Teen killed in Bay Area hotel may be linked to 1960s FBI most wanted suspect

A teenage girl killed in an Oakland hotel room almost 60 years ago has finally been identified, police said this week, but her killer escaped and may still be evading arrest.

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On Oct. 2, 1969, witnesses saw a teenager in a white knit dress accompanying a man with a crew cut on 7th Street in Oakland. The pair entered room No. 15 of the St. Louis Hotel at around 2:45 p.m.; less than 30 minutes later, screaming began emanating from the room. By the time police arrived, they were too late: the teenage girl had been brutally beaten and strangled with her own clothing. The man was nowhere to be found.

Detectives searched for the teen’s identity, but they had few leads. She had no identification on her at the time, and she didn’t match any local missing person reports. But despite her mysterious identity, her killer did come into focus.

That same year, two sex workers in their 20s were killed nearby. One was crushed with a chunk of concrete and left in the Oakland Estuary, while another was beaten to death near Aquatic Park in Berkeley. The cases were all tied together by another sex worker named Fran who was interviewed by the Oakland Tribune. She said she’d been hired in Oakland by a man with a crew cut. When she got in his station wagon, he began driving toward Berkeley, eventually stopping in Point Richmond. 

With Fran now trapped in his car, the man began beating her. She said he showed her photos of a dead body and said he was going to kill her next. Somehow, Fran managed to escape and was found by two men fishing in the area. The suspect sped off before police could arrive.

When interviewed by police, Fran had an intriguing detail to share: She said she saw the same man entering room No. 15 with a young woman on the day the girl was found dead. Dubbed the “crew cut killer” by the press, it was believed he may have been a wanted criminal named Taylor Morris Teaford.

Teaford was born in 1935 and raised in North Fork, a community south of Yosemite National Park. After contracting polio as a child, he walked with a permanent limp, but he was known as an adult for his frightening strength, heavy drinking and a terrifying personality. According to the FBI, Teaford was “proficient with all types of firearms” and was “feared by his neighbors because of his extremely vicious and explosive temper.”

In 1957, he was sentenced to prison for raping a teenager. He was paroled less than a decade later, and he soon resumed his reign of terror by shooting his grandmother dead and wounding his sister. He escaped into the woods around North Fork; despite a huge search effort, he wasn’t located, and the FBI added him to their 10 Most Wanted list in 1968.

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It’s believed he next went to the Bay Area, where police speculated he may have killed multiple women. In 1972, based on witnesses placing him at the St. Louis Hotel on the day of the homicide, he was charged with murder. 

Decades passed with no sign of Teaford and no identification of the young woman in the hotel room. But cold case investigators with the Oakland Police Department picked up the case again in recent years, submitting the victim’s DNA for testing. They found a possible familial match — a potential brother — who supplied his own DNA for comparison. 

On Thursday, Oakland police announced she has been identified as Joanne Yvonne Burdick, better known to family and friends as Joanie. Joanie was born in Feb. 1953 and went missing from her Southern California home two years before her death. She was just 14 when she went missing and 16 when she died. Her family reported her missing and searched for her, but the connection, until recently, was never made between the deceased teenager in Oakland and the runaway in Southern California. 

The identification has finally brought some measure of closure to her surviving family. Chevelle Timmins, whose father is Joanie’s brother, posted on Facebook that even decades later, loved ones were using online records to try to find Joanie. 

“She deserved better than assumptions being made about who she was. She deserved better than to be reduced to a Jane Doe. And she deserved so much better than what happened to her,” Timmins wrote.
 
Although Joanie is now identified, the case continues. Teaford was never found, dead or alive, and it’s possible he is still out there. If he’s still alive, he would be 91 years old. At a Thursday press conference, Oakland police said they had some leads on Teaford’s whereabouts over the years. In the 1970s, local media reported Teaford may have been working in a logging camp in the Sonoma County area. 

Anyone with information about Teaford is asked to contact Oakland’s homicide division at 510-238-3821.