Creepy followup to a recent story here on SCVTalk: KHTS reports that that burned corpse found last weekend off Templin Highway near Castaic was “bound” together, presumably at the hands and/or feet. The victim, male, aged 16-26, is being considered a John Doe and authorities are continuing to investigate.
A shocking and terrible crime, to be sure, but it’s not the first in Castaic. Indeed, a review of newspaper reports over the years shows Castaic and the hills around it, have been home to many grisly murders.
Take for instance the story of a 22 year old Anaheim man who contacted his family in September 2000 to tell them that he had been kidnapped.
A few days later, this unfortunate young man was “discovered by a passerby on Ridge Route Road.” The Times:
The passerby saw the car on Wednesday and assumed the occupant was sleeping. When he saw the car again about 9 a.m. Thursday at the same location, he approached, saw the body and called authorities.
The victim had been shot once in the upper body, said sheriff’s Lt. Ray Peavy.
The last time the victim was seen was about 7 p.m. Tuesday at a liquor store in Anaheim. Peavy said the man made a call to his family and told them he had been kidnapped. They called Anaheim police.
Just six years prior to that murder, cops found yet another vehicle with yet another body in it in 1994. This time, however, the body was found outside the vehicle and it was hard to identify. And in this case, there was an added twist:
Investigators said Tuesday it could take months to determine if skeletal remains found near a wrecked truck in a canyon north of Castaic are those of a suspect from a January, 1993, murder.
The truck, discovered Saturday, belongs to Mark Douglas Snyder, 29, of Winnetka. Snyder’s family and friends said they are certain he committed suicide by driving the truck off the 400-foot cliff the night of the slaying. But officials want to make sure Snyder didn’t place the body of an innocent person in the truck and send the vehicle over the cliff to aid his escape.
Snyder is suspected of shooting his friend, Christ James Wetzel, 27, in the head at the garage of a Northridge home on Jan. 14, 1993. Those close to Snyder said they didn’t know why the incident occurred.
Way back in 1980, yet another young man was found dead at Templin Highway near Castaic, just like the victim from this past weekend. This young man was a Marine, known for hitchhiking:
MARINE HEAD BP-Mark Alan Marsh, 20, a Marine from the El Toro base, found Feb. 18, 1980, at Templin Highway and Interstate 5 near Castaic in Los Angeles County. He had indicated to fellow Marines that he was on his way to Buena Park. He was a known hitchhiker.
The head and hands had been severed. A large object had been stuffed into a body cavity. Cause of death undetermined.
The only good news in this case is that a serial killer likely committed this crime. Randy Steven Kraft allegedly killed 45 young men in the 1970s and 80s. He was convicted of at least 16 murders and is currently on death row in San Quentin.
Finally we come to perhaps the saddest Castaic murder story of all. Nicknamed Castaic Jane Doe, this victim was written about as recently as 2007 by the Daily News:
A flowery dress, a ring and a mangled, unidentifiable body. Dug up in 1969, these are the precious few clues investigators have in the case of Castaic Jane Doe.
Now a sheriff’s investigator rehired out of retirement is working on a Texas link in the cold case. The inside of the ring bears an insignia of a Lone Star State jeweler.
“The big thing now is, all I want to do is get her identified and then figure out who killed her,” said Investigator Richard Kennerly, 70, of the sheriff’s Homicide Unit’s cold-case division.
The insignia of three candles with the letters “JA” belongs to James Avery jewelers, a Christian-oriented company based in Kerrville in south-central Texas.
“A lot of these old (cases), there’s not a whole lot I can go by. … In this case I had the ring,” Kennerly said. “Also there was a dress, a hippie-type dress.”
It doesn’t appear the mysterious victim, now known only as Jane Doe, was from the Santa Clarita Valley.
I find it most tragic when investigators can’t even identify the name of the murder victim, let alone catch the murderer. There are a number of unsolved murders in Santa Clarita, but at least we know who the victims were. In the case of Castaic Jane Doe, however, it’s possible we’ll never find out.
What is it about Castaic that makes murderers end up dumping bodies out there? Beats me, but Castaic used to be really remote, the last place to stop on your way out of Los Angeles County. Bodies have been dug up in other parts of Santa Clarita as well (most recently homeowners in Whites Canyon found human bones after the October 2007 fires, no word on the origin of those bones), but Castaic seems to have a special grisly history.