Irene Hind was a 55-year-old woman whose life revolved around the small neighborhood bar she owned on Larkin Street in San Francisco. Known as Irene’s Domar Club, the establishment stood in a rough section of the city but had developed the familiarity of a gathering place where regular customers knew one another. Hind had purchased the bar despite objections from members of her family and operated it with an independent spirit.
Her daughter later remembered her as a generous person who gave customers birthday presents and tried to help the troubled or struggling people who came through the doors.
On March 12, 1974, Hind was raped and strangled. Publicly available accounts provide few details about where her body was discovered, who found her, or the precise sequence of events preceding her death. Investigators nevertheless recognized the killing as a sexually motivated homicide in which the attacker had used strangulation to take her life. The crime occurred during a particularly violent period in San Francisco, when several unrelated murder investigations were alarming residents and placing heavy demands on the city’s homicide detectives.
Hind’s murder was eventually examined alongside the deaths of several women in San Francisco and the San Pedro area of Los Angeles. The victims shared several characteristics: many drank or regularly visited bars, some were living with illness or personal difficulties, and they had been sexually assaulted and strangled. At least some of the women had also been bound or had their faces covered. San Francisco investigators believed Hind’s death resembled the March 1975 murder of Leah Griffin, who was found bound, raped and strangled in a Powell Street residential hotel, as well as the later 1974 killing of Maude Burgess in her Hyde Street apartment.
The principal suspect to emerge was Adolph Theodore Laudenberg, a former security guard and taxi driver who lived in San Francisco during part of the period in which the women were killed. In July 1975, Laudenberg allegedly told his future daughter-in-law that he had killed three women in the Los Angeles area and one in San Francisco. She and her fiancé reported the disturbing confession to police. The information was forwarded to investigators in both cities, and Los Angeles detectives questioned Laudenberg six days later. He denied killing anyone, and authorities lacked the physical evidence necessary to arrest or charge him.
At that time, the suspected killer had left investigators with few usable clues. Semen recovered in the cases established that the victims had been sexually assaulted, but modern DNA testing did not yet exist. A partial fingerprint recovered from the separate Maude Burgess crime scene did not match Laudenberg. There was no publicly reported fingerprint, eyewitness identification, confession specifically naming Hind, or other physical evidence that conclusively connected him to Hind’s death. With no sufficient case against him, the investigation went cold, and Hind’s family gradually lost hope that anyone would be held responsible.
The investigation was revived in 2002 after another member of Laudenberg’s family told police that he had again spoken about committing killings during the 1970s, this time reportedly providing more detail. Los Angeles cold-case detectives worked with San Francisco investigators, who reopened their files on Hind, Griffin and Burgess. Unfortunately, the biological samples from those three San Francisco cases had not survived, preventing detectives from directly comparing Laudenberg’s DNA with evidence from Hind’s murder. The only usable biological evidence that remained came from the 1972 killing of Lois Petrie in San Pedro.
Police obtained Laudenberg’s DNA through an undercover operation in which an officer befriended him and arranged a meeting at a doughnut shop. After Laudenberg drank from a coffee cup and left it behind, investigators collected it and recovered his DNA. The sample matched biological evidence from Petrie’s murder, leading to Laudenberg’s arrest in September 2003. He was later convicted of killing Petrie and received a life sentence. That conviction established his responsibility for Petrie’s death, but it did not legally resolve Hind’s case.
Laudenberg remained a suspect in Irene Hind’s murder because of the similarities among the crimes, his presence in the region and his alleged statements about killing a woman in San Francisco. Investigators attempted to connect him to Hind and four additional deaths after his arrest, but no murder charge was filed against him for Hind’s killing. He was never tried or convicted in connection with her death, and the available record does not identify any other publicly named suspect. Irene Hind’s murder therefore remains officially unresolved, leaving behind the story of a compassionate bar owner whose efforts to care for people in a difficult neighborhood ended in violence, and whose family never received a definitive answer about who killed her.
