FBI links inmate to unsolved Gypsy Hill killings on Peninsula

Rodney Halbower, seen in this 1976 booking shot, has been linked to a string of killings in the Bay Area in that year. Rodney Halbower, seen in this 1976 booking shot, has been linked to a string of killings in the Bay Area in that year. Photo: Courtesy, FBI Photo: Courtesy, FBI Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close FBI links inmate to unsolved Gypsy Hill killings on Peninsula 1 / 10 Back to Gallery

A person of interest in a string of unsolved killings in San Mateo County was identified by the FBI on Monday, nearly 40 years after the first victim was found near Gypsy Hill Road in Pacifica.

Rodney Halbower, a 66-year-old inmate at the Oregon State Penitentiary, was linked to the killings of five young women on the Peninsula in 1976 after investigators connected DNA evidence in those cases to a cigarette butt left under the body of a sixth murder victim in Reno, authorities said.

That victim was Reno resident Michelle Mitchell, 19, who had her throat slit shortly after her car broke down near the University of Nevada on Feb. 24, 1976.

Another woman, Cathy Woods, was convicted of her murder after giving what her attorney said was a false confession. After more than three decades in custody, Woods requested a review of the evidence in the case earlier this year. It turned up the DNA sample on the cigarette butt that linked Mitchell's murder to two of the cases in San Mateo County.

In turn, that DNA was linked to Halbower, who had only recently given a DNA sample when he was transferred from state prison in Nevada to state prison in Oregon, said Woods' attorney, Chief Deputy Public Defender Maizie Pusich.

"The people that are in custody serving long sentences, there's a backlog in taking their DNA," she said. "Thank goodness he transferred jurisdictions and that put his DNA in the database."

Halbower had been in custody in Nevada after he was convicted of a 1976 rape just a few blocks from where Mitchell was found in Reno, Pusich said. In 1986, he escaped the maximum-security prison where he was being held and fled to Oregon, where he committed a slew of other crimes.

He was admitted to Oregon State Penitentiary in November 2013 after he was paroled in Nevada to serve his sentence for attempted murder, assault and robbery, according to the Oregon Department of Corrections.

Investigators said they believe Halbower's DNA also matches the DNA found in some of the unsolved San Mateo County slayings that haunted the Peninsula for decades.

They began on Jan. 8, 1976, when the body of 18-year-old Ronnie Cascio was discovered at the Sharp Park Golf Course in her hometown of Pacifica. She had been stabbed 30 times and sexually assaulted.

A few weeks later, 14-year-old Tanya Blackwell was reported missing after leaving her home in Pacifica. Her body was discovered on Gypsy Hill Road in the city a few months later.

The body of 17-year-old Paula Baxter was found a few weeks after that in her hometown of Millbrae. The next month, 19-year-old Denise Lampe of Broadmoor was slain in her car in the lot of the Serramonte mall in Daly City.

Carol Lee Booth, 26, who was reported missing that March, was found dead in South San Francisco a month later. She, like Cascio and Baxter, had been sexually assaulted.

The FBI did not say what is going to happen to Halbower now that he has been named a person of interest. But Pusich's client Woods will be released and out of custody for the first time since Feb. 24, 1979. Pusich's motion for a new trial was granted, and Woods is expected to be released to her family in Bakersfield by the end of this week.

Woods, now 64, was a psychiatric patient at the Louisiana State University Medical Center when she told hospital staff that she had killed a girl named Michelle in Reno. Woods was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Pusich said she believes she had just been trying to get her own room at the hospital.

"She was very sick," Pusich said. "There was some discussion about whether or not she qualified to be in a single room, and after they told her she didn't qualify for a single room, she told them that. I suspect the reason why she thought of this case is because this was the case everybody around her was talking about. This is something she would have heard about many, many times."

Woods' conviction was reversed by the Nevada Supreme Court when it was discovered that a witness in the case gave differing testimonies of the events in two separate cases. She was tried and convicted again in 1995, Pusich said, and had remained in custody the entire time.

Woods told Pusich that she had never met Halbower. Pusich said her client was overwhelmed but happy to finally be reunited with her brother and mother.

"It's bittersweet," Pusich said. "I wish this had happened on her behalf years and years ago, but it couldn't have. We didn't have the ability or the authority to do the testing, and we wouldn't have had the results to compare. Even though it's been forever, it's the right time."