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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Less than 24 hours after a jury convicted Rodney Halbower of raping a Nevada blackjack dealer, he was freed pending an appeal and then, authorities say, drove 200 miles to the San Francisco Bay Area and raped and stabbed to death a 19-year-old woman.
The teen was one of six young, female victims of the so-called Gypsy Hill Killer, who terrorized Northern California and Reno, Nevada, during four months in 1976. The killings stopped abruptly as soon as they started and remained a mystery for almost 40 years. Then DNA taken from cigarette butts saved from the scene of a 1976 killing led authorities to Halbower's prison cell in Oregon last year.
Halbower was moved to a Redwood City, California, jail in January, when he was formally charged with two of the Gypsy Hill killings. He's a suspect in the other four killings, which were all committed while Halbower worked his way through the Nevada legal system.
Halbower, 66, has not entered a plea.
Two psychiatrists are scheduled to appear at a hearing Thursday to discuss the results of a court-ordered mental exam to determine whether Halbower is mentally fit to stand trial.
It's not the first mental exam on Halbower, who has spent most of the last 50 years in prison or on the lam.
A 1987 psychiatric report for an Oregon court concluded that Halbower was an intelligent man who suffered from "a severe personality disorder, with a propensity toward criminal behavior."
Halbower earned a high school diploma in prison, but he has had no other education, court records show. He does not appear to possess job skills, although he took drafting classes and dabbled with art behind bars in Michigan, Nevada and Oregon.
Still, that psychiatric report said Halbower "feels that he is pretty accomplished, that he should be able to teach, that he has a great many qualifications" and yearned to be a famous artist or a rock-and-roll star. The report concluded that Halbower's "life is replete with poor impulse control, narcissism and a certain grandiosity."
By his own reckoning, Halbower's criminal career began when he was 9 years old in his hometown of Muskegon, Michigan, when police picked him up for "breaking windows in a cottage," the psychiatrist said.
Four years later, he stole and wrecked a car and then ran away from a juvenile detention facility. It was the beginning of a pattern of crime, prison and escape.
Halbower has been arrested at least 10 times as an adult and convicted of larceny, rape, attempted murder, escape and other felony charges, court records show.
"He's a bad man," said San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe, who is prosecuting Halbower for the Gypsy Hill killings.
Halbower's attorney did not return calls seeking comment.
His brother said Halbower was often truant from school and didn't get along with teachers or fellow students.
"He was a loner, and he was mean," said John Halbower, who still lives in Muskegon. "He was a bully."
But John Halbower said his brother never displayed any particular hostility toward women, though he broke off contact when Rodney moved to Nevada in 1975.
The day after Christmas of that year, Halbower was released from a Reno jail on $5,000 bail with pending rape charges. Five months later, he was sentenced to life in prison.
It was during those five months, from his release to his sentencing in Reno, that authorities say he went on a killing spree in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Halbower would never have been charged with murder and linked to the five California murders and the killing of a University of Nevada nursing student in Reno had he not escaped from prison in December 1986. He stole and made his way to Oregon, where he soon was arrested for rape and attempted murder.
An Oregon jury convicted Halbower. He was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in prison and returned to Nevada to finish his prison term.
When Nevada paroled him in 2013, he was sent back to Oregon, where prison officials took a DNA sample and submitted it to a national database investigators use to revive stalled investigations.
Meanwhile, Reno police reopened an investigation into the 1976 killing of a nursing student found near the University of Nevada. A woman who confessed to murder spent 30 years in prison for the crime, but evidence mounted that she was mentally unfit and probably innocent.
So detectives took another look — and they found that DNA from cigarette butts where the nursing student was killed matched Halbower. Police also linked his DNA to the rapes and killings of two of the Northern California victims, police said.
"That's why we keep all evidence collected from violent and notorious crimes," Reno deputy Chief Mac Venzon said. "You never know."
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Barnard reported from Grants Pass, Oregon. Associated Press writer Scott Sonner in Reno, Nevada, also contributed to this story.
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