26 lugl 1971 anni - Rosa Linda Zuniga HOMICIDE

Descrizione:

Rosa Linda Zuniga was born to parents Leonardo Cortez Zuniga and Irene/Yrenia Oviedo Cantu on January 22, 1953 in San Antonio, Bexar County, TX. Her first name(s) may have been Linda Rosa, Rosalinda, or Rosalind; I am using the most common version I could find, which was also used in the TX birth index.

Both sides of Rosa Linda's family had deep roots in Texas, specifically in Floresville, Wilson County, and San Antonio, Bexar County. All of Rosa Linda's great- (or sometimes great-great-) grandparents were born in either Mexico proper or in Texas while it was part of the Republic of Mexico; after that, all of their descendants, including Rosa Linda's parents and Rosa Linda herself, were born and raised in either Floresville or San Antonio.

Rosa's younger brother Thomas was born in 1954. She also had a younger sister, Maria Isabel Machado (b.1955). The family moved to Watsonville, Santa Cruz County, CA by 1959; another brother, Daniel, was born that year. Their parents split up at some point after Daniel's birth, and Irene remarried to a man named Jose "Joe" Gamez (occasionally misspelled as Gomez).

Rosa Linda graduated from Watsonville High School in the spring of 1971. By July 1971 she was taking classes at Cabrillo College, a community college in Aptos, Santa Cruz County, while also working as a live-in housekeeper in San Jose. I could not find information regarding whom she was working for.

Rosa Linda was last seen hitchhiking from her job in San Jose to her home on Saturday, July 10, 1971. She never arrived at her home, which was located at 29 Ninth St in Watsonville.

A few hours later, two children found Rosa Linda's wallet on a hill while bicycling on a dirt road near the intersection of Highway 1 and Larkin Valley Rd in San Jose. Whether anything was missing from the wallet was not reported in the news. It seems that, at the very least, Rosa Linda's identification was still in the wallet, as the two children returned it to her parents' home in Watsonville.

Rosa Linda was reported missing to San Jose Police on Tuesday, July 13, 1971. The reason for the lapse in time was never indicated; it is possible that her family believed they had to wait more than 48 hours to make a report, a commonly-believed myth.

The missing person report was dropped by SJPD when it was learned that Rosa Linda was 18; at the time, the department would not accept reports for missing adults until after five days had elapsed, unless there was reason to suspect foul play. Another report was never filed. Authorities in Watsonville and Santa Cruz were never notified.

At about 6:30pm on Monday, July 26, 1971, a 20-year-old from Aptos named Steven Smith was training his pet falcon in a field about 0.5 mi from the intersection of Highway 1 and Larkin Valley Rd, near San Andreas Rd, in Santa Cruz when his bird perched in a dense pine tree and refused to return to its owner.

When Steven went to investigate, he discovered a sheet lying on the ground beneath overhanging branches of the tree where the falcon was perched. Steven noticed a bare human foot sticking out from underneath the sheet, and quickly went to alert authorities.

Investigators arrived at the scene, which was in a rugged, hilly field in the area of La Selva Beach, south of Santa Cruz, about halfway between Aptos and Watsonville. When detectives removed the sheet, they discovered the body of a female teenage murder victim.

The body was swiftly identified as that of Rosa Linda. She was fully clothed, wearing white Levi's and a white blouse. The red shoes that she was wearing when last seen were missing. Her blue overnight case was found near her body.

Rosa Linda was found with her hands tied behind her back with a multi-colored scarf. There was a large wound on the left side of her neck; an autopsy on July 27th determined that she had been stabbed, possibly with a pocket knife. Both her jugular and her trachea had been cut.

Investigators believe that Rosa Linda died on July 10th, the day she was last seen. It was further established that she was murdered at the location where she was found. Her body was discovered about 75 yd away from where her wallet was found sixteen days earlier.

It was reported that on Wednesday, July 28, 1971, LE were in San Jose, where Rosa Linda worked, talking to her friends and acquaintances. That same day, investigators learned of the discovery of her wallet on July 10th and its return to her family.

It was also reported that day that later that same week further medical examination would be done to determine if Rosa Linda had been sexually assaulted. However, the results of this were never made public.

Rosa Linda was buried in Watsonville Catholic Cemetery. Her funeral was held on Friday, July 30, 1971. There were no further newspaper articles about her or her case for almost two years.

In the spring of 1973, several newspapers reported a possible connection between Rosa Linda Zuniga's murder and those perpetrated by Edmund Kemper, the then-newly-caught "Coed Killer." Kemper killed ten victims total, four of whom he knew personally: his paternal grandparents in August 1964, and his mother and her best friend in April 1973. The other six victims were killed from early May 1972 to early February 1973.

Kemper lived with his mother — an administrative assistant at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) — in Aptos, Santa Cruz County, CA in 1971 before eventually moving in with a friend in Alameda, Alameda County. All of his 1972-1973 murders occurred in Alameda and Santa Cruz Counties. One of the victims, Aiko Koo, was a 15-year-old female high school student, while the remaining five were female college students ranging from 18 to 23 years old. Of the college students, two were picked up together in Berkeley, Alameda County, one on the Cabrillo College campus, and two together on the UCSC campus.

Rosa Linda's murder is similar to those committed by Kemper in that the victim was an 18-year-old female attending Cabrillo College who was seemingly randomly murdered in Santa Cruz County. Kemper also employed various modes of killing, including stabbing. If Rosa Linda was in fact a victim of his, then she would have been his first victim since the murder of his grandparents in 1964.

However, there are far more differences. All but one of the aforementioned victims was picked up by Kemper on a college campus; Rosa Linda was not. Kemper's 1972-3 murders always involved four separate locations: (1) where the victim was picked up, (2) the location of the murder itself, often remote, (3) Kemper's apartment or his mother's residence, where he would decapitate and commit necrophilic acts with the corpses, and (4) dump site(s) where the bodies were disposed of. Rosa Linda, on the other hand, was murdered at the same location where she was eventually found. Furthermore, Rosa Linda's killer did not decapitate her, and Kemper did not tie up his victims. It should also be noted that of Kemper's student victims, two were East Asian, while the remaining four were white and non-Hispanic. Rosa Linda was Mexican-American.

After confessing and turning himself in to the police, Kemper was — and always has been — very forthright when interviewed by authorities, freely sharing details of all of his murders. In early May 1973, newspapers reported that, upon questioning, Kemper told investigators that "he had nothing to do with the death of [...] Rosalinda Zuniga."

Since then, Rosa Linda's case has been absent from newspapers and public discussion. It seems that Kemper has not been questioned specifically about Rosa Linda since the spring of 1973.

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I found out about this case from a post in the Zodiac Killer Ciphers forum from August 2013, in which a user posited Rosa Linda as a possible victim of the Zodiac, noting the similarities to other potential victims. For this reason I tagged this post as "Connection"; this decision was solidified by my later discovery of the suspicion on Kemper.

Rosa Linda's case has also been mentioned in a 2020 post from another amateur sleuth-run site that I use to find related cases: the Murder Incorp. blog, which compiles sources about crimes in CA from the 1960s and 70s that either have been recently confirmed to still be, or the blogger suspects to be, unsolved. Special focus is put on cases that bear resemblance and/or occurred somewhat in proximity to confirmed and possible EARONS and Zodiac crimes.

On February 2, 2013, a Facebook account titled "Photos by Sam Vestal" — chronicling the work of the aforementioned Santa Cruz/Monterey Bay Area newspaper photographer — posted about the Santa Cruz County murders of the early 1970s perpetrated by serial killers Ed Kemper and Herbert Mullin, as well as mass murderer John Linley Frazier (perpetrator of the Ohta family massacre); photos from the Mullin case were included. Among other comments, a user named Ellen Scurich commented on that post, "That was a scary & sad time. Did they even find who murdered Rosie Zuniga in 1973 ?"

It should be noted that Rosa Linda actually died in 1971, though it seems the Facebook user simply misremembered. Either way, it seems to imply that her murder was never solved.

Rosa Linda's case is featured on neither the City of Santa Cruz Cold Cases page nor the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Department site's Unsolved Homicides page.

The murder of Rosa Linda Zuniga was unsolved as of at least May 1973, and likely still in February 2013. There has been no further information online regarding the current status of her case.

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WRITE-UP COMPLETION DATE: June 11, 2025
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