On a warm summer evening in California’s Central Valley, 15-year-old Mark Hatcher was enjoying a bike ride with his cousin. A freshman at Fowler High School, Mark was spending the evening of August 20, 1980, close to his family’s rural home in Fowler. What began as a simple pleasure of youth ended in an act of unimaginable violence that tore a family apart and exposed a predator living in the community’s midst.
That evening, Mark became a victim of the serial killer Fernando Eros Caro.
Mark and his 15-year-old cousin, Mary Helen Booher, who was visiting from Hawthorne, had left for their after-dinner ride around 7 p.m. As they pedaled near a local peach orchard, they were confronted by Caro, driving an orange pickup truck. He stopped the two teenagers and, without provocation, pulled out a gun and shot Mark in the face, killing him instantly. Caro then abducted Mary, forcing her and the bicycles into his truck before speeding away from the scene.
About half an hour after the cousins had left, Mark’s mother and grandmother went for a walk to meet them on their way back. As they walked, they heard a single gunshot echo from a nearby orchard and saw a pickup truck driving away. Minutes later, they made a devastating discovery, finding Mark’s body on a road within the orchard. The senselessness of the attack left the family and the small farming community in a state of shock and terror.
The events that followed the shooting escalated quickly. Shortly after murdering Mark and kidnapping Mary, Caro was involved in a minor hit-and-run collision in a bar parking lot about two miles away. The two men whose car he struck, Rick Donner and Jack Lucchesi, pursued him. When they forced him to stop, Caro got out of his truck, shot both men, and fled. Both Donner and Lucchesi survived and were able to provide police with a description of their assailant and his truck. Later that night, Caro drove to an orange grove, where he shot Mary Booher in the head. Her body was found five days later.
The description provided by the surviving victims led investigators to focus on Fernando Eros Caro. A supervisor at the plant where Caro worked as a watchman recognized the police sketch and alerted authorities. When police approached Caro, he attempted to flee but was quickly apprehended on August 25, 1980. A search of his apartment uncovered a gun that ballistics experts matched to a bullet fragment recovered from Mark’s brain. Tire tracks and shoe prints from the crime scenes also linked Caro to the murders. His coworkers expressed shock at his arrest, describing him as a quiet and nice man.
Fernando Eros Caro, a former Marine and honors student, was charged with the murders of Mark Hatcher and Mary Booher, the kidnapping of Mary, and the attempted murders of Rick Donner and Jack Lucchesi. He was convicted and, in 1982, sentenced to death. During his trial, it was revealed that Caro had a history of violence, including a prior conviction for kidnapping. He was also the prime suspect in the 1979 murder of 8-year-old Victoria DeSantiago and the killings of two other teenage girls in 1980. Though his initial death sentence was overturned, he was later resentenced to life in prison. Caro remained on death row for other charges and died at San Quentin State Prison in January 2017 at the age of 67.
