71-year-old suspect charged in 1976 ‘Gypsy Hill’ killing
A 71-year-old suspect was charged in the previously unsolved 1976 slaying of a 19-yearold woman in Daly City, challenging the notion that a single person committed a string of murders on the Peninsula known as the “Gypsy Hill killings.”
The San Mateo County district attorney’s office formally charged Leon Melvin Seymour on Wednesday with murder in the 41-year-old cold-case killing of Denise Lampe of Broadmoor.
The Chronicle reported at the time that Lampe was supposed to meet a friend on the evening of April 1, 1976, but never showed up. She was found fatally stabbed in her car in the parking lot of the Serramonte Center mall in Daly City.
Lampe was one of five young women killed on the Peninsula within the first four months of 1976 in a terrifying spree. The slayings went unsolved for years. Seymour’s arrest in the Lampe case conflicts with a long-held hypothesis by some in law enforcement that a single person was responsible for all five deaths.
The FBI launched a task force to look into the series of slayings in 2014, and DNA evidence revived the hunt for suspects in the cold cases.
In 2015, Rodney Lynn Halbower was charged in connection with the killing of Paula Baxter, 17, in Millbrae and 18-year-old Veronica “Ronnie” Cascio, whose body was found on a golf course in Pacifica. Halbower is scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 8 on two counts of murder that carry special circumstances.
Initially, police suspected Halbower in the Lampe case as well, said Karen Guidotti, chief deputy district attorney of San Mateo County. She said Daly City police re-examined old evidence to see if there was any link to Halbower’s DNA. Instead, the DNA evidence they found connected the killing to Seymour, who had a long history of violent sexual crimes.
Seymour was already incarcerated and being held in the Coalinga State Hospital as an “inmate-patient.” Guidotti said Seymour had been classified as a sexually violent predator who was likely to re-offend, following a series of assaults and kidnappings. She said his first conviction was for an assault with intent to rape in San Mateo County in 1973.
“Science changes, and these new methods allowed for a re-examination of old cases,” Guidotti said.
She declined to comment on whether Seymour is under investigation for the remaining unsolved Gypsy Hill killings of 14-year-old Tanya Marie Blackwell of Pacifica and 26-year-old Carol Lee Booth of South San Francisco.