Serial killer Ted Bundy confessed to raping and killing around 28 women and young girls in California and in the Pacific Northwest in roughly the same period that the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders took place. In 1979, Bundy was sentenced to death by a Florida court for the killing of two female college students and again sentenced to die one year later for the rape and murder of a 12-year–old girl (via Britannica). Bundy is linked and suspected to be guilty of a number of other unsolved murders and missing persons cases from the era dating to around 1974. Some experts believe the true count of Bundy’s victims could be close to 100, according to SFGATE. For these reasons, some consider Bundy a suspect in the Santa Rosa killings.
Also implicating Bundy in the murder spree, he’s known to have attended Stanford University located in Palo Alto, California, near Santa Rosa, and to have possibly traveled through the Sonoma County area around the time that the Santa Rosa murders happened. According to authorities, Bundy confessed he killed others in that same time frame, though he provided no details before his death by electric chair in the late 1980s.
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Retired detective Robert Keppel who investigated Bundy said (via SFGATE) “Bundy is definitely a good suspect … The killings in Santa Rosa would fit his methods, he spent time in the area, and I’m sure he started killing well before 1974.”
