Leah Griffin, 60, was found bound, raped, and strangled in her room at a residential hotel on Powell Street in San Francisco on March 21, 1975. A retired legal secretary, Griffin had been a heavy drinker and recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Her killing fit a disturbing pattern from the early 1970s in California: middle-aged or elderly women, often with health problems or alcohol dependency, sexually assaulted and strangled.

The case went cold for decades until DNA testing linked Adolph Laudenberg, a former cab driver and security guard, to the murder in 2002 via DNA from a discarded coffee cup. Laudenberg had earlier told two daughters-in-law, years apart, that he had committed four murders in the 1970s, one of which he named as Griffin’s; those admissions had not led to charges at the time. He was arrested in 2003 and later convicted in 2006 for the 1972 murder of Lois Petrie; he died in prison in 2015. Authorities strongly suspected his involvement in Griffin’s death but he was not formally charged for it.

Did anyone in the Powell Street area in 1975 ever notice suspicious visitors to the hotel or remember Leah Griffin’s routines?