sfgate.com
A small unincorporated community in rural Southern California has been besieged by a pack of aggressive stray dogs this year, according to numerous reports. In March, roaming stray dogs reportedly killed over 300 sheep and goats in Anza, Riverside County. “It was a massacre. It was a traumatic situation to come home to,” Alex Avalos, a local farmer who says 30 of his goats were killed by dogs in one attack, told the Press-Enterprise. “My concern is: What if a kid is next.” Another farmer in Anza…
2 months ago
sfgate.com
A mystery surrounding a gruesome discovery made by two fishermen 50 years ago in Southern California has been partially solved. On June 13, 1973, a woman’s dismembered body was found in an orange suitcase and several plastic bags in San Diego Bay. The fishermen initially saw a leg floating in the water before finding the case and green garbage bags washed up on the shore between Laurel Street and the US Coast Guard Station. “A half inch mole on the left thigh of a dismembered murder victim was…
3 months ago
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A controversy has bubbled up on the northern shore of Lake Tahoe after a fence and signs were installed at the back of a restaurant parking lot near a public beach. The 3-foot fence, security gate with a lock code and signs warning “residents only” were erected earlier this year behind Whitecaps Pizza, which backs onto the Kings Beach State Recreation Area. Another nearby sandwich board standing on the sand reads, “No public access to beach or street.” Though installed by the pizzeria owner in M…
3 months ago
sfgate.com
Police in Northern California have made an arrest after eight abducted children were found in Shasta County in the early hours of Saturday morning. On Oct. 21 at around 12:30 a.m., a “concerned citizen” called 911 after witnessing a woman with six children “displaying bizarre behavior” in the parking lot of gas station and Mexican restaurant off I-5 in Anderson, Calif., police said in a statement. Authorities arrived on the scene and found the woman, children and a Dodge pickup with Arkansas pl…
3 months ago
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The 1983 killing of a 14-year-old girl in Red Bluff, California, has finally been solved — thanks in part to a single strand of hair found on the victim. Rashell Ward was abducted while taking her usual five-block walk to school on the morning of March 3, 1983. Her body was found later that day by a rancher on Pine Creek Road, a few miles west of the city, on Interstate 5 in Tehama County. Ward had been bound with tape, sexually assaulted and shot in the back of the head. Ward was one of only t…
3 months ago
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A search is ongoing for a California woman who went missing under mysterious circumstances while embarking on a cross-country road trip from San Diego to Connecticut, authorities say. The last confirmed sighting of Chelsea Grimm, 32, was on Sept. 28 in Williams, Arizona, though investigators believe she was also with her vehicle on nearby Forest Service Road 6 two days later. On Oct. 4, Chelsea’s parents reported her missing to Phoenix police. The following day, hunters reported a “suspicious”…
3 months ago
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Sometime in the 1970s, a California man headed to Nevada to find gold and was never heard from again. The mystery of Virgil R. Renner’s disappearance now has some answers after the John Doe was identified in Arizona last week. In September 1982, some passersby found human remains on Hackberry Road, near historic Route 66, in the desert outside Kingman, Arizona. Mojave County sheriff’s deputies were called to the scene, where they found a comb, a rusty can opener, fingernail clippers and various…
3 months ago
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A songwriter, model and actress known for co-writing a Katy Perry hit has been found after going missing from her Beverly Hills home for about three months, officials confirmed. Camela Leierth-Segura, 48, was located by police on Oct. 5 through an anonymous source who reported seeing Leierth-Segura in the city of Santa Monica, Lt. Reginald Evans, a spokesperson for the Beverly Hills Police Department, wrote in an email to SFGATE on Tuesday. “The BHPD Watch Commander requested the Santa Monica P…
4 months ago
sfgate.com
Meghan Modafferi has a memory from when she was 7 years old. She was walking the streets of San Francisco, handing out flyers to strangers, trying to find her big sister. She remembers her family went to Kinko’s to make more copies of missing posters with her sister’s face on them. While they waited, she wandered over to a big blue mailbox. “I had a favorite stuffed animal,” Meghan said, “and I put it in a mailbox, and I closed it, and it disappeared. I was so upset.” In the 26 years since then…
4 months ago
sfgate.com
As luck would have it, the evening I drove up the eastern slopes of Mount Tamalpais to stay at the iconic peak’s historic hotel was also a blue moon. As I arrived, diners and drinkers on the old redwood deck looking out over the forests of Marin watched the rare moon rise from one of the best vantage points around. And the serendipity didn’t end there. Serenading the crowd was a man named Wolff, who didn’t quite howl at the moon but instead sang pretty Neil Young covers into the twilight. Built…
4 months ago
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A victim of a long-haul trucker who took at least eight women’s lives across America in the 1990s has been identified, authorities say. Suzanne Kjellenberg was strangled and left by Interstate 10 in Florida in Sept. 1994 by serial killer Keith Hunter Jesperson — also known as the “Happy Face Killer” due to his tendency to sign letters to the media with smiley faces. She was 34 at the time of her death. “In February of 1996, Jesperson actually admitted to killing our victim,” Sheriff Eric Aden…
4 months ago