Seventeen-year-old Patricia Ann Moore—referred to in court filings simply as a female teenager, with no official record specifying her ethnicity—vanished from a Redding, California motel in early August 1978. Investigators would later connect her disappearance to a brief but vicious series of attacks that claimed four young lives across Shasta County in the summer of 1978.
More than two weeks after she went missing, Patricia’s nude body was discovered at the rural Igo dump west of Redding. The autopsy documented multiple fractured teeth, crushing blows that caved in the right-front portion of her skull, and additional evidence of manual strangulation; the official cause of death was hemorrhage and shock from blunt-force head injuries.
Detectives first encountered future suspect Darrell Keith Rich when he “found” the dump-site bodies and offered to show deputies the scene. After Rich failed a voluntary polygraph about the killings, he boasted to friends that he had been paid $7,000 “to snuff” one of the victims. Those friends alerted police, and on the night of August 23 1978 officers located the 23-year-old man at the Oarlock Bar in Redding, hand-cuffed him, and—during a taped interrogation—obtained a detailed confession that included Patricia Ann Moore’s murder.
Rich, a Native American male nicknamed “Young Elk,” was indicted on four counts of first-degree murder plus numerous sexual-assault and kidnapping charges. A Yolo County jury convicted him on all counts in January 1981, imposing a death sentence for Patricia’s slaying and two of the other murders; he received life without parole for the fourth.
After nearly nineteen years on death row, Rich was executed by lethal injection at San Quentin on March 15 2000—ending the only prosecution ever brought in connection with Patricia Ann Moore’s death. Authorities have never identified additional suspects, and no parallel arrests have been reported.
