Riverside City College student Cheri Jo Bates’ friend still hopes 1966 killing can be solved

On a back page of Ken Welty’s 1964 Ramona High yearbook, a friend he had known in Riverside schools penned a note at the end of their sophomore year:

“Ken — I have known you ever since the 6th grade — I think we are better ‘buds’ now than then. Summer school last year with ‘Mr. A.’ was really something – just as I think Am. Hist. will prove to be in the gym!See ya then — Cheri.”

“She signed that,” Welty said, “and two years later she was dead.”

‘”She” was Cheri Jo Bates.

Sixty years ago — on Oct. 30, 1966, someone stabbed to death the 18-year-old Riverside City College student on campus. Her body was found in an alley on Halloween.

The case remains unsolved.

Welty says he still mourns her brutal killing, and now, six decades later, he is mounting what he calls a “last gasp” to drum up leads and find the killer. He has helped establish a $100,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction and has reached out to the media.

“It’s one of those things that haunts you,” Welty said in an interview in his Cypress home. “We were 18 years old. We had our whole lives ahead of us, and here I am, I’m 78. I don’t know what my expiration date is. We all have one. And I’d like to see something happen on this before I go to wherever I’m going.”

“Somebody needs to keep this story alive,” Welty added. “Somebody knows something.”

Welty has collected newspaper clippings, Bates’ death certificate, police reports, pulled information off the internet, “bugged detectives” and received letters from people who have theories about who killed her. Although he is a retired Los  Angeles Police Department homicide lieutenant, he said he has not investigated the killing, nor does he have access to any inside information.

“What am I gonna do?” Welty said. “I mean, am I gonna go knock on doors of these people that are interviewed by the police and say, ‘What can you tell me that differs from your statement to the police?’ “

Bates’ 79-year-old brother, La Jolla resident and Ramona High graduate Michael Bates, said his sister, who would be 78 today, came out with the family from Nebraska in 1958. She was upbeat, had a lot of friends, was a cheerleader in school and wanted to be an airline stewardess.

Bates has helped Welty gather information for the past 30 years after Welty cold-called him. Oddly enough, they had not met in person until this month, simply for logistical reasons, they said.

“I think it’d be good for it to be solved, you know, but I mean, I don’t have any real hopes,” said Bates, a former electrician. “I mean, especially this many years. Now, does the murderer think about it every October 30th when that comes around? I don’t know. I hope so.”

Theories abound about who killed Bates.

On the night Bates was attacked, she went to the campus library to pick up some books. When she returned, she put the books in her car and discovered it had become disabled, Welty said. She appeared to have been walking with someone — willingly — away from her car when she was killed, Welty said.

“She would not have left the car with a stranger to walk up at nighttime on a dark campus to some alley near the school, where she was ultimately killed,” Welty said.

Michael Bates said he learned about his sister’s death as he sat in a movie theater at Naval Air Station Jacksonville watching “Walk, Don’t Run,” which was Cary Grant’s final movie role. Bates was granted five days of leave before he had to return. He remained in the Navy until 1970.

Welty heard the news from a friend who phoned him while he attended Ventura College.

At 6:32 a.m. on Oct. 31, a janitor found Bates’ body between Terracina Drive and Fairfax Avenue where the Math & Sciences Building is today. A man’s watch was found nearby.

“There was talk of a witness that said, sometime after midnight, there were two people seen in that alley where her body was later discovered. One with a flashlight,” Welty said.  “The speculation is they’re looking for the wristwatch. They didn’t find it because it was recovered as evidence. The wristwatch was ripped off the suspect’s wrist during the struggle. Apparently, she put up a very, very strong struggle.”

A popular theory among internet sleuths is that the Zodiac Killer — who authorities say killed five people in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1968 to 1969 and has not been caught — was responsible.

In 1967, Riverside police and this news organization received a handwritten letter that led detectives to believe the Zodiac Killer was responsible. But the author recanted that assertion in another letter in 2016, according to the Police Department’s cold case webpage.

Detectives now believe Bates likely knew her assailant, and that it was not the Zodiac Killer.

Her boyfriend at the time was cleared because he was not in town when she died.

“Early in the investigation, a potential suspect was identified,” the cold case website says. “Based on the evidence, this person of interest has remained the primary suspect over the years and continues to be the focus of the investigation.”

Police Chief Larry Gonzalez told KABC/7 that detectives are now looking at DNA and fingerprint evidence using new technology. The Police Department declined to discuss the case with this news organization this month.

Detectives, as well as Welty and Bates, still receive letters or packets of information from people who say they’ve solved the case.

There was a man named Carlos who had 12 questions and who sent a photo purporting to show Bates and her mother walking away from a camera wielded by the Zodiac Killer near San Francisco.

His mother was not there at the time, Bates said, and of the girl in the photo, “That’s not (Cheri).”

Then there was the woman in Louisiana who said her son did it, and oh, by the way, he’s dead.

Michael Bates shook his head.

And a person whom Bates described as a “Zodiac zealot” from England sent an envelope with his findings. Police received it as well, Bates said.

“So to me, it’s like, what the hell?” Bates said. “It’s kind of almost ridiculous in a way. … What am I supposed to do with it? “

Welty said he is satisfied with their efforts.

“I can sleep at night,” Welty said, speaking directly to Cheri Jo Bates, “knowing that I’ve done everything I could as a law enforcement officer and an outsider, to keep your memory alive, to keep the case alive, and to try to get this case solved. And you will not be forgotten.

“I mean,” Welty said, pointing to a photograph, “you tell me this is not your All-American girl right here.”