mar 13, 1970 - Marie Antoinette Anstey

Description:

24yo; last seen driving her mother's car from their 10 Wilshire St, Vallejo, home. She drove to the Coronado Inn, a nightclub at 1506 Sears Point Rd, Vallejo, and was seen there at about closing time, 2am Mar. 14.

The morning of the following day (Mar. 14), her car was found abandoned just off Highway 29 near Vallejo. It was inoperable. The car was blocking the driveway of the Solano County Humane Society's animal shelter, ~4mi from Vallejo. "The car, when abandoned, was headed toward Vallejo." Her keys were not in the car.

Mar. 21: her nude drowned body recovered in rural Lake County, off Morgan Valley Rd near the Lake County line; that road is a continuation of Napa County's Knoxville-Berryessa Rd, but is named Morgan Valley Rd once in Lake County.
She was found nude 50 yds off the remote country road, w/ a scalp wound in the back of her head that was not sufficient to cause death, but likely rendered her unconscious. She was likely stunned by a blow to the head, then drowned

Preliminary report lists the death attributable to drowning. Small bits of gravel and sand were found in her lungs. COD was later determined to be mescaline overdose, the same COD as Eva Lucienne Blau

There are posts about Anstey on Zodiac forums. In 1986, Robert Graysmith published a list of 49 confirmed & possible Zodiac victims. The list includes SRHM victims, and murders with some similarties to the SRHM crimes. This includes Anstey's murder.

While Marie's death is often brought up in conjunction with other "Astrological Murders" -- with that also being how I first learned about her case -- I am also putting her case in the Bad Samaritan Murders category because it very much fits the MO.









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In February 1975 the California Department of Justice (CA DOJ) issued a special report titled "Unsolved Female Homicides: An Analysis of a Series of Related Murders in California and Western America." The report indicated that, "After evaluating more than one hundred murder cases involving female victims, it appears that thirteen of these crimes" -- with fourteen victims total -- "were committed by the same person. Each of the thirteen cases occurred in Northern California within the past five years. As of this writing, the suspect remains unknown and the cases unsolved" (pp4 of pdf). The report summarized all thirteen cases, noted observations and similarities, created a suspect profile, and included a map of all of the cases.

The cases were:
- The six then-known cases -- with seven victims -- of the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders (1972-1973): Maureen Sterling & Yvonne Weber, Kim Wendy Allen, Lori Lee Kursa, Carolyn Davis, and Theresa Walsh.
- The four 1973 San Francisco victims: Rosa Vasquez, Yvonne Quilantang, Angela Thomas, and Nancy Gidley.
- The 1969 murder of Leona LaRell Roberts
- The 1970 murder of Marie Antoinette Anstey
- The 1971 murder of Linda Susan Dudley
- The 1974 murder of Donna Maria Braun

The available section of the report's summary of Marie's case is as follows:
"On March 13, 1970, Marie Antoinette Anstey was last seen in the parking lot of the Coronado Inn in the city of Vallejo. Her nude body was discovered in Lake County on March 21, 1970, lying off an isolated county [...]"

Also included in the report was a possible out-of-state connection involving the disappearances of eight young women in Washington and Oregon since January 1974, as well as the murders of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund. The only copy of the report that I could find online has some of the last few (ten or so) pages missing, though other reports are also included in the pdf. Because of this, only a few of the Washington-Oregon cases remain: Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, Lynda Ann Healy, and Donna Gail Manson. All four of these young women were later determined to have been murdered by serial killer Ted Bundy.







MARCH 13
LUNAR PHASE: waxing crescent
ZODIAC SIGN: pisces
DAY OF WEEK: Friday
EVENTS: Mar. 20 = Spring Equinox (7 days later)

MARCH 21
LUNAR PHASE: waxing gibbous
ZODIAC SIGN: aries (first day)
DAY OF WEEK: Saturday
EVENTS: Mar. 20 = Spring Equinox (1 day earlier); Mar. 22 = Palm Sunday (1 day later)
moon descending node

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