed any plan behind his actions—Pete asked Linda if she was happy. Upon learning that she indeed was, he complained, “Happy people piss me off.” He confessed to her that he had been fighting with his wife and was planning to go to Vallejo. He also stated that he intended to move back to Redding because all the people in the area were stabbing him in the back and, after the knife was in, twisting it.
Pete remained in the apartment for about 45 minutes, Linda estimated to the officers. After he left, she heard someone walking around outside, but she did not look to see who it was. The couple could not recall Pete’s last name, but knew that he drove a blue 1952 Chevrolet coup. He also had a 1955 cream- and maroon-colored Buick. He owned a rifle and a pistol, but she did not know the calibers. She did know that he carried a fishing knife in his pocket.
The couple provided a rough description of their strange guest: about 28 years of age, five feet eleven inches in height, jet black hair, and acne pits on his face. They also shared that he served as helper on the day shift at Kaiser Steel.
Lundblad detailed Butterbach to drive to Kaiser Steel with Larry to attempt to identify Pete’s car in the company parking lot. If possible, they would also try to collect any information about him that they could from other employees.
A Vallejo woman, named Jean, contacted Sergeant Lundblad that same day. Though she was hesitant to provide a statement, she offered that her three children, ages 18, 16, and 14, and a 17-year-old boy who lived with them, had made comments that they knew who was responsible for the killing. The woman admitted that it was probably a guess from no more than speculation. Nevertheless, the person responsible, according to the youths, was named “Gary.” The woman could offer no concrete proof, nor any additional facts.
Like so much other vague information provided to the department, this would be filed for future use. No one knew when a minor detail would break the case, but everyone shared the belief that something in the voluminous, and ever-growing, file would eventually cough up the criminal.
Also on December 27, Lundblad took a statement from a gunsmith at Al’s Sport Shop who had been contacted by Lundblad to provide information on certain types of self-loading revolvers and pistols. Based on the evidence available, the gunsmith suggested that the fatal shooting could have been carried out with a type of Ruger that had a tube magazine and carried from 12 to 15 rounds, depending on the ammunition used. He offered to provide any help he could to the department as
it labored to identify the responsible weapon.
The next morning, Lundblad and Butterbach met with George Parks, the Range Master assigned to test any seized weapons to determine whether they were associated with the attack. He told the officers that by means of test firings he was able to eliminate three guns that had been provided to him: Connelly’s Marlin automatic rifle; James A. Owen’s Ruger automatic rifle, serial number 138577; and a Remington automatic rifle, model 550-1, owned by another man named James.
The CII later concluded that an exact match with a particular weapon would be difficult, if not impossible, since the copper coating on the slugs made the rounds too hard to accept a clear impression of the barrel’s rifling pattern, and prevented the identification of a unique pattern of lands and grooves. But many firearms could and would be eliminated.
Though many guns were present in the area of the attack, none that came to the attention of law enforcement was ever linked to the assault on Faraday and Jensen. Forensic analysis eliminated all the weapons that were tested. Apparently, the gun that was used to kill the couple had left the immediate area and was as elusive and mysterious as the person who had fired it.
Tests of rifling marks on the slugs—6 right-hand grooves, land to groove ratio of 1:1+; groove width approximately .056, and land width approximately .06; semi-circular firing impression at 12 o’clock, and small ejector markings on the shell casings at 3 o’clock; somewhat-visible, faint ejector markings at 8 o’clock—revealed that the weapon could have been a J.C. Higgins model 80, a High Standard Model 101, or some other .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol, as opposed to a rifle, and categorically eliminated any model of revolver, since they do not leave ejector markings. (Mel Nicolai, in a 35-page California Department of Justice report written on January 22, 1971, shared that criminologist David Q. Burd of the CII linked the shooting to a J.C. Higgins model 80 automatic pistol.) The ammunition was identified as .22 caliber Super X copper-coated long rifle rounds, the knowledge of which would later become one among several pieces of information by which the perpetrator would later identify himself in letters to law enforcement as the one responsible for this attack.
Because there were no eyewitnesses to the attack itself, the investigators had to rely on crime scene evidence to reconstruct exactly what had happened. Shell casings found scattered about revealed that 10 shots had been fired at the scene, though only 8 of the slugs could be accounted for: 1 in Faraday’s skull, 5 fired through Jensen’s back, and 2 discovered lodged in the station wagon. The other 2 missing rounds evidently represented misses on the part of attacker, or possibly 1 or 2 warning shots fired into the air.
Initially, one of the bullet holes in the station wagon was misidentified as being the product of a .38 caliber weapon. This led investigators to falsely conclude that there were two guns—and possibly two shooters—at the scene. Subsequent analysis confirmed that only one gun was responsible for all 10 shots.
***
The investigators reviewed the details of the actual attack. Between the time that the mid-sized, dark car, lacking in chrome, was spotted by Owen at 11:14 p.m. and the time that Medeiros found the victims outside the car at 11:20 p.m., the officers theorized that the killer had exited his vehicle, commanded or threatened the couple to leave the station wagon, and fired the deadly shots before fleeing the scene. The bullets recovered from the interior of the car may have been an attempt to force Faraday and Jensen to leave the relative safety of their vehicle. The rather close scatter of shell casings to the right of the station wagon—and the 28-foot-long trail of blood from the car to Jensen’s collapsed body—suggested that the killer did not move very far from his own car parked next to and paralleling the Faraday car before the deed was done and he was back on the road.
It appeared to investigators that Faraday had been shot first, possibly at the moment he stumbled out of his vehicle. But it was not an obvious conclusion. Jensen could have then been fired upon first as she fled between the cars, attempting to gain some distance from the killer’s weapon. It is also possible that the killer coerced the couple to stand outside the car, and even spoke with them. “Possibly they were ordered out of the car,” speculated Lundblad. Whether the couple and shooter exchanged words, and whether Faraday and Jensen were given a few seconds to stand in the last moments of their lives, were known to the killer alone. The shot to Faraday’s head appeared to investigators to be an effort to subdue the stronger of the two victims, and was the violence that instigated Jensen’s flight.
The condition of the station wagon also suggested some details about the attack and its aftermath. The officers arriving at the scene found the passenger front door open. The other three doors, and the tailgate, were closed and locked. The front seat was set back so the couple could recline. The seat position may have prevented the raccoon hunters from observing the teenagers within the car as they passed the Rambler just after 11:00 p.m. It may somehow have been related to the attack as well, the couple’s sudden emergence possibly startling and angering their attacker.
The investigators were left to speculate on the activities of Faraday and Jensen between 9:00 p.m. when they were last seen by Betty Lou’s friend, Sharon, and 10:15 p.m. when they were first spotted at the attack site by former classmate Helen and her boyfriend. The couple spent some money, or Faraday somehow parted with some of the change given to him by his mother.
The officers astutely noted that even if the attacker had some compelling reason to attack the couple—and no obvious motive emerged—he would not have known where to find them. This suggested a random attack on victims not known to their killer, possibly the impulsive action of a trigger-happy assailant, Faraday and Jensen just happening to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Substance abuse appeared to play no part in the attack. No alcohol or narcotics were found at the scene or were revealed in the course of the autopsies. The two victims merely wanted to be alone and enjoy the intoxicating power of love when their lives were suddenly and brutally extinguished.
What was absent from any scenario created in the minds of the investigators was any kind of rational motive. On the first page of the main murder report, the officers marked in clear letters, “no apparent motive.” Lundblad at first believed that the killer’s intention was to sexually molest Jensen, but investigators were able to eliminate robbery and sexual assault quite quickly. They initially considered that the couple had been followed to the location, but then discounted that possibility. Subsequent investigation did nothing to reveal or clarify the killer’s reasoning. Lundblad described it as a “senseless murder.” The act was perhaps carried out by a demented person. By Sunday night, 24 hours after the attack, investigators were already theorizing that the killer was unknown to the victims.
In early spring, in an attempt to assure the public that progress was being made in the by-now-slow-moving investigation, and to allay its fears, Detective Sergeant Lundblad answered questions that became a story in the local paper on Sunday March 30, 1969. He informed readers that his department had spoken to over 100 people in the course of the department’s work, filing reports on more than 50 of them, many of the individuals being interviewed more than once. The file of reports had grown to over four inches thick, plus many items were collected in a “fairly sizable evidence locker.”
Lundblad did not reveal all of his cards, however. He retained enough pieces of information so that if someone were to confess to the crime he would know quite quickly whether the person had been at the scene or not. He worked on the case every day, he noted, and had received assistance from many sources.
But he hadn’t yet found the clue that would lead him to the killer.
The case, V-25564 #9, by itself achieved a high profile status, becoming one of the most infamous unsolved cases in California at the time. Numerous law enforcement agencies contacted Lundblad to offer assistance, and he was grateful for the support that he received from numerous agencies in the vicinity of his department, in
cluding the VPD, BPD, Napa Police Department, Napa and Sonoma County Sheriff’s Offices, and the Fairfield PD.
The community also rallied around the investigation. When Lundblad requested all the small caliber weapons owned by the residents living in the vicinity of the attack be tested, he received good cooperation. Jim Gaul, a Hogan High student, spearheaded a Jensen-Faraday reward fund drive. He, together with students from both Vallejo high schools, planned fund raisers in the hopes of collecting $1000 in reward money toward the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for the appalling double murder. The students planned to canvass businesses, make door-to-door neighborhood requests, sponsor car washes, and host candy sales. If the money was unclaimed after one year, they decided, it would convert into memorial scholarships.
In time, leads became dead ends, and new sources of information dried up like the brown, grass-covered hills in a Northern California summer. As winter disappeared under the new life of spring and spring warmed to a hot, dry summer, investigators and the public alike began to wonder whether this crime would ever be solved. There was no known motive, no eyewitnesses, and the forensics that were gathered yielded few hints as to who had done this and why.
A pattern would emerge only after the killer attacked again.
3 | BLUE ROCK SPRINGS PARK
“the boy was also shot in the knee.”
By the time the fourth of July rolled around, the odd event on Lake Herman Road the previous December was no longer on the forefront of the minds of most Solano County residents. It had become less and less relevant as life in the area returned to normal and the murders receded in history. Though the gruesome, unsolved attack left many unanswered questions, no one anticipated it would be repeated.
