More than a century after a young mother and her toddler were murdered and dumped in a Kern County irrigation canal, Bakersfield police have reopened the case, and organizers are turning to an unlikely headliner to help pay for answers: the retired Los Angeles detective who helped catch the Night Stalker. Gil Carrillo is scheduled to appear Sunday at 7 p.m. at the historic Woolworth’s building in downtown Bakersfield for an event meant to raise money for exhumation and DNA testing that organizers hope can finally identify the pair.
The woman, described as a Latina between 25 and 30 years old, was beaten to death, according to KGET. Her body was found two days after a toddler, assumed to be her baby, was thrown into that same canal to drown. A grave marker in Kern County reads, “Here sleeps an unknown mother and her infant son mysteriously murdered April 18, 1923,” per the outlet.
The Bakersfield Police Department has officially reopened the cold case, the station reports, part of a broader push that also includes a fundraising campaign built around proposed exhumation and DNA testing of the remains. That campaign, called Give Them Their Names Back, is a partnership of the Bakersfield Police Department, Kern County Secret Witness and Notorious Bakersfield, according to the same report.
A Night Stalker Connection Draws a Crowd
Carrillo, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s investigator, helped bring Richard Ramirez — the serial killer known as the Night Stalker — to justice in 1985, per the station’s report. At Sunday’s event, billed as “An Evening with Gil Carrillo: Inside the Night Stalker Investigation,” he is set to share firsthand experiences investigating Ramirez and discuss how he and his colleagues tracked down a man who murdered at least 15 people during a crime spree that lasted 16 months in the mid-1980s.
Tickets cost $45 apiece, with proceeds going toward the estimated cost of exhuming the woman and baby and conducting DNA testing, the outlet notes. Cost estimates for that work have varied across the news organization’s own coverage: a more recent report put the figure at an estimated $15,000 per victim, while an earlier KGET story cited Robert Petersen estimating the cost at upwards of $10,000, with Bakersfield police Capt. Nathan McCauley putting the possible price tag closer to $15,000.
Why the Case Can’t Go to Trial
Petersen, a Notorious Bakersfield podcaster who is leading the identification effort, has said the work must be funded privately rather than with public money. “There’s not a possibility of prosecution,” Petersen said, according to KGET. “They can’t use taxpayer money, so the money has to be raised privately.” Petersen has said he conceived the fundraiser after hearing Carrillo speak in Los Angeles.
Carrillo has said he hopes the effort can bring closure to any living family members, per the station’s reporting. Petersen has said the identities of the woman and infant remain unknown more than 100 years later, and the station notes that identifying them has become something of a mission for Notorious Bakersfield, whose podcast devoted an episode to the case. “Over a century later, the identities of these victims remain unknown,” according to Notorious Bakersfield.
A Separate Community Effort Has Also Tried
The Bakersfield-area push isn’t the first attempt to put names to the grave. A separate local effort previously sought DNA testing to identify the mother and child, according to Turnto23. Greg Zuniga and Alyssha Geraldl had planned a GoFundMe to help identify the pair and also hoped to use funds to clean other old graves throughout Kern County, the outlet reported.
Even if the exhumation and testing move forward, how much usable evidence remains is an open question. The cemetery’s CEO told Turnto23 it’s unclear how much of the remains are even available for identification, saying, “we truly don’t know how much of the remains are there to be able to identify them.” For now, the grave outside Bakersfield still bears no names — just a date, and a mystery that Sunday’s event is betting a room full of true-crime fans can help finally solve.
