Annette Lynn Selix, an 11-year-old female whose ethnicity is not publicly documented, left her Cottonwood home near Anderson, California, on the evening of Sunday, August 13 1978 to buy groceries. When she failed to return, a search began; by the next morning her crumpled body lay 105 feet below the Antlers Bridge on Interstate 5, still wearing only blood-spattered underwear.
The autopsy showed the 11-year-old female had been raped, forced to perform oral sex and then flung from the bridge while alive, suffering multiple fractures, massive internal bleeding and fatal aspiration of blood. Distinct bite marks on her thigh were later matched to the killer, and the cruelty of the assault shocked even seasoned investigators.
Detectives traced her last purchases—two cans of Squirt soda and tubs of margarine—to Darrell Keith Rich’s refrigerator during a consent search, and recovered hair and blood samples under warrant. The matching bite-mark analysis, the groceries in his home and witness statements placed the 11-year-old female squarely in Rich’s path minutes before her death.
Rich, a 23-year-old white male saw-mill worker known locally as the “Hilltop Rapist,” had once worked alongside the victim’s mother. Initially interviewed only because of that link, he failed a polygraph on August 23, bragged to friends that he had “snuffed” the girl for money, and was arrested late that night outside a Redding bar. He soon led officers to weapons, confessed on tape to killing the 11-year-old female, and surrendered a handwritten list of all his crimes.
In January 1981 a Shasta County jury convicted Rich of four murders—including the rape-murder of the 11-year-old female—and numerous sexual assaults; the Selix case, filed as Count IV, was pivotal in the death-penalty verdict. Rich remained on San Quentin’s death row until March 15 2000, when he was executed by lethal injection as the victim’s step-father watched impassively.
One secondary crime-database entry lists the 11-year-old female’s death as June 6 1978, but every primary court and contemporary news record places the abduction and homicide in mid-August 1978, consistent with Rich’s own confession and the investigative timeline.
