Two Aliens - The unsolved Murder of Cheri Jo Bates

📚🔎 The unsolved Murder of Cheri Jo Bates

Podcast: Two Aliens

In this episode, our two alien minds investigate the chilling unsolved murder of Cheri Jo Bates — a case that some believe may be connected to a much larger mystery.

We explore:

• Who Cheri Jo Bates was — a college student in Riverside

• The night she went to the Riverside City College library

• Her car being sabotaged, preventing her from leaving

• The violent attack in a nearby alleyway

• Anonymous letters sent to police and media after the murder

• A typed confession claiming responsibility

• Handwritten notes referencing the crime

• Speculation about links to the Zodiac Killer

• Ongoing debates among investigators and researchers

• Why the case remains officially unsolved decades later

A haunting cold case — exploring cryptic messages, possible connections, and a mystery that still fuels speculation.

👽👽

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In 1966, a killer left behind an absolute mountain of physical evidence. We are talking about a forensic gold mine.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Right. It is truly staggering when you catalog it all.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

Exactly. There was a paint-spattered watch violently torn from his wrist. There was a military-grade bootprint stamped heavily into the dirt.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Aaron Ross Powell And uh biological material too.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Yes. Biological material scraped from his body, trapped right beneath the victim's fingernails, plus a trail of his own blood leading away from the scene.

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Aaron Ross Powell Not to mention the terrifying typed confessions that eventually arrived, claiming direct responsibility for the act.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Right. So if you look at that list of evidence on paper, you would assume this case was closed within a week.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

You really would.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Yet here we are looking at a timeline that spans from 1948 right up to the present day, and the perpetrator remains a ghost.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Aaron Powell It is an incredibly frustrating paradox. I mean, you have this staggering array of tangible clues combined with more than half a century of relentless scrutiny, and the puzzle stubbornly refuses to be solved.

SPEAKER_01 1:02

And part of the problem is the noise, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Aaron Ross Powell Exactly. Over the decades, the mythology surrounding this case has grown so loud that it often drowns out the physical facts. We live in an era where amateur internet theories can easily overshadow concrete biological evidence.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Which is why our primary objective right now is to cut through that noise.

SPEAKER_00 1:20

Right. We need to separate the grand sweeping narratives of legendary serial killers from the documented reality of an 18-year-old woman's life.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

And we need to look at the very localized, specific malice that ended it. So imagine you are standing in a small, quiet college library on a Sunday night.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

A completely ordinary setting.

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Completely ordinary. You are totally focused on an upcoming term paper. You feel entirely safe in your own hometown. That is the reality we need to reconstruct today.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

We have to build a complete multidimensional portrait of who Cherijo Bates was before October 30, 1966.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yes. It is so crucial to pull her out from beneath the weight of those case files and actually see the person at the center of this massive investigation.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Understanding her routine, her ambitions, and her environment isn't just about humanizing the victim, though that is obviously essential.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

Right. It serves an investigative purpose, too.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

It does. From a strictly analytical standpoint, her biography is the baseline we need to understand the psychology of the offender. Because, you know, victims are never chosen in a true vacuum.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

So let's start from the beginning. Cherry Josephine Bates was born on February 4th, 1948, in Omaha, Nebraska. Okay. She was the younger of two children, born to Joseph and Irene Bates, growing up alongside an older brother, Michael, who later joined the United States Navy.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

And the family relocated eventually, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:44

Yes. They moved to California in 1957. They settled in Riverside, which, well, at the time was this rapidly growing community deeply influenced by both the citrus industry and the military presence.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

That military presence is a huge factor later on.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

It really is. Her father worked as a machinist at the Corona Naval Ordnance Laboratory.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

And that environment is important context. I mean, a naval ordinance laboratory is an environment defined by precision, routine, and discipline. Right. You can clearly see those traits reflected in Sherry's own life as she grew up. Riverside in the late 1950s and early 1960s was expanding, but it still retained a tight-knit community feel.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Yeah. And by the time Sherry reached Ramona High School, she had firmly established herself within the fabric of that community.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

She really had.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

When you read through the interviews with her classmates and teachers, you don't see someone who was quiet or living on the margins.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

Not at all.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

She was a varsity cheerleader. She was actively involved in student government. She was an honor student.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

The descriptions consistently point to a young woman who was exceptionally sweet, highly social, and very driven.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

And she had very specific career aspirations too. She wanted to become a flight attendant.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Which was a major ambition back then.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Yes. Today we might not grasp the full cultural weight of that ambition, but in the mid-1960s, becoming a flight attendant was highly competitive.

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Oh, absolutely. It was a career path associated with fierce independence, global travel, and an incredibly rigorous standard of personal presentation and social grace.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

It required an outgoing personality and a high degree of poise under pressure.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Things she clearly possessed.

SPEAKER_01 4:21

Definitely. Now the family dynamics did experience a shift in 1965 when her parents divorced. Right. Sherry stayed at the family home at 4195 via San Jose in Riverside, living with her father, while her mother relocated elsewhere within the city.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

And after high school. And while taking classes, she demonstrated a really serious work ethic.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Yeah, she took a part-time job at the Riverside National Bank.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

That job at the bank is a critical data point, analytically speaking. Well, she wasn't just working for spending money. She had a specific goal. She saved her wages meticulously to purchase a 1960 lime green Volkswagen Beetle.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

I want to pause on that car for a second.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Purchasing your own vehicle as a teenager, especially in that era, is a massive milestone of independence.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Oh, without a doubt.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

That lime green beetle wasn't just a mode of transportation, it was a physical manifestation of her hard work. She was immensely proud of it.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

It absolutely was a symbol of agency. But analytically, the car, her job, and her schooling created a very distinct, predictable routine. Right. She was moving around a lot. She was moving consistently between the house on Via San Jose, the RCC campus, and the bank. She was responsible, she was academically focused, and most importantly, she was highly visible.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

That visibility is something that really stands out to me.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

Why is that?

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Well, when you look at standard analytical profiles of targeted victims, there is often an assumption of vulnerability, someone isolated, someone walking alone late at night in unfamiliar areas.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Yes, the typical stereotype.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

Exactly. But Cherie breaks that stereotype completely. She was athletic, she was confident, and she was front and center in her social and academic circles.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Right. And taking that a step further, her visibility is likely the very mechanism that brought her to the killer's attention in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

Really, just by being outgoing.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Yes. When an individual is outgoing, conventionally attractive, and constantly interacting with the public, whether it is cheering on a field, participating in student government, or handling transactions at a local bank, they exist in the peripheral vision of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

SPEAKER_01 6:39

So you're suggesting she didn't necessarily know her attacker personally.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

It is highly probable she didn't know him well, if at all.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Okay, that changes the dynamic.

SPEAKER_00 6:48

It does. For an individual harboring a dangerous fixation, or someone dealing with severe pathological feelings of inadequacy, a highly visible, successful young woman can become a focal point for resentment.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

So they just fixate on her from afar.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Exactly. The perpetrator could easily have been someone who simply observed her routine from a distance. They watch her drive that lime green beetle, they see her interacting cheerfully with others, and they project their own internal toxic narratives onto her.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

Her success essentially becomes a mirror, reflecting their own perceived failures.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

That is precisely how the psychological profile works.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Which makes the sheer normality of her final day even more chilling. We need to do a granular hour-by-hour breakdown of Sunday, October 30th, 1966.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Yes, the timeline is crucial here.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

Because when you map out the timeline, there is absolutely no sense of impending danger. The morning began like countless other Sundays in the Bates household.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Very typical routine.

SPEAKER_01 7:47

Cherie and her father attended Sunday Mass together at St. Catherine of Alexandria Catholic Church. Afterward, they went to a local restaurant and shared breakfast. It is a perfect picture of domestic stability and routine.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

And as the day transitions into the afternoon, her focus shifts entirely to her academic responsibilities.

SPEAKER_01 8:04

Right, the term paper.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

She was repairing a research paper for one of her classes at RCC, and she planned to utilize the college library that evening. We know from phone records and witness statements that she made two separate calls to a close friend named Stephanie Gutman.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

The first call was at 3.0 p.m. and the second was at 3.45 p.m.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

What was the purpose of the calls?

SPEAKER_01 8:23

She was trying to convince Stephanie to come down to the library with her to study and check out books. Stephanie ultimately declined the invitation during that second call.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

And it is worth noting the mechanics of life in 1966 here.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Oh, absolutely. You are dealing with landline telephones?

SPEAKER_00 8:39

Right. You can't just send a quick text to see if someone is around. You are physically dialing from a kitchen or a living room, actively trying to coordinate plans in real time.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

And when Stephanie declines, Shuri doesn't alter her plan. She remains committed to finishing her work. But then we get a detail that firmly grounds the timeline in mundane, immediate reality.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Phone call to the bank.

SPEAKER_01 9:02

Yes. Shortly before she leaves the house, she makes a frantic phone call to a coworker from the bank. She was looking for a misplaced bibliography for her term paper.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Ah, right.

SPEAKER_01 9:13

When the coworker told Cherie she hadn't seen it, Sherry reportedly sighed and said, Now I'll have to start all over on my note cards.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

Think about the physical labor of research in 1966.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

It was intense.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

There are no digital documents, there are no search engines, you are navigating the Dewey Decimal system, pulling heavy reference books, and meticulously writing citations on physical index cards.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

So losing a bibliography meant hours of tedious, repetitive manual labor to recreate it.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Exactly. Now I'll have to start all over on my note cards. It is such a universal, frustrating academic moment.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

You can hear the annoyance in that statement. It completely proves that she wasn't focused on any looming threat. Her biggest anxiety that afternoon was the prospect of rewriting index cards.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

It highlights her complete lack of apprehension regarding her safety. She felt entirely secure in her community.

SPEAKER_01 10:03

Sometime between 4.30 and 5.00 p.m., she finally leaves the house.

SPEAKER_00 10:08

And she leaves a note.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Yes. Before walking out the door, she takes a small note to the family refrigerator. It simply reads, Dad went to RCC library.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Put yourself in that moment.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Right. That fridge note functions almost exactly like the mundane digital check-ins we do today. You shoot a text saying, Headed to the library, be back later.

SPEAKER_00 10:26

It is an automated communication of accountability.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

It shows how rapidly a situation can pivot from absolute mundane safety to fatal danger.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

And the first hint of that danger begins to materialize around 6.9 p.m.

SPEAKER_01 10:39

The drive to the campus.

SPEAKER_00 10:41

Yes. An eyewitness comes forward later to report seeing Sherry driving her lime green beetle toward the Riverside City College campus. But this witness notes a highly specific, unusual detail.

SPEAKER_01 10:52

What did they see?

SPEAKER_00 10:53

They observed a bronze 1965 or 1966 model Oldsmobile following closely behind Sherry's Volkswagen.

SPEAKER_01 11:00

The bronze Oldsmobile. When you analyze vehicular movement in a suburban setting, how do you categorize a detail like that?

SPEAKER_00 11:07

It is tricky.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Is it just a coincidence of traffic flow, or are we looking at the beginning of a coordinated predatory stock?

SPEAKER_00 11:13

In forensic behavioral analysis, context is everything. While it is impossible to completely rule out coincidence, the subsequent events lean heavily toward premeditated surveillance.

SPEAKER_01 11:23

So you think it was the killer.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

What we refer to as hunting behavior in populated areas frequently involves vehicular stalking. The perpetrator uses the anonymity of the car and the natural flow of traffic to track a target without raising alarm.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

So they're essentially hiding in plain sight.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Precisely. If that automobile was tailing her, it tells us the offender either knew her destination beforehand or was tracking her from the safety of her residential neighborhood into the more transient public environment of a college campus on a Sunday evening.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

They're waiting for her to reach a point of isolation.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

Well, Cherie arrives at the RCC library, completely unaware of any potential surveillance. She parks her beetle on Terracina Drive, which is a street running adjacent to the library, and she goes inside to work on those note cards.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

And she stays there quite a while.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

She studies there until the library's normal closing time, which is 9.00 PM. Now several of her friends were actually inside the library that evening, but none of them explicitly recalled interacting with her.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Which is entirely plausible given the architecture and atmosphere of a mid-century college library. These were large spaces with heavy wooden desks, often partitioned with privacy dividers to encourage focus. If she was frustrated about losing her bibliography, she likely found a quiet corner, put her head down, and worked continuously for those few hours.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

That makes sense. But the crucial observation from that location comes right at 9-0 p.m., just as the library is locking its doors.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

The female student, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:55

Yes, a female RCC student is leaving the building and heading out into the night. She later provided investigators with a highly detailed, deeply unsettling account.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

What did she see?

SPEAKER_01 13:06

As she walked toward the parking areas, she noticed a young man standing in the shadowed areas across the street from where Cherry's Volkswagen Beetle was parked.

SPEAKER_00 13:14

The witness was actually able to provide a fairly specific physical description too.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

Yeah, she was.

SPEAKER_00 13:19

She estimated his age to be roughly 19 or 20 years old, and his height at approximately five feet eleven inches.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

But the detail that makes this encounter so chilling isn't just his physical presence, it is his behavior. He wasn't hiding behind a tree or crouching out of sight. He was standing in the shadows, staring intently in the direction of Cherie's car.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

And then the interaction happens.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Yes. As this female student walked past him, they actually exchanged brief pleasantries. They nodded and offered a polite greeting to one another.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

That interaction is incredibly revealing from a psychological standpoint.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

Right. I mean, think about that for a second. It is the ultimate extreme of what you might call a customer service voice.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

You can be having the worst, most stressful day of your life, but when you have to interact with the public, you instantly switch to a cheerful, polite tone.

SPEAKER_00 14:10

It is a facade.

SPEAKER_01 14:11

Exactly. How does an individual stand in the dark, locked onto a target, exchange a completely socially acceptable greeting with a random passerby, and then proceed to commit a horrific act just moments later?

SPEAKER_00 14:25

What you are describing is a textbook demonstration of the mask of sanity.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

The mask of sanity. Explain that.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

It is a foundational concept in the psychology of violent offenders. Individuals capable of extreme calculated violence are frequently highly adept at mimicking normal social behavior. It is the survival mechanism to avoid detection.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

They compartmentalize the intent to do harm from their immediate social environment.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Exactly. When the passerby greeted him, his internal heart rate might have been elevated, he might have been entirely focused on his violent objective, but he didn't panic or act suspiciously.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

He just acted normal.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

He offered a polite response because drawing attention to himself would ruin the elaborate trap he was in the middle of setting. Wow. It demonstrates a terrifying degree of emotional regulation and situational awareness. He viewed the passerby as merely a temporary variable that needed to be managed smoothly so he could return to his primary focus.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

And the trap he was setting was a marvel of sinister engineering.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

It was incredibly calculated.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

When Cherry's lime green beetle was eventually located by authorities, it was found about 75 yards east of where the ultimate tragedy occurred. The car had been deliberately sabotaged.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Under the hood, right?

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Yes. The ignition wiring and the central wire to the distributor cap had been pulled loose. The ignition key was still sitting in place. Both the driver's side and passenger windows were rolled partly down, and three library books on U.S. government were lying neatly on the front passenger seat.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

The mechanics of that sabotage are specific and deliberate.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Why the distributor wire?

SPEAKER_00 16:02

The Volkswagen Beetle has a rear engine layout. To disable it, the perpetrator simply had to access the engine compartment and yank the distributor wire. It doesn't require complex tools, it just requires a few seconds of access.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

So it is fast.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Very fast. But the result is immediate. The starter motor will crank, the battery will drain, but no electrical spark will ever reach the spark plugs.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

So it is a non-destructive disablement.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Precisely.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

He didn't slash the tires or smash the windshield, which would have immediately signaled foul play and caused her to run back to the library for safety.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

That is the critical point. He engineered a specific mechanical failure to create a false narrative.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

A false narrative of just a broken down car?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

Right. The working theory, which aligns flawlessly with the physical evidence, is that the killer disabled the engine and then retreated back into their shadows to wait.

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Just watching.

SPEAKER_00 16:53

He watched Sherry approach the vehicle, unlock it, place her books on the seat, and get behind the wheel. He watched her turn the key and listen to the engine crank fruitlessly, slowly draining the battery in the dark.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

It functions exactly like a spider pulling a thread on a web to see what gets caught.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

That is a perfect analogy.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

It is a mechanical trap set explicitly to force a human interaction. Think about the last time your car wouldn't start in an empty parking lot at night.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

It is terrifying.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

You know that immediate sinking feeling in your stomach? The sudden realization that you are stranded? Yes. The killer engineered that exact feeling as a psychological weapon. He broke the machine so that she would be stranded, forcing her to accept help from a stranger in a dark alley.

SPEAKER_00 17:38

The ruse of the helpful stranger is one of the most effective predatory tactics documented in criminal psychology.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

So he steps in to play the hero.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

Once the car is definitively dead, he emerges from his vantage point. He likely expresses concern, acting the part of the Good Samaritan, and offers his assistance.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

And there is physical evidence of this interaction at the car.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

The fingerprints.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Investigators found smeared, greasy palm prints and fingerprints on the exterior of the vehicle that did not belong to Sherry, her friends, or her family.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

The grease suggests he actually leaned over the vehicle or pretended to inspect the engine compartment to sell the ruse.

SPEAKER_01 18:15

And the rolled down windows.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

The fact that the windows were rolled partly down indicates that Sherry likely remained inside the locked car initially while he looked at the engine. She was maintaining a barrier.

SPEAKER_01 18:26

But eventually she gets out.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

Yes. Eventually he would have convinced her to exit the vehicle. He might have claimed he had tools, a flashlight, or a working car parked further down the poorly lit alley of Terracina Drive.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

So he manipulates her.

SPEAKER_00 18:38

He leveraged her trust in basic social norms, the expectation that people offer genuine help during a breakdown to lure her away from the relative safety of her car and into a highly isolated, vulnerable position.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

The illusion of that safety shattered around 10.15 p.m.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

That is when the witnesses heard her.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Several witnesses living in the residential properties surrounding the campus reported hearing brief, sharp female screams cutting through the night. The attack that subsequently took place on a dirt driveway off Terracina Drive was exceptionally brutal.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

When analyzing the forensic reports, the clinical details reveal the sheer ferocity of the encounter. It was an overwhelming blitz attack.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

It was. She was repeatedly stabbed in the chest and the left shoulder area. Her face and neck were slashed with a bladed weapon that forensic pathologists estimated to be one and a half inches wide and three and a half inches long.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

It is incredibly violent.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

She was kicked forcefully in the head. The wounds to her throat were so severe that they severed her jugular vein and her larynx.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

But to truly understand the motive behind this level of violence, we have to look closely at what did not happen at that crime scene.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

What do you mean?

SPEAKER_00 19:49

In behavioral analysis, the absence of certain actions is just as informative as the actions themselves. The autopsy and the crime scene technicians definitively confirmed there was no sexual assault.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Furthermore, there was absolutely no robbery. Cherie had a woven straw bag with her. It contained her personal identification and 56 cents in coins.

SPEAKER_01 20:11

And the bag wasn't taken.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

That bag was lying completely untouched in the dirt right alongside her body.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

So if the motive wasn't financial gain and it wasn't sexual gratification, the forensic profile shifts dramatically.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

It points squarely toward an anger-driven, deeply personal or psychologically motivated assault.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

The sheer excess of it.

SPEAKER_00 20:32

The extremity of the violence, the fact that the attacker targeted the face and the neck so specifically is known as overkill.

SPEAKER_01 20:39

What does that tell us?

SPEAKER_00 20:40

It often indicates a profound desire to obliterate the victim's identity or permanently silence them. It is driven by an intense internal rage rather than a calculated desire for resources.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

And Cherie did not just submit to this rage. She fought back with an incredible ferocity.

SPEAKER_00 20:56

She really did.

SPEAKER_01 20:57

The official police report described the dirt ground surrounding her body as looking like a quote, freshly ploughed field. She was athletic, she was strong, and she used every single ounce of that strength to fight for her life.

SPEAKER_00 21:10

The defensive struggle she put up was extraordinary. She clotted her attacker so relentlessly that she captured fragments of his skin and strands of his brown hair tightly packed beneath the fingernails of her right hand.

SPEAKER_01 21:23

She literally pulled pieces of his biology away from him.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

She did, and the defense wounds she inflicted were severe enough that he bled profusely.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

A blood trail.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

He left a visible trail of blood spatter leading from the dirt driveway back toward Terracina Drive as he fled into the night.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

The disturbed earth, the skin under the nails, the hair, the blood trail, these are the absolute hallmarks of a chaotic, high energy struggle.

SPEAKER_00 21:47

It wasn't clean.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

No, it tells us that the perpetrator severely underestimated his target. He lost control of the situation. He intended a swift, overwhelming blitz, but he met intense physical resistance.

SPEAKER_00 21:58

And because she fought back so Hard, she forced him to expend immense energy.

SPEAKER_01 22:03

Right, incur physical damage, and most importantly, leave behind an incredible wealth of physical evidence.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Among those physical clues left scattered in the dirt were two massive investigative anchors.

SPEAKER_01 22:16

Yes, the watch and the footprint.

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Located just 10 feet from Sherry's body, investigators recovered a cheap, heavily paint-spattered Timex brand wristwatch. It had a seven-inch circumference, and the band had been physically torn off the attacker's wrist during the violence of the struggle.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

And near the watch, they found that footprint. But not just any footprint.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

It was very specific.

SPEAKER_01 22:38

It was a size 8 to 10 impression from a very specific type of boot, one manufactured by prisoners at Leavenworth, and sold exclusively through military quartermasters and military outlets.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

You have to appreciate how these two items instantly narrow the suspect pool.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Oh, massively.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

The paint spatters on the Timex suggest a specific occupation or hobby, perhaps a professional painter, a construction worker, or someone involved in facility maintenance.

SPEAKER_01 23:04

And the bootprint provides a direct, undeniable institutional link. If those boots are only sold at military outlets, the investigation immediately pivots toward the military installations dominating the region.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Specifically the nearby March Air Force Base.

SPEAKER_01 23:19

Exactly. You are now looking for an individual with military access, working in a maintenance or trade capacity, who wears a size 8 to 10 shoe, has a 7-inch wrist, and is currently nursing severe scratches on his face or arms.

SPEAKER_00 23:34

It is a staggering amount of parameter data to have right out of the gate.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

It really is.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Recognizing the complexity of the crime scene, the Riverside Police Department decided they needed to extract every possible detail from the witnesses, leading to a truly unprecedented investigative maneuver.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the early investigation. Nine days after Cherie's funeral, Detective Sergeant David Bonin organized an absolutely massive logistical operation.

SPEAKER_00 24:00

The living diorama.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

He essentially staged a living diorama of the final hours at the RCC library. He tracked down 62 students, two librarians, and one custodian who had been present in the building on the night of October 30. He brought them all back to the campus.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

And he didn't just ask them questions, he gave them highly specific instructions.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

Right. He told them to wear the exact same clothes they had worn that night.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

The exact same clothes.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

They had to park their vehicles in the exact same spots they had parked in on October 30. They had to walk into the library and sit in the exact same chairs. He essentially tried to build a time machine out of college students to recreate the sensory environment of the crime.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

It was an incredibly ambitious, forward-thinking approach for 1966.

SPEAKER_01 24:46

But it works.

SPEAKER_00 24:47

What Detective Bonin was doing was an early, large-scale application of a psychological principle we now call state-dependent memory retrieval.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Let me stop you there because I have to challenge the efficacy of that. Is human memory really reliable enough for a theatrical restaging to yield hard, actionable evidence? I mean, nine days have passed. There has been intense local media coverage. The community is traumatized. Isn't memory too malleable, too susceptible to suggestion for a reenactment to produce uncorrupted facts?

SPEAKER_00 25:19

It is a very valid critique. Human memory is absolutely fallible and highly subject to contamination. However, the foundational theory behind state-dependent memory is robust.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

How does it work?

SPEAKER_00 25:30

The concept is that human beings are much better at retrieving specific information when they are in the exact same physiological and environmental state as when the memory was originally encoded.

SPEAKER_01 25:41

So replicating the sights and sounds unlocks things you didn't know you remembered.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

Precisely.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

So they're trying to trigger something subconscious.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

By perfectly recreating that sensory environment, investigators were hoping to bypass the conscious narrative memory, which, as you pointed out, might be clouded by trauma or newspaper reports. They were trying to trigger subconscious environmental recall. They wanted to unlock the peripheral vision of those 65 individuals.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

And the incredible thing is, the effort actually produced a new lead.

SPEAKER_00 26:21

It did, the Stew Baker.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

The reenactment triggered a memory that brought forward sightings of a tan-gray studer vehicle that had been seen lurking in the close vicinity of the campus on that Sunday evening.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Unfortunately, despite extensive public appeals and canvassing, the owner of that studer was never definitively traced, and the lead ultimately went cold.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

Even though the studbaker lead didn't result in handcuffs, you have to admire the lengths the Riverside Police Department went to.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

They were very thorough.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

They recognized they were dealing with a complex predator, and they applied advanced psychological concepts to try and break the case open. But exactly one month after the murder, on November 29, 1966, the case took a terrifying literary turn.

SPEAKER_00 27:02

This is where the profile of the offender begins to shift dramatically.

SPEAKER_01 27:07

Two identical typewritten letters arrived in the mail. One was sent directly to the Riverside Police Department headquarters, and the other was mailed to the editorial offices of the Riverside Press Enterprise newspaper.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

And what did they say?

SPEAKER_01 27:20

The author claimed full responsibility for the murder.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

And crucially, the author included non-public details about the disabled wiring of the Volkswagen Beetle.

SPEAKER_01 27:30

That is the key, right. Because the police withheld the specific mechanics of the sabotage from the press. The inclusion of the distributor wire detail forced investigators to treat the author as either the actual killer or someone who had intimate inside access to the crime scene reports.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

And the dialogue in the letter is just chilling.

SPEAKER_01 27:49

The letter contained a terrifying recount of the dialogue that allegedly took place in the dark. The author wrote that he approached Cherry and said, It's about time. She supposedly replied, About time for what? And the author answered, About time for you to die.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Then the author provides a stated motive. He claims, quoting directly from the letter, making her pay for the brush-offs that she had given me during the years prior.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

When you look at that motive, the brush-offs, how do you interpret it? Was this a genuine grievance from a high school acquaintance she rejected, or is it a fabricated justification?

SPEAKER_00 28:23

You have to look at it through the lens of pathological narcissism.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Okay, what does that reveal?

SPEAKER_00 28:27

It is highly likely it was a fabricated or vastly magnified grievance. For a deeply disturbed individual, a brush-off doesn't necessarily mean a formal romantic rejection.

SPEAKER_01 28:38

So it could be something minor.

SPEAKER_00 28:40

It could be something as simple as Cherie, an outgoing popular girl walking past him in a hallway without making eye contact. To a mind plagued by severe inadequacy, being ignored is processed as a profound insult that demands retaliation.

SPEAKER_01 28:54

Six months later, the communication escalated again.

SPEAKER_00 28:57

The handwritten letters.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

On April 30th, 1967, the Press Enterprise published a six-month update on the unsolved case. The very next day, the police, the newspaper, and horrifically Cherie's father all received handwritten letters in the mail.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

They were brief, jagged, and terrifyingly direct.

SPEAKER_01 29:14

The letters read, Bates had to die, there will be more. They were scrawled with an indecipherable symbol at the bottom, which investigators thought resembled either a sloppy number two or a letter Z.

SPEAKER_00 29:25

And this coincided with another disturbing discovery.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

At the library.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

Around the same time, a custodian doing deep cleaning at the RCC library discovered a poem scratched deeply into the underside of a foldable wooden desk.

SPEAKER_01 29:39

The desk poem. It was titled Sick of Living/slash Unwilling to Die.

SPEAKER_00 29:43

It contained highly graphic references to a bleeded weapon and violent acts. It was signed with the lowercase initials R.H.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

The shift from the physical brutality of the alleyway to this protracted literary theatrics is a massive evolution in the offender's behavioral profile.

SPEAKER_00 29:58

It really is.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

How so? Because writing a poem seems so detached from the ferocity of the physical attack.

SPEAKER_00 30:04

It is detached, and that is the point. The physical attack was chaotic, messy, and grounded in intense localized rage. It was a loss of control.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

And the letters.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

The typewritten letters, the handwritten notes to the father, the desk poem. These represent a desperate desire to regain control. It is about seeking notoriety and engaging in psychological manipulation long after the physical violence has ended.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

He wants to build a myth.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

The killer is essentially attempting to craft a mythology around his own actions. He wants to be feared not just as a violent man, but as an omnipresent threat.

SPEAKER_01 30:40

Recognizing the psychological complexity, the investigators sought outside expertise. In July of 1967, the chief psychologist at Patton State Hospital, a facility experienced in dealing with the criminally insane, provided a comprehensive evaluation of the murderer's mindset.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

And that evaluation from Patton State perfectly synthesizes the physical crime scene evidence with the documentary evidence.

SPEAKER_01 31:02

The profile concluded that the killer was pathologically preoccupied with an intense hatred against female figures.

SPEAKER_00 31:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

It explicitly noted that due to his own profound unconscious feelings of inadequacy, he was unlikely to act out his aggression sexually. Instead, he externalized his rage through violent fantasy and absolute physical domination.

SPEAKER_00 31:21

Unconscious inadequacy is the operative phrase there.

SPEAKER_01 31:23

Why is that the key?

SPEAKER_00 31:25

It explained the total absence of sexual assault or robbery. The perpetrator is driven by an overwhelming need to exert absolute power to compensate for an internal reality where he feels entirely powerless and insignificant.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

So the murder is just a power trip.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

The Blitz Attack is an externalization of a power fantasy. And the letters in the poem are continuations of that exact same fantasy. He is writing his own script, positioning himself as a mastermind to mask his fundamental weakness.

SPEAKER_01 31:54

But as we move out of the 1960s and into the 1970s, a massive shadow falls over the Riverside investigation.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

A very famous shadow.

SPEAKER_01 32:02

It is a shadow that completely alters how the public views the case. I am talking about the shadow of the Zodiac Killer.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

The introduction of the Zodiac Theory dramatically changed the trajectory of the Bates investigation, pulling it from a localized tragedy into a national media spectacle.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

It started in November 1970. San Francisco Chronicle journalist Paul Avery, who had been heavily covering the zodiac murders in Northern California, received an anonymous tip.

SPEAKER_00 32:26

And what did the tip say?

SPEAKER_01 32:28

The tipster pointed out the striking similarities between the zodiac's confirmed crimes and the unsolved murder of Cherry Joe Bates four years earlier. Avery began investigating, and the connection seemed compelling to many people at the time.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

To validate the theory, investigators brought in a renowned handwriting expert from the California Department of Justice named Sherwood Morrill.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

He looked at the letters.

SPEAKER_00 32:51

Morrill examined the scratch desk poem, the handwritten letter sent to the press, and the known Zodiac correspondence. He publicly declared that the Bates letters were unquestionably written by the same individual who later terrorized San Francisco as the Zodiac.

SPEAKER_01 33:05

And beyond the handwriting, investigators noted tactical similarities.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Like the car sabotage.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

Yes, the specific method of disabling Sherry's car by pulling the distributor wire closely mirrored the general modus operanda the Zodiac used during his attack on a couple at Lake Beriesa in 1969.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

The momentum of the theory peaked on March 13, 1971.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Because of the letter.

SPEAKER_00 33:27

The Zodiac himself mailed a letter to the Los Angeles Times directly claiming responsibility for the riverside murder. He wrote, I do have to give the police credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones. There are a hell of a lot more down there.

SPEAKER_01 33:44

Okay, I have to play devil's advocate here.

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 33:46

From an outside perspective, if you have a renowned state handwriting expert definitively matching the letters, and the notorious serial killer himself is actively writing to the press to claim the murder, isn't that case closed? Why wouldn't investigators definitively link the two and move on?

SPEAKER_00 34:03

Because you have to understand the inherent flaws in both handwriting analysis and the psychology of serial killers.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Okay. Explain the handwriting flaws first.

SPEAKER_00 34:12

First, handwriting analysis is highly subjective. It relies entirely on the examiner's baseline, and it is notoriously susceptible to confirmation bias. When an examiner expects to find a match, they often subconsciously highlight similarities and ignore discrepancies.

SPEAKER_01 34:27

And what about the Zodiac's own confession?

SPEAKER_00 34:29

The Zodiac was an entity that thrived entirely on media manipulation and public terror. Inflating his own mythos was central to his psychological gratification. He had a documented history of reading newspaper reports of unsolved murders and subsequently claiming them to artificially augment his perceived body count and geographic reach. It is called serial killer credit taking.

SPEAKER_01 34:54

So just because a pathological narcissist claims a crime, it doesn't make it true.

SPEAKER_00 34:59

Exactly. The Riverside Police Department understood this profoundly. They refused to be bullied by the media narrative or the FBI's interests.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

They stuck to their guns.

SPEAKER_00 35:08

They looked past the theatrical letters and remained laser focused on the physical evidence, the footprint, the hair, the paint-spattered watch. They maintained a steadfast belief that the murder was an isolated event committed by an offender local to Riverside County, not a transient serial killer passing through.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

While the police battled over jurisdiction and theories, the tragic aftermath for the Bates family compounded in the most heartbreaking way.

SPEAKER_00 35:31

The mother, right.

SPEAKER_01 35:32

Yes. In July 1969, Sherry's mother, Irene, passed away from strychnine poisoning. It is a stark, devastating reminder of the immense collateral damage that radiates outward from an unsolved homicide.

SPEAKER_00 35:46

The toll on the families is truly immeasurable. In analytical discussions, the focus naturally gravitates toward the puzzle of the investigation, the clues, the theories, the suspect profiles.

SPEAKER_01 35:56

Right. It is easy to get lost in the mystery.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

But we must always ground the analysis in the reality of the human loss. The Bates family endured not only the violent loss of Sherry, but the agonizing, unending uncertainty of the decades that followed, watching her death become fodder for amateur sleuths and newspaper headlines.

SPEAKER_01 36:15

Bring the timeline right up to current times, the case has seen incredible technological interventions.

SPEAKER_00 36:20

Oh, massive updates.

SPEAKER_01 36:22

In August 2021, the Riverside Police Department's Cold Case Unit released a startling update regarding those handwritten letters from April 1967, the ones sent to the father that read, Bates had to die, there will be more.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

This development completely upended 50 years of established theory.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Using modern DNA analysis techniques in 2020, investigators definitively identified the author of those letters. And it turned out to be a profoundly distasteful hoax.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

It is important to understand how they achieve this. Modern genetic genealogy allows forensic scientists to extract minute traces of DNA from the saliva used to seal an envelope or place a stamp in 1967.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

And they cross-referenced that.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

They run that profile through public genealogy databases to find distant relatives, build a family tree, and trace it down to a single individual.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

And when they found him, the truth was incredibly mundane.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

Very mundane.

SPEAKER_01 37:15

The author had actually contacted investigators anonymously in 2016 to apologize. He explained that he was just a troubled teenager living in Riverside at the time, he was seeking attention, and inserted himself into the biggest local news story available.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

This is a perfect example of how the mythology of a case can become completely tangled with the reality.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:34

For over 50 years, those handwritten letters were analyzed by psychologists, debated by experts, and used as the primary linchpin to link the murder to the zodiac. Modern DNA analysis cuts through decades of psychological profiling of those specific documents to reveal a cruel teenage prank.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

It underscores the danger of relying too heavily on correspondence in high-profile cases. The media attention acts as a magnet for troubled individuals seeking to inject themselves into the narrative.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

You really is a distraction.

SPEAKER_01 38:05

But it is a bizarre realization. You utilize cutting-edge science to finally solve a 50-year-old mystery regarding the letters, only to find out it is a complete dead end for the actual murder investigation.

SPEAKER_00 38:17

And nature of horrors of vacuum. Shortly after the RPD cleared the letters as a hoax, another massive theory emerged to fill the space.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

Right. In October 2021, an independent investigative group known as the Casebreakers, comprised of retired officers and intelligence personnel, came forward with a massive public claim.

SPEAKER_00 38:35

They pointed to a specific suspect.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

They pointed to a deceased man named Gary Francis Post, asserting he was definitively the zodiac and the murderer of Sherry Joe Bates.

SPEAKER_00 38:45

Their reasoning relied heavily on circumstantial connections to the physical evidence we discussed earlier.

SPEAKER_01 38:50

They noted that Post worked as a house painter, which could theoretically explain the paint spatters on the Timex watch.

SPEAKER_00 38:57

And the boots.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

Yes. They pointed out he received medical treatment at the March Air Force Base around the time of the murder, linking him to the military footprint. And they noted he had brown hair, potentially matching the hair sherry captured beneath her fingernails.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

The Gary Francis Post Theory is a textbook study in the dangers of confirmation bias in amateur sleuthing.

SPEAKER_01 39:18

Explain how confirmation bias warps an investigation like this.

SPEAKER_00 39:22

Confirmation bias occurs when you start with a suspect and work backward, forcing the ambiguous evidence to fit your narrative while ignoring data that contradicts it.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Give me an example of Post.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Yes. Post was a painter. But thousands of people in Southern California interacted with Paint in the 1960s. Yes, he received treatment at the Air Force Base. So did countless other military personnel and civilian contractors.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

So the connections are there, but they aren't proof.

SPEAKER_00 39:50

The connections are plausible, but they are not definitive.

SPEAKER_01 39:54

And the Riverside Police Department's reaction to the casebreakers was swift and unequivocal. They completely rejected the theory. They denied claims from the group that the department had refused DNA testing, stating firmly that Gary Post's profile simply was not a match to the biological evidence they hold.

SPEAKER_00 40:13

The RPD's stance here is incredibly firm and scientifically rigorous. They reaffirmed their long-standing belief that they actually know the identity of the local killer.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

But if they know who it is, why hasn't there been an arrest?

SPEAKER_00 40:25

Because knowing and proving are two vastly different legal standards. They lack the final piece of definitive physical evidence required to secure a conviction in a court of law.

SPEAKER_01 40:34

Which is the DNA.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

Specifically, they attempted to match mitochondrial DNA extracted from the hair found at the crime scene to their prime local suspect, and it did not yield a match.

SPEAKER_01 40:46

Let's clarify the science there. Why mitochondrial DNA? Why not standard DNA testing?

SPEAKER_00 40:51

When you are dealing with hair samples that are decades old, the root which contains standard nuclear DNA is often degraded or missing entirely.

SPEAKER_01 40:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 41:00

Mitochondrial DNA, however, is found in the shaft of the hair. It traces the maternal bloodline and is incredibly resilient over time. Cold case units rely on it heavily.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

So if it doesn't match.

SPEAKER_00 41:11

If the mitochondrial DNA from the crime scene hair does not match the prime suspect, you cannot proceed with an indictment, regardless of how perfectly the behavioral profile aligns.

SPEAKER_01 41:21

The RPD refuses to bend the physical facts to close the case. They are prioritizing biological truth over compelling narratives.

SPEAKER_00 41:28

It is a highly commendable standard. It prevents false convictions and ensures the integrity of the investigation remains intact, even under immense public pressure.

SPEAKER_01 41:36

While the legal resolution remains pending, the legacy of Cherry Joe Bates is actively being preserved in a way that honors who she actually was.

SPEAKER_00 41:44

The scholarship.

SPEAKER_01 41:45

Yes, the Cherry Joe Bates Memorial Endowed Scholarship was established at Riverside City College. It is awarded to students who major in music, demonstrate financial need, and are active in volunteer work.

SPEAKER_00 41:57

It is a beautiful tribute.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

It ensures her name is permanently associated with education, art, and community support rather than being defined solely by the tragedy of her final hours.

SPEAKER_00 42:07

The entire history of this case illustrates a profound human paradox. As you look at the public obsession with the zodiac theory versus the police department's quiet, steadfast focus on a local suspect, you see our desperate psychological need to find meaning in senseless violence.

SPEAKER_01 42:24

We want the monster to be a mastermind.

SPEAKER_00 42:26

We do. We are drawn to construct grand, overarching narratives, the idea of an elusive superpredator roaming the state. We want the perpetrator to be legendary because it somehow makes the overwhelming scale of the tragedy feel proportional.

SPEAKER_01 42:40

But it isn't always legendary.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

No, the terrifying truth of forensic science is that extreme violence is often much closer to home. It is usually grounded in quiet, mundane, localized malice. The true legacy of this investigation is not the myth of the boogeyman who tried to claim it, but the enduring tenacity of the investigators who demand hard evidence and refuse to let the real perpetrator fade into the shadows.

SPEAKER_01 43:05

It makes you wonder how the continuing evolution of forensic technology will continue to shed light on the darkest corners of our history. We are constantly developing new ways to extract truth from the past, forcing us to re examine the narratives we have blindly accepted for decades. You have to consider what other silent physical clues are locked away in evidence boxes right now, just waiting for the right scientific advancement to finally speak. Thanks for listening.