Arrest Made In Infamous 1976 'Gypsy Hill' Killings On Peninsula
DALY CITY (CBS SF) -- A 71-year-old inmate has been arrested for the murder of a Bay Area teenager in 1976 -- a slaying that was considered to be one of the infamous "Gypsy Hill Murders" in San Mateo County.
San Mateo County prosecutors said Leon Melvin Seymour will be charged with the murder of 19-year-old Denise Lampe, found stabbed to death in the parking lot of Serramonte Shopping Center in Daly City in April of 1976.
Seymour is currently incarcerated at Coalinga State Hospital for a string of kidnappings and sexual assaults dating back to the 1970s.
The Gypsy Hill killings were a series of unsolved homicides of young women and girls on the San Francisco Peninsula in 1976, named after a road in Pacifica where one of the victims was found.
The bodies of five victims were found in Pacifica, Millbrae, Daly City and South San Francisco.
After years of being in the cold case files, the FBI and local law enforcement renewed the investigation in 2014 into the slayings using modern DNA technology.
Rodney Halbower was arrested in connection with two of the six Gypsy Hill homicides in 2015. Halbower was serving time in an Oregon state prison on an unrelated attempted-murder conviction at the time.
He was charged with two counts of murder and special circumstance of murder during the course of a rape in the 1976 deaths of 17-year-old Paula Baxter, whose body was found in Millbrae, and Veronica Anne Cascio, 18, who was found dead in her native Pacifica.
In the Lampe case, a blood stain on her jacket was positively tied to Seymour, according to prosecutors.
Authorities did not disclose if there was any connection between the two men
Seymour was formally arraigned on the murder charge Wednesday via a video conference. He is next scheduled to appear in court Jan. 12 for a preliminary hearing.
