8. Rodney Halbower
On the day after Christmas in 1975, Rodney Halbower was released on bail pending his trial for raping a blackjack dealer in Nevada. Over the next five months, Halbower raped and murdered at least six women—five in the San Francisco Bay area and one in Reno. After the killing spree, he went back to Nevada to stand trial and was given a life sentence for rape.
With Halbower locked up in a different state, the cases of the five victims in the San Francisco area went cold. They became known as the “Gypsy Hill” murders. While the murder in Reno had been pinned on a mentally ill woman, who was confined to a mental institution for the crime, mounting evidence suggested that she was innocent.
But Halbower wasn’t locked up tight enough in prison because he was able to escape twice. The first time happened during a softball game in June 1977. He made it all the way to Michigan, where he kidnapped his own daughter.
The second time was in December 1986. He and another inmate—also a sex offender—climbed a wall, cut holes in two fences, and ran under a guard tower. A short time later, he was in Medford, Oregon, where he stabbed a 23-year-old woman 19 times while trying to steal her purse. Luckily, she survived the attack. Halbower was convicted of the attempted murder in Oregon and sent back to prison in Carson City.
When Halbower was paroled in 2013 for the original rape charge, he was sent directly to Oregon to serve his sentence. There, he had a DNA sample taken. It matched samples from the Gypsy Hill murders and the murder in Reno. Halbower’s escape was the reason that he was connected to the murders. If he hadn’t gone to Oregon, his DNA test might not have been done. In early 2015, Halbower was charged with two of the six murders.
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