Kim Wendy Allen was a 19-year-old student at Santa Rosa Junior College who disappeared after hitchhiking from her job at a Larkspur health food store on March 4, 1972. She was carrying an aluminum-framed backpack and a wooden soy sauce barrel with red Chinese characters when two men gave her a ride north to San Rafael and left her at the Bell Street entrance to Highway 101. That drop-off is the last confirmed sighting of her alive.

Allen’s nude body was found the next day, March 5, 1972, face down in a creek at the bottom of a 20-foot embankment on Enterprise Road about eight miles southeast of Santa Rosa. Investigators concluded she had been murdered elsewhere and dumped at the site.

Allen’s death was later linked to the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders, a series of similar unsolved homicides of young female hitchhikers in Sonoma County between 1972 and 1973. The two men who drove her that evening were interviewed and one passed a polygraph, after which both were cleared. A checkbook belonging to Allen was recovered March 24, 1972, from a drive-up mailbox; two fingerprints were lifted from it but no arrests resulted. Does anyone have information about Allen’s movements that evening or about the two men who gave her a ride?