Going West: True Crime · Dark West Productions

Cheri Jo Bates // 546

·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

Was Cheri Jo Bates the first victim of the Zodiac Killer, or was her brutal murder the work of a local student?

Heath and Daphne open by acknowledging the Zodiac case has been covered extensively, and explain they chose to focus specifically on the Cheri Jo Bates murder — an October 1966 case that has never been officially connected to Zodiac by Riverside Police but which many Zodiac researchers believe may be the killer's first strike. Cheri Jo Bates is introduced through her biographical background: born in Omaha in 1948, raised in Riverside after her father took a job at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, popular at Ramona High School where she was a cheerleader, and recently enrolled at Riverside City College. At the time of her death, she was living with her father Joseph, working part-time at a bank, and had reportedly become secretly engaged to a teenager named Dennis Highland — quietly kept from friends, possibly because the engagement was uncertain or because Bates had romantic interest elsewhere. Her journal contained extensive entries about another man, identified by police only by the initials BB and given the working alias Bob Barnett, who was apparently in a relationship with one of Bates's friends but had what investigators described as an unhealthy fixation on Bates herself. This mutual ambiguity — possibly both seeing other people on the side — makes BB the primary suspect in her murder to this day, though police have never released his full name. On the night of October 30th, 1966, Bates attended church and had breakfast with her father, then left a note saying she was going to the library to study. She checked out three books, but witnesses could not place her inside the library building. Her body was discovered in a nearby alley on Halloween morning, stabbed and beaten, with her car disabled on a nearby lawn. Her father had waited up all night and reported her missing around 5:30 a.m. The episode examines the physical evidence, the crime scene characteristics, and the specific features that have led Zodiac researchers to argue the case is connected to the later confirmed Zodiac murders.

As heard by us

A brisk, unsettling look at a Riverside killing that was never officially tied to Zodiac.

Going West frames the Riverside killing as one possible Zodiac-related case that was never officially tied to Zodiac, and it keeps its attention on the 1966 campus-night timeline, the body found in a nearby alley the next morning, the suspect questioning, and the letter sent 30…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a Zodiac-adjacent case and a conversational walk through the Riverside murder.

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