California jury: Career criminal guilty of killing two teens
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A Northern California jury on Tuesday found guilty a career criminal thought to be the “Gypsy Hill Killer” of raping and murdering two teenage girls more than 42 years ago.
The San Mateo County jury deliberated for a little more than an hour before finding Rodney Halbower guilty.
Authorities believe the 69-year-old is responsible for other rapes and murders of young women in Northern California and Reno, Nevada, over a five-month span in 1976. In 2004, advances in DNA technology connected Halbower to the murders. He was in an Oregon prison at the time.
Halbower is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 10 in Redwood City, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of San Francisco. The judge is required to sentence Halbower under the sentencing laws of 1976, the year the crimes occurred.
District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said the stiffest sentence available then was life with the possibility of parole. Wagstaffe said the judge can impose consecutive sentences, meaning if Halbower was given parole for one murder, he would start serving the life sentence for the second.
“Our expectation is that this monster of a killer will never, ever, be allowed to be free on our streets again,” Wagstaffe said.
The six murders remained a mystery for four decades until a cold-case detective re-opened the investigation. He scraped DNA samples from cigarette butts found at the scene and in 2014 they were discovered to match Halbower’s genetic makeup. DNA taken from the victims also matched Halbower’s DNA, prosecutors told jurors.
It took four years to start Halbower’s after he was charged with two of the murders. He routinely fired his attorneys and demanded to represent himself. A judge also ordered a trial to determine if he was sane enough to stand trial. A jury in 2017 found him sane.
The start of the murder trial almost ended as soon as it started on Sept. 7 with Halbower disrupting the proceedings.
“I am not guilty!” he yelled at the jury. “I have never raped or murdered in my life!”
The judge declined public defender John Halley’s calls for a mistrial and Halbower ceased his outbursts.
“He doesn’t get to set up his own mistrial,” Judge Mark Forcum said.
He stopped the outbursts after that and Wagstaffe said Halbower calmly congratulated prosecutor Sean Gallagher after the verdicts were read.
Prosecutors said they charged him with the two murders with the strongest evidence and expected he would be locked up for life if convicted.
Gallagher told the jury about the two teen girls who were abducted, raped and killed in a once-tranquil suburb, and that DNA from semen found in both women and preserved for decades matched Halbower’s DNA.