A summer Sunday afternoon picnic for two teenage friends in the suburbs of San Jose, California, ended in a tragedy that sent waves of fear through the community and baffled investigators for nearly two years. On August 3, 1969, the bodies of 15-year-old Kathie Reyne Snoozy, a female, and her friend, 14-year-old Debra Gaye Furlong, were found on a sun-drenched, wooded knoll in the southern Almaden Valley.
The girls had ridden their bikes from their nearby homes to enjoy a quiet picnic on the hill, a spot that overlooked their own neighborhood. When they failed to return home for dinner, Debra's father began to search, only to discover a horrific scene cordoned off by police.
The brutality of the crime was staggering. Both girls were fully clothed and had not been sexually assaulted, but they had been the victims of a frenzied and violent knife attack. The Santa Clara County Medical Examiner, Dr. John E. Hauser, was shaken by what he found, stating he had never encountered a case with so many wounds. Kathie had been stabbed more than 200 times, and Debra over 100 times, mostly on the upper parts of their bodies. The sheer number of wounds, inflicted so rapidly that neither girl showed signs of a struggle, led Dr. Hauser to describe it as a "frenzied flurry of knife-wounds." The lack of significant blood at the scene initially led investigators to believe the attack had happened elsewhere.
The shocking double murder of two local girls in their own seemingly safe suburban neighborhood created a climate of intense fear and suspicion in San Jose. In the absence of immediate leads, speculation ran rampant. The crime occurred just five days before the infamous Tate murders in Los Angeles, leading to a brief and ultimately unfounded investigation into a possible connection with the Manson Family cult. The nature of the slayings also drew the attention of investigators hunting the Zodiac Killer, who was active in Northern California at the time. The Zodiac himself would later claim responsibility for the murders in one of his cryptic communications, inflating his victim count, though this was later proven to be a false claim.
For 21 months, the case remained a painful open wound for the community and the families of the two girls. Debra’s father, Glen Furlong, spoke to the press in the hopes that publicity might "trigger something in someone's mind." He described his daughter as "just an ordinary nice girl who baby set and had a boy friend and talked about becoming an airline stewardess." Kathie's parents, Wilfred and Mrs. Snoozy, were reportedly in a state of collapse following their daughter's murder. The investigation seemed stalled until another brutal stabbing took place nearly two years later.
The break in the case came after the murder of 18-year-old Kathy Bilek in a Saratoga park on April 11, 1971. The similarities between the attacks immediately linked the cases. A maintenance worker at the park provided a description of a "little odd" young man he had seen, leading police to a student at San Jose City College named Karl Francis Werner. Investigators soon discovered that Werner had been a classmate of both Kathie Snoozy and Debra Furlong at Oak Grove High School and lived only a few blocks from their homes.
A search of Werner's residence uncovered the knife used in the Bilek murder. In September 1971, Karl Francis Werner, a serial killer who was described by a girl who dated him as "accomplished in mathematics" and not a "weird, skulking guy," confessed to the murders of all three teenage girls. He was convicted on three counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. Werner was incarcerated at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, where he remained until his death in 2015. The resolution of the case finally brought answers, but it could never erase the profound loss suffered by the Snoozy and Furlong families or the terror that gripped San Jose in the summer of 1969.
