Riverside papers & Cheri Jo Bates
In a prior post I mentioned that in searching for more information on Donna Lass I realized I was limiting myself to Bay Area newspapers. (For whatever reason, Google still has not indexed the Tahoe Daily Tribune, and I suspect it won't until the site's maintainers realize this and undertake a redesign.) One of the more surprising discoveries has to do with looking for sources related to Cheri Jo Bates' murder in Riverside. I scoured the Riverside Press-Enterprise site for articles but found precious few pertaining to the possible Zodiac 1966 event. Most of what I did find had to do with the recent David Fincher movie and was not particularly informative.
But then -- like a slap across the forehead -- I discovered another Riverside newspaper with more than a few articles on Cheri Jo Bates, including one from 1966. It's the Viewpoints online edition. Viewpoints is the newspaper of Riverside City College, where Bates was enrolled at the time of the murder as well as the location of the same. I should've gone looking for Viewpoints from the get-go, especially since every college and university worth its salt has a newspaper. It was too obvious.
Viewpoints' coverage isn't half-bad, especially since their staff seem to do the job the Press-Enterprise can't be bothered to do these days, namely (a) ask the Riverside police the obvious questions about Bates' death, since the case remains open and developments have occurred over the past thirty years, and (b) to make the articles available on the web for free rather than burying them in a pay-for-access archive. Turn up the applause machine for Viewpoints. Boo, hiss to the Press-Enterprise.
Links to Viewpoints articles on Cheri Jo Bates:
- 5 Nov 1996: On 30th anniversary, RCC murder still unsolved
- 5 Nov 1996: "She was young and beautiful. But now she is battered and dead. She is not the first and she will not be the last."
- 31 Oct 1991: There is a real murder in RCC's past; One of the Zodiac killings
- 4 Nov 1966: Police still lack clues in murder
