A series of unsolved murders in Sonoma County, all involving women who were hitchhiking on country roads during the trusting, hippie era of 1972 to 1973, has a new suspect in the mix: Ted Bundy. The executed serial killer admitted to having committed a number of murders in an undisclosed area of California. He admitted to investigators, prior to his electrocution in 1989, to having murdered over 100 women, and that he started raping and strangling women in 1969. But the first actual murder to which he confessed was in 1974. The Sonoma County Sheriff's Department began looking back into the unsolved Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, which totaled seven unsolved cases, last year, and they're now trying to match Ted Bundy's DNA to old evidence in the cases, believing there's reason to believe that Bundy may have been in the area. All the murders match Bundy's M.O., which was raping, strangling, and dumping bodies near roadsides.

As the Chron reports, "The Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders began Feb. 4, 1972, when Yvonne Weber and Maureen Sterling, both 13 and from Santa Rosa, were seen thumbing a lift on Guerneville Road northwest of the town. They vanished, and their bones were found 10 months later near the edge of twisty Franz Valley Road, about 6 miles into the hills north of Santa Rosa." Five more young women, aged 15 to 23, were murdered in similar fashion, all after being seen hitchhiking in the general area, but one of their bodies was never found.

Bundy won a summer scholarship to attend Stanford University in 1968 in order to impress a girl, and later returned to enroll at University of Washington in 1969 for several years. Some skeptics of the Bundy theory for the Sonoma murders say that it was unlikely he was driving down from Washington so much during the period of '72 to '73, and that the remote areas where the bodies were found suggested someone much more familiar with Sonoma County and all its winding back roads. But others note that Bundy often drove hundreds of miles to kill, and no other suspect was ever arrested in the case.

In any event, the investigation has been reopened, and the families of the victims are hoping to have their minds put at rest these many years later. And all this the same summer that Joseph Naso is on trial for decades-old killings, and when the remains of one of the legendary I-5 strangler's victims were finally found.