Rosalind, a bright, well-liked girl from an affluent coastal resort town, was just completing her studies in linguistics and psychology at UCSC. She lived downtown in an apartment on Mott Street which she shared with her friends Nancy, Virginia, Kathy, and Linn.
Sometimes Rosalind bicycled up the hill to her university classes. On the evening of February 5 [1973]—only days after Cindy [Schall]’s remains had been identified and Mary [Guilfoyle]’s body discovered—Rosalind left the apartment after dinner to attend a lecture on campus.
Her roommate Nancy was under the impression that she planned to take a bus, since the day had been rainy. Rosalind was wearing her dark pea jacket when she left the house. She did not return that evening, and her housemates quickly informed the police.
The same evening in another house in Santa Cruz, Alice, 21, a small Oriental girl weighing only about one hundred pounds, left for the University campus to do some research at the library and afterward attend a late class. She was from Southern California and in her senior year at UCSC.
Alice regularly hitchhiked to and from the campus. She shared living quarters with Julie, also Oriental, a former student who was working as a financial assistant on the campus. The two girls had grown up together in Los Angeles and remained the closest of friends.
Alice, one of four sisters, was the daughter of an aerospace engineer. She did not return from her evening class. Definitely, in Julie’s opinion, Alice was not the sort of girl to leave town without telling anyone.
When Julie telephoned the police to report Alice’s disappearance, she reported that she, like the missing Rosalind, had been wearing a dark pea jacket and that she carried a tote bag containing an I.D. card, a hairbrush, a UC health card, and an El Camino Library card, among other items. She also carried a photograph of a friend in Taiwan, where she had visited the previous summer.
Word of the two girls’ vanishing swept quickly through the campus community. There was nothing to link them together since they had not known one another. On February 14, several squads of students began grimly combing the groves of redwoods, pines, and madrona that grow thickly over much of the campus, stumbling through underbrush along the canyons, searching for what they feared to find.
Adding confusion and spreading fear over a broader range, on the following day the body of a girl named Leslie, 21, was found in a remote part of the Stanford University campus in San Mateo county to the north. She had been strangled and left beneath an oak tree. Leslie’s death, as it turned out, was unrelated to the Santa Cruz student murders.
Source: The Co-Ed Killer, by Margaret Cheney
