Jury: Gypsy Hill killer guilty

Some four years after he was charged with the girls’ gruesome murders — which led to Cascio being found dead in the Sharp Park Golf Course in Pacifica in January of 1976 and the discovery of Baxter’s body behind a church in Millbrae about a month later — a jury found Halbower guilty of first-degree murder in the teens’ deaths Tuesday.

And in doing so, they have destined Halbower for a life prison sentence and a path prosecutors believe will help bring Cascio and Baxter’s families closer to a sense of justice.

Though District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe was surprised the jury’s verdict was returned a little more than an hour after they began deliberations Tuesday afternoon, he noted it couldn’t come soon enough for those who have waited more than four decades for the girls’ killer to be held accountable.

“I can’t imagine what they feel after 42 years,” he said, of Baxter’s and Cascio’s families. “The horror of what they had to live with because of the evil of this man is beyond any of our comprehensions.”

In his closing argument, Supervising Deputy District Attorney Sean Gallagher commended investigators who worked on the cases throughout the years since the teens’ deaths, noting the role DNA evidence played in linking Halbower to their murders.

“So much of what we heard about in the trial really for all those years was just waiting, waiting to be discovered,” he said.

Evidence

He acknowledged investigators could uncover some details about the girls’ final moments from evidence discovered near or at the crime scenes. The overnight bag Cascio packed for her first-ever sleepover and found by a couple driving by the bus stop where she is believed to have waited moments before she was abducted, the memories friends of Baxter have of saying goodbye to her after a rehearsal at San Bruno’s Capuchino High School before she disappeared for two days and the way in which both girls were stabbed and sexually assaulted were among the pieces of evidence investigators relied upon in the years following their deaths.

But it was a scientist’s revisiting of the evidence collected at the scenes in 1996 that connected the two cases to the DNA of the same person, and another scientist’s work in 2014 that matched the killer’s DNA to Halbower, who had been serving time in an Oregon prison after being convicted for attacking a 22-year-old woman in parking lot as she was locking her car, noted Gallagher.

DNA analysis

In his own closing argument, Halbower’s defense attorney John Halley questioned the methods investigators and scientists employed in collecting and analyzing the DNA evidence found at the scenes, emphasizing the prosecution’s burden to prove without a reasonable doubt Halbower was the killer. He asked jurors to consider the fact that the prosecution never showed them the charts showing the DNA analysis and didn’t ask the scientists who performed the analysis to demonstrate how they reached their conclusions, noting at least two of the witnesses who took the stand admitted to mistakes made in the DNA analysis related to the two cases.

“You don’t have the raw material,” he said. “You can’t do what I did with these witnesses and see for yourself whether they’re saying things that are not true.”

Additional crimes

Though Halbower was previously thought to have been the killer behind five 1976 killings of young women in San Mateo County, he was only charged with Cascio’s and Baxter’s murders as insufficient evidence has been unearthed to connect him with three other murders occurring shortly after theirs. Dubbed the “Gypsy Hill” murders after the road 14-year-old Tanya Blackwell was discovered near months after her January disappearance in 1976 off Gypsy Hill Road in Pacifica, the crimes also include the murder of Carol Lee Booth, 26, who was last seen in South San Francisco March 15 before her body was discovered in early May and Denise Lampe, a 19-year-old who was found stabbed to death in her car at the Serramonte Shopping Center in Daly City April 1, 1976.

Investigators broadened their search for Lampe’s killer when they discovered Halbower was in custody at a Nevada jail facing rape and other related charges when the young woman was last seen leaving the Daly City mall hours before she was found dead, according to prosecutors.

In November, prosecutors announced a murder charge against 71-year-old convict and known sexual predator Leon Melvin Seymour after tying him to Lampe’s case based on DNA found from a bloodstain on her jacket. Civilly committed to Coalinga State Hospital after serving a 33-year prison sentence, Seymour has been convicted for sexually assaulting six different female victims. His charges included rape and attempted sodomy in San Mateo County and other counties.

Among those following Halbower’s trial in San Mateo County was Allan Fox, a retired detective from Washoe County in Nevada who investigated the murder of a young woman named Michelle Mitchell that same year in Reno. Though a woman with a history of mental health issues named Cathy Woods was arrested for Mitchell’s murder while Fox was serving in the U.S. Army, he said he worked with her defense to get her released from prison years later after a match was made between DNA collected at the crime scene for Mitchell’s murder and in some of the evidence connected to the Gypsy Hill murders. Fox said he was encouraged by San Mateo County’s trial of the case and hoped the Washoe County community would soon have a similar opportunity to try Halbower as the alleged killer in Mitchell’s murder as more light is shed on her last moments.

“It’s very satisfying because these cases keep you up at night,” he said, after Gallagher and Halley delivered their closing arguments. “You think you’re tired and you start thinking about what this could be.”

‘Day of reckoning’

Halbower faces life in prison with the possibility of parole when he returns to court for sentencing Oct. 10, after which he is expected to be transported to Nevada to face charges in the kidnapping, stabbing and murder of Mitchell, said Wagstaffe.

For his part, Gallagher also expressed gratitude for the light shed on the cases of Baxter and Cascio by the advances in DNA collection and analysis in the years since their murders, noting the DNA evidence connected to their deaths was able to speak for them when they couldn’t.

“For so long, we could only say we know how this criminal had done this and now we can say we know who did this,” he said. “His day of reckoning is now.”

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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