THE KILLER WHO OFFERED THEM A RIDE

Yvonne Lisa Weber had turned thirteen only six days earlier. She was born in Carson City, Nevada, and moved to California as a little girl. Her parents split up when she was young, and her mother, Sheila, later married a man named David Herrington. Yvonne had a big brother, Mark, who was fiercely protective of her, and a little half-brother, Aaron. Later that year her mother would give birth to a baby girl, Emily. It was a sister Yvonne would never meet.

Funnily enough, even though Yvonne was the older of the two, most people assumed she was the younger one. Maureen was the stronger personality. Both girls went to Herbert Slater Middle School, they spent their weekends together, and both had hitchhiked before. In those days that wasn’t unusual. Thumbing a ride was simply how young people got around. But these were girls of twelve and thirteen.

At around half past seven that evening, one of their mothers dropped the pair off at the rink. The plan was simple. She would come back and collect them at eleven o’clock.

Some time that evening, the girls stopped to talk with another girl they knew. They told her a man had asked them to go and smoke marijuana with him. He was a stranger, tall and slender. The friend wanted nothing to do with it, and she said no and stayed behind. But she saw the man for herself. He was standing in the lobby, side-on to her, watching the skaters out on the ice. She had never laid eyes on him before.

She remembered something else too. Maureen and Yvonne had dressed up that night in a way that made them look years older than they really were. To a grown man standing in a lobby, they might not have looked like children at all.

That friend carried what she saw for the rest of her life. In 2019 she told interviewers that the man in the lobby looked like Ted Bundy. Then, in a 2024 HBO documentary, she looked at an old photograph from the early 1970s and said the man resembled someone else entirely, a man named Jim Mordecai. Hold on to that name. We’ll be coming back to him.

At about nine o’clock, roughly an hour and a half after they’d been dropped off, Maureen and Yvonne were seen for the last time. They were out on Guerneville Road, just outside the rink, hitchhiking. They were seen getting into a vehicle. Nobody took down a number plate. Nobody got a proper look at the driver. Nobody knows to this day whether the girls climbed in happily, thinking they’d scored a free ride, or whether they were frightened or forced. They simply got in, and the car drove away.

At eleven o’clock, the mother came back as promised. The girls weren’t waiting outside. She went into the rink and searched for them, looking among the skaters and the kids in the lobby. Nothing. She rang the other girl’s mother, hoping they’d found their own way home. They hadn’t.

She rang around their friends. Nobody had seen them. Finally, with her stomach in knots, she called the police.

The Santa Rosa Police Department started searching the next day. And almost straight away, they decided they knew exactly what had happened. Two girls, a bit wild, used to hitchhiking. They had run away. They’d be off with some friend somewhere and would turn up in a few days with their tails between their legs.

The families never believed it for a moment. Yvonne’s stepfather, David, later told the local newspaper, the Press Democrat, that police had insisted the girls were runaways. “It is obvious that they weren’t,” he said.

I’m with him. Runaways plan. They pack a bag, they take money, they tell a friend. These were two young girls who had a lift home booked for eleven o’clock that same night. Nobody runs away from a skate night with their mother on her way to pick them up.

Still, the search went ahead in a fashion. Their classmates were questioned at school the following week. Officers looked out towards Kenwood and Sugarloaf, and around Spring Lake and Howard Park. Rumours came in, as they always do. One said the girls had been in contact with a man who lived out along the Russian River. Another said they’d been spotted at a bowling alley after leaving the rink, maybe going to meet someone. Police chased both and got nowhere. Neither rumour was ever confirmed.

Within a week, the leads simply stopped. Within two weeks, nothing was coming in at all. The newspapers barely mentioned the girls. With the police calling them runaways, there didn’t seem to be much of a story. Two families were left sitting by the phone, waiting for a call that never came.

Much later, once the police finally understood what they were dealing with, a Santa Rosa lieutenant made a plea to the public. He asked anyone who had given the girls a ride that night, even an innocent driver who’d just dropped them somewhere, to come forward. Everything the police knew, he admitted, stopped at the door of the ice arena.

That was the trouble. Nobody came forward. Whoever pulled over on Guerneville Road that Friday night never said a word.

Maureen Sterling and Yvonne Weber would not be seen again for almost eleven months. When they were finally found, three days after Christmas, there was nothing left of them but bones.

And long before then, just one month after the two girls vanished, another young woman would stand at the side of the road with her thumb out, and climb into the wrong car.

End of chapter one. 11 more chapters and about 17,964 words in the full book.