Cases in Sonoma and Napa County that served as inspiration for true crime films and television series

The true crime genre, which uses real-life horror stories for entertainment, has often looked to Sonoma and Napa counties over the years.

From shocking murders to a woman with ties to JFK, here are some of the cases and residents with local connections that have inspired true crime films, documentaries and television programs.

The Salcido murders

Ramon Bojorquez Salcido murdered seven people, mostly women and children, family members 35 years ago. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office called the murder “the worst mass murder” in Sonoma County’s history.

Salcido, a Boyes Hot Springs resident and winery worker, went on the rampage in a drug- and alcohol-fueled fit of rage on the morning of April 14, 1989. Within three hours, he murdered his wife, two of his children, his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law and his supervisor. A nearly week-long manhunt for Salcido ended with his arrest in Mexico.

A 2012 episode of Investigation Discovery’s Evil, I, entitled “Killer in the Sun,” recreated the events of the case.

Salcido’s only surviving daughter, Carmina, also appeared in the 2010 E! Network television movie “Kids of Killers.” The hour-long documentary also featured the daughters of Diane Downs, an Oregon woman who murdered her daughter and attempted to murder her other two children in 1983, and the “Happy Face Killer” Keith Hunter Jesperson, who murdered at least eight women in the United States in the early 1990s and drew smiley faces in his many letters to the media and authorities.

Killing of Deputy Frank Trejo

Frank Trejo, 58, was the oldest member of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and a year away from retirement when he was killed on March 29, 1995.

The deputy was on patrol that night and had stopped in front of a tack shop off Highway 12 to look at a suspicious pickup truck. Recently paroled inmate Robert Scully got out of the truck and shot Trejo at point blank range. Scully also stole the deputy’s gun belt and then, along with an accomplice, took a Santa Rosa family hostage during a lengthy standoff with police officers.

The 2014 feature film “Supremacy,” starring Oscar winner Mahershala Ali (“Green Book,” “Moonlight”) as a murdered deputy sheriff, Joe Anderson (“Across the Universe,” “The Ruins”) and Danny Glover, is loosely based on these events.

The dark side of Jim Mordecai

Jim Mordecai grew up in Santa Rosa, was a star football player at Montgomery High School and worked as a teacher in Half Moon Bay for 25 years before his career ended abruptly and without explanation.

According to the 2024 HBO Max documentary series The Truth About Jim, Mordecai, who died of cancer in 2008, was a manipulative and monstrous bully and abuser who exploited and sexually abused defenseless young women.

“The Truth About Jim” is narrated by Sierra Barter, a step-granddaughter of Mordecai and an associate producer on the project. Barter was very young when Mordecai died, as she explains in the opening minutes of the series, but she grew up hearing horror stories about him.

“Many women in my family lived in fear of Jim, of what he would do to them and what they suspected he might have done to others,” she said on the show.

As for other heinous acts Mordecai may have committed, Barter and true crime director Skye Borgman worked hard (and ultimately in vain) to prove that he was the serial killer behind the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders.

The docuseries also references one of Jim’s sons, Drue Mordecai, 59, of Santa Rosa, who pleaded guilty last month to two counts of oral sex with a minor and one count each of lewd or lascivious acts with a child, furnishing drugs to aid in a crime, assault on a minor, possession of obscene material and sodomy with a minor. Mordecai was a volunteer youth group leader at the time at New Vintage Church in Santa Rosa, which the victim also attended. He is scheduled to be sentenced in October.

Murders at Jenner Beach

The deaths of Lindsay Cutshall and Jason Allen, two young Christian camp counselors found shot to death on a beach in Jenner in August 2004, shocked Sonoma County and the nation and remained unsolved for more than a decade.