After decades, cold-case detectives working a string of brutal murders and disappearances link a serial rapist to the violent murder of a loving mother of three young girls. Is Jack Bokin the infamous Sonoma County “Hitchhiker Killer?”
A survey engineer setting up stakes in the sweltering 80-degree California sun, spotted a female body: dumped like a limp ragdoll in the brush alongside a barbed wire fence a dozen feet off a rural road. Frantic, he dials 911 on his cell phone. A Sheriff’s deputy arrives to find 32-year-old Michelle Veal lying face up, with blood and lacerations visible on her head. In a final act of humiliation, her killer not only inflicted great bodily harm but stripped the clothes from the single mother’s body.
It was July 15, 1996, which was also Veal’s youngest child’s seventh birthday. The Santa Rosa medical examiner determined Michelle forcefully fought her attacker. She suffering grave injuries in the process including a broken neck. The devoted mother and former interior designer had likely been killed two days earlier which explains why she failed to show up for her daughter’s birthday party in Union City. “My mom always, always celebrated our birthdays. She never missed a single birthday until that one,” recalls Brittany who was nearly eight years old at the time.
Veal’s brutal death and the unceremonious dumping of her lifeless body shocked the affluent community of Santa Rosa. It recalled a haunting string of unsolved murders known as the “Hitchhiker Killings” that began in 1972 with the kidnapping of two local middle school students. On February 4th, 12-year-old Yvonne Weber and 13-year-old Maureen Sterling vanished shortly after 9pm from the Redwood Empire Ice Arena. The besties were last seen in the parking lot trying to hitch a ride. Despite an exhaustive search, no trace of the girls were found for months. Then, on December 28, their skeletal remains were located stripped of all clothing down a steep embankment off a rural county road.
The girls’ shocking kidnapping and deaths paralyzed the quiet bedroom community of Santa Rosa. “I was the same age in school and hitchhiking was everywhere in the Bay Area,” recalls Detective Sgt. Les Bottomley who now oversees Sonoma County Sheriff’s Violent Crimes Investigations. “I never did it. My parents wouldn’t allow it but people did it all the time. People did it to get rides out to the beach, to like Stinson Beach or one of the other beaches out there. And, and that's how they got back and forth.” Bottomley says pre-cell phones, the internet, and smartphones, “you never really heard about any negative experiences. You heard some things but you didn't really hear a lot.”
Throughout the 1970s in an around Santa Rosa over a dozen young girls and college-age women met similar deaths and despite the thousands of hours of exhaustive police investigation, the hitchhiker cases went cold for decades.
A FEW GOOD MEN
On any given day or night, in a primarily windowless office on the second floor of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office, the tidy desktops of the detectives of VCI (Violent Crimes Investigation) are littered with well-worn banker boxes of cold cases. The 12-pound binders bulge at the seams with the weight with, hundreds of fading pages of typed and handwritten notes of retired and deceased detectives who doggedly worked the hitchhiker cases for forty years.
“I think there's upwards of 66 cold cases in there,” says Detective Sgt. Bottomley who supervises VCI. “And, you know, these things are all the binders and all the paperwork portion of it, they sit in these cardboard boxes. I guess, in Sleepy Sonoma, it does surprise you when you walk in and see this many boxes. It's like, you know? Holy cow!”
Since spring of 2021, I’ve worked collaboratively investigating cold cases with fellow Korean American, Detective John Barr when our shared interest and pursuit of serial killers collided. I’ve spent four years tracking unidentified serial killers including, John Getreu, the Stanford Murder serial killer who was also known to frequent other counties in Northern California.
In 2021 Sonoma County established a war room dedicated to this string of unsolved murders and disappearances. The mission to bring resolution for these victims is daunting and not some tidy six act “made for tv” narrative. Although he is a man of few words, Barr would like to disabuse the public of the notion that, unlike the popular crime yarns streamed by the millions, police departments don’t have individual cold case units with endless budgets.
“The reality is you have a budget that barely keeps up with the day-to-day. Everyone here carries a caseload. Everyone’s busy,” says Barr who spent 22 years with Santa Rosa PD before migrating to Sonoma in 2018. Case in point. Yesterday, after executing an all-day search warrant that took them to San Francisco 24 hours earlier on a cold case, Barr and the VCI unit returned to Santa Rosa to work a current homicide case and clocked out at 3:30 am only to return to the office three hours later.
Over the last year with the clock ticking and rapid advances in DNA technology, Barr and his team, with the full support of Detective Sgt Bottomley, has made a concerted push to bring the victims and remaining family members justice. “In March, for whatever reason we had a decent enough of lull in there that where we could really dig in and start looking at some of these cases,” explains Bottomley. “And that's what we were doing. Everybody just grabbed boxes and started looking again”
A SUSPECT EMERGES
37-year-old Detective Adrian Anaya won a promotion into VCI in January of 2021 and soon after, grabbed a box marked MICHELLE VEAL. “You see John, you know poking around and going down these rabbit holes of cases that are older than I’ve been alive, and as an investigator, you want to be curious and start,” explains Anaya.
While Barr consumed his off hours with the hitchhiker cases from the 1970s, Anaya grabbed Veal’s unsolved 1996 murder explaining, “This ’96 case appealed to me right away, you know because the Sheriff's office VCI in ’96 had a well-oiled machine. With the effort that went into the evidence collection, you can tell they were operating at a very good level. The retention of evidence, the collection of evidence. The investigators attempts to find answers to a victim who had zero ties to Sonoma County They were under the impression that she was likely killed somewhere else and taken to that spot to be left. Her only tie was being left for dead on a county road.”
In 1997, however, Sonoma investigators working from a tip from the FBI met with San Francisco Inspectors who were working on prosecuting a violent serial rapist they had arrested within weeks of Veal’s murder. That suspect, Jack Bokin, a serial burglar and San Francisco father of three had been charged that fall with the rape and attempted murder of a 19-year-old single mother identified as “Amber.” At the time of the attack on Amber, Bokin had been released on bail and was awaiting trial for violent rapes and attacks on two sex workers and his former assistant. He had held some of the women hostage for hours and one victim reported he bit her tongue so hard it almost came detached. Investigators honed in on Bokin because one of the assaults took place within days of Veal’s murder and, Bokin’s parents had a home in Sonoma County just a short drive from where her body was discovered.
How violent was Bokin? Amber testified that on October 4, 1997, Bokin picked her up and solicited sex near his home in the Mission district of San Francisco but drove her out to a deserted area of Bayshore and bound her hands and feet. He viciously beat her and repeatedly raped her forcing her to perform oral copulation so many times that she lost count. The hours-long brutalization included biting her tongue “like a dog chewing on a piece of meat,” land biting her vagina so hard that she passed out in pain. Bokin alternately beat her and comforted her seemingly aroused by her crying and pain. In the end, he hit Amber on the head with a hammer where she recalls hearing her skull crack “like an eggshell.” Believing she was dead, he tied a plastic bag on her head and drove her to downtown San Francisco where he threw her body into the bay off the Embarcadero. Miraculously the 19 year old single mother survived.
The 1997 investigation into Veal’s death hit a dead end when police DNA and blood testing efforts did not yield any evidence linking Bokin to Veal’s death. In 2000, Jack Bokin was convicted and sentenced to serve 231 years to life for the attempted murder of Amber and with no additional evidence, Veal’s case went cold.
A BIG BREAK
Last summer, Detective Anaya scoured the list of forensic material and worked with a private lab to try to determine if there was any evidence left that might yield a profile. Working with Richmond California-based, SERI one of the leaders in forensic serology, their analyst reviewed the material and determined there was one sample of scraping left from Michelle Veal’s right hand that might yield DNA.
“The analyst, Mallory, looked at these fingernail scrapings, and she told us she could work with them. However, that process would exhaust what evidence stands. We would have one shot at it. After 25 years, we decided to go for it,“ Anaya recalls. “The analyst did get a DNA profile from the right-hand fingernail scrapings. I wrote up a case summary to accompany the DNA profile for entry to the CODIS Database.” CODIS is the acronym for Combined DNA Index, the FBI’s DNA database. “
On January 18, 2022, 26 years after the vicious murder of 32-year-old Michelle Veal, her killer was identified through a positive match with serial rapist, Jack Alexander Bokin. Unfortunately, Bokin died just a month earlier in prison on December 4, 2021.
ANSWERS FOR LOVED ONES
“Every cop that gets in this job, comes in here with a really distinct thought about right and wrong. You get in here to solve crimes and you want to take people to jail who deserve it,” conveys Bottomley. “The obstacles to solving these cases even with the magical powers of DNA technology are real. You take a case that somebody hasn't solved for 20, 30 or 40 or 50 years and nobody's cracked this case. But if you can take it and solve it right now, it's an even greater accomplishment. It's huge.”
Last week, after 26 years, detectives from Sonoma County visited the surviving mother and daughters of Michelle Veal. The daughters who were 7, 8, and 10 at the time of their mother’s death released this statement:
Our family would like to share about our beloved daughter/mother/sister Michelle Marie Veal (maiden name Michelle Hinojos)
In 1996, she was taken from us, leaving her family and large network of friends who all loved and adored her dearly, deeply grieving. Though she has been gone, memories of her beautiful smile, impeccable style, generous spirit, and enthusiasm for life live on forever in the hearts of the many people whose lives she touched.
Our dear Michelle was a mom to three young girls who were raised in the care of her incredible mother Tillie, as well as by her loving sister Cindy. Though her struggles made her particularly vulnerable at times, Michelle’s strength is what kept her persevering through many adversities, to do her best for those she loved. Michelle’s tenacious spirit lives on in her daughters, who are all leading happy, healthy lives today, and raising their children to remember her as the beautiful grandmother we all wish they could have met.
We are incredibly grateful for the tireless efforts of Detectives Anaya and Little at finding answers about Michelle’s case after all these years, and we hope that their hard work will bring closure and peace to other families as well.
Though we are thankful for this tremendous news, we hope that everyone understands and respects our family’s wish for privacy at this time.
Karin Veal wants people to remember: “My mom had this magnetism about her… what I would always hear other adults say about her was that she could sell ice cubes in Alaska because she was just such a sweet talker. She had the ability to, like, convince anyone of anything, anytime. She was able to get all of these great jobs because she was so good with people.”
Now, 33, Brittany shared that her mother struggled on and off with addiction. “When my mom passed away, there were a lot of questions and unknowns surrounding her death, and I think in the process of trying to come up with a sensible explanation to what happened with no known culprit or murderer, that my mom passively shouldered the blame in her own death. I hope that going forward, she can be remembered for the beautiful person that she was, and the blame for her senseless murder can be placed where it belongs; on the monster who killed her.”
“Our youngest sister now works as a social worker, often directly interacting with women facing similar issues as our mom. I think there is a bit of poetic justice in knowing that although my mom ran into the worst person possible on the day she was murdered, my sister is working every day to protect other vulnerable women from meeting a similar fate.”
IS BOKIN THE SONOMA SERIAL KILLER?
While Michelle Veal’s family requests privacy at this time, solving the mystery of her death is just the beginning of more work for the VCI unit in Sonoma.
Detective Adrian Anaya predicts an acceleration of efforts. “We've had this person possibly lurking in Sonoma County since 1968. God knows what else he's done, right? Right. 30 years later, another violence, sexual assault. Our reaction overall is what else has this person done?”
With nearly four decades of law enforcement experience, Detective Sgt. Bottomley concurs.“Well, I look at a guy like that. And you know, the first thing when I heard I'm like, how old is this guy? Because I want to know how far back we can take this guy, you know? He certainly he did. He got caught for three years. You know there were three different rapes situations in San Francisco that he went down for. That's what he got put in prison for. And then we have him on this one up here. These guys don't just dabble in this. It becomes their obsession for periods of time. And sometimes they go dark for a while, sometimes they get married and try and live a straight life and then fall back into it. It goes back forth. But you know, my feeling is, if there's one here in Sonoma, there's, you know, worse. We want to find the second one, because if I find the second one, I know, there's six or seven or eight, right, you know?”
HUNTED is an original investigative documentary series directed by Grace Kahng in partnership with Wolf Productions. Kahng is also writing books based on her investigation HUNTED: The Stanford Murders and HUNTED: The Hitchhiker Killer. She is represented by Sean Perry at William Morris Endeavor.