Cherilyn Hawkley

•Cherilyn Hawkley was 39 in the fall of 1993. She had just started a new job teaching 5th grade at Eureka Elementary in Granite Bay, had bought a house in Roseville—brand new construction not too far from her mother, and she was engaged to be married. Her three teenaged children had stayed with her ex-husband in Chico, so her fiancee was the first person to notice when she didn’t come home from school on Friday, October 29, 1993. 

•Co-workers had seen her at the end-of-the-day after the students wrapped their Halloween trick or treat party, and everyone assumed she got in her van, and drove away safely.

•By 7:30 that night, her boyfriend drove to the school and talked to the night janitor. It turned out that Cherilyn and her 1990 gray Dodge Caravan were missing, and an APB was issued on Saturday morning.  Although there had been no trouble at the school that afternoon, witnesses did describe a stranger who seemed out of place. He was a muscular man, in his mid-30s, about 6 feet tall with wavy, dark brown hair just over his ears. He was wearing blue shorts and a “faded, sweat-stained pink tank top.” Despite months of public pleas, he did not come forward, and has never been identified. 

• At 9:00 pm on Sunday, Halloween night, a Placer County Sheriff’s deputy on routine patrol noticed a van parked in the trees just off Elmhurst Drive, yards from Oakhills Elementary. Inside he found Cherilyn lying between the second and third row seats. She had been strangled with a thin rope or cord, and the killer had taken the ligature with him. She was fully clothed, with no other visible injuries, and no evidence of a sexual assault. The area where the van was found was very isolated at night, and investigators believed that Cherilyn had been killed where she was parked. 

•The lack of an obvious motive for a stranger to kill Cherilyn was puzzling. She had not spoken to anyone of plans other than meeting her finance at home for dinner. Cherilyn’s boyfriend and ex-husband were eliminated, and that left investigators with no viable suspects. Why would someone kidnap a well-liked teacher at school, drive a couple of minutes to another school, and quickly kill her?  

•The elementary school where Cherilyn worked is only about 3/4 of a mile from the school where she was found, but that’s as the crow flies—or, as a man likely walked through the old golf course. Driving the route requires a double back that adds a mile, but it would have only been a drive of a couple minutes at most. The medical examiner estimated that Cherilyn died shortly after she was last seen, no later than early Saturday morning. Witness canvassing determined that the van had been seen by joggers and soccer players starting at first light on Saturday, so it’s likely that she was killed almost immediately. Money and other valuables were found in the van, so investigators quickly ruled out robbery as the motive.

• Placer County investigators were divided on whether or not the case was connected to Cindy Wanner’s murder 2 years earlier, and Janet Kovacich’s disappearance 9 years before that—three young, pretty petite brunettes that simply disappeared just a few miles apart from each other off Auburn-Folsom Road. 

• They were all no risk victims taken from safe locations. Cindy and Cherilyn were both strangled with a thin ligature that was taken from the scene. However, since the Sheriff did not want a “serial killer” in his county, all linkages were offically dismissed. 

• A year after Cherilyn’s murder, investigators continued to tell the public that she had been killed by someone she knew. “Wanner was a stranger-type abduction, and the kidnapping and strangulation of Wanner is not, in any way connected to the abduction and strangulation last year of Cherilyn Hawkley. We’re sure about that,” said Placer County Detective Bill Summers. That’s not what the smart detectives in the unit believed, and Summers had zero evidence for his “theory,” but the press repeated his statement as fact. 

• In the decades since the murders, PCSO has issued various statements about the lack of “matching” fingerprints and DNA between the cases, and to DeAngelo. The only fingerprints in the Wanner case were found on the garbage dump bag. The items are either completely unconnected to the case, or were deliberately planted—it would hardly be the first DeAngelo scene with staged beer cans. The fingerprints in that bag cannot be used to eliminate suspects. The same with fingerprints found in and on Hawkley’s van. There is no way to know how the long the prints had been there, and no way to connect them to the kidnapping or murder. It’s safe to assume that the killer(s) was smart enough to wear gloves. 

•In more recent years a few male alleles were recovered from Hawkley’s saved fingernail clippings, but there was no identified cellular source (blood, saliva, skin, semen), and no way to eliminate all of the officers and attendants that handled her body, and the parents/children in her classroom during the party where she was handing out candy, and then cleaning up. 

• It would be a huge investigatory mistake to use a partial trace profile to eliminate suspects—especially when Hawkley was known to have been in such close contact with dozens of males shortly before she was killed. In that environment she could have even transferred foreign DNA to her hands—meaning DNA that didn’t belong to anyone at the party. Every object touched in public has random DNA on it, people pick it up, and then transfer it to people and objects they touch later. 

This article explains how secondary DNA transfer to a victim's fingernails can occur:

•DeAngelo and his wife Sharon had a strange divorce and property drama in the Wanner/Hawkely timeframe. On November 12, 1991, Sharon had DeAngelo served with Sacramento County divorce papers—Cindy Wanner was kidnapped two weeks later from Auburn-Folsom Road, driven north through Auburn, and up Foresthill Road. The route went directly past the PG&E homicide scene, DeAngelo’s family home, the Kovacich house, Nick Willick’s, the Auburn PD station, Mary Lloyd’s kidnapping, the church where DeAngelo and Sharon got married, the house they owned on Auburn Ravine Road, and the Best/Sinclair homicide scene. The killer then drove back to Greenback Lane and Auburn Blvd in Citrus Heights and took a huge risk using Wanner’s ATM card for no real financial gain. That location was blocks from the Norris and “Nancy” kidnapping scenes, Sharon’s family home, three EAR attacks, and on the street leading directly to DeAngelo’s home. That could be a message to Sharon, a taunt to law enforcement, or a total coincidence. PCSO and the Placer DA call it “unrelated” and “irrelevant.”

•While that divorce action was still active and pending in Sacramento County (where DeAngelo lived), Sharon filed a new action in Placer, and had DeAngelo served on August 12, 1993. DeAngelo never filed a response. On October 29, 1993 Sharon closed on a new house purchase in Roseville. She bought it as the separate estate of a married person, and DeAngelo had to sign a waiver of his community property interest that was recorded as part of the sale. A few hours later, Cherilyn Hawkley was kidnapped and killed exactly three miles east of Sharon’s new house, and within walking distance of the house she was moving from. Five days after Cherilyn's body was found, Sharon dismissed the divorce action in Sacramento county. They never dissolved their marriage or got a legal separation before DeAngelo’s arrest. The 1993 case stayed open until 2006, but Sharon refiled it, and that case was still open in 2018.