Sonoma and Napa County Cases That Inspired Crime Movies and TV Shows

The true crime genre, which exploits real-life horrors for entertainment purposes, has turned to Sonoma and Napa counties numerous times over the years.

From shocking murders to a woman with a connection to JFK, here are some of the cases and residents with local ties that have inspired true-life films, documentaries and TV shows.

The Salcido Murders

Thirty-five years ago, Ramon Bojorquez Salcido murdered seven people, mostly women and children, in what the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office calls “the worst mass murder” in Sonoma County history.

Salcido, a Boyes Hot Springs resident and winery employee, went on a drug- and alcohol-fueled rampage on the morning of April 14, 1989. Over the course of three hours, he murdered his wife, two children, his mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law and his supervisor. A nearly weeklong manhunt ended with his capture in Mexico.

A 2012 episode of Investigation Discovery’s “Evil, I,” titled “Killer in the Sun,” reenacted the events of the case.

Salcido’s only surviving daughter, Carmina also appeared in the 2010 E! Network TV movie “Kids of Killers.” The hour-long documentary also featured the daughters of Diane Downs, an Oregon woman who murdered her daughter and attempted to murder her two other children in 1983, and the “happy face killer” Keith Hunter Jesperson, who murdered at least eight women in the United States in the early 1990s and drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and authorities.

Murder of MP Frank Trejo

Frank Trejo, 58, was the oldest member of the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and a year away from retirement when he was killed on March 29, 1995.

The officer was on patrol that night and had stopped on Highway 12 in front of a tack shop to examine a suspicious pickup truck. Robert Scully, a recently paroled inmate, got out of the truck and shot Trejo at point-blank range. Scully also stole the officer’s gun belt, and then he and an accomplice took a Santa Rosa family hostage in a lengthy standoff with law enforcement.

The 2014 feature film, “Supremacy,” starring Oscar winner Mahershala Ali (“Green Book,” “Moonlight”) as the slain deputy, Joe Anderson (“Across the Universe,” “The Ruins”) and Danny Glover, is loosely based on the events.

The Dark Side of Jim Mordecai

Jim Mordecai grew up in Santa Rosa. A star football player at Montgomery High School, he became a teacher in Half Moon Bay for 25 years before his career ended abruptly and without explanation.

According to the 2024 HBO Max docuseries “The Truth About Jim,” Mordecai, who died of cancer in 2008, was a monstrous, manipulative bully and abuser who preyed on and sexually assaulted vulnerable young women.

“The Truth About Jim” is narrated by Sierra Barter, Mordecai’s step-granddaughter and an associate producer on the project. Barter was very young when Mordecai died, as she explains in the series’ opening minutes, but she grew up hearing horror stories about him.

“A lot of the women in my family lived in fear of Jim, of what he would do to them and what they suspected he might have done to others,” she said in the series.

As for what other heinous acts Mordecai might have committed, Barter and crime fiction filmmaker Skye Borgman worked hard (and, ultimately, unsuccessfully) to prove that he was the serial killer behind the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders.

The documentary series also refers to one of Jim’s sons, Drue Mordecai, 59, of Santa Rosa, who pleaded not guilty last month to two counts of oral copulation with a minor and one count of lewd or lascivious acts with a child, furnishing drugs to facilitate a crime, assault of a minor, possession of obscene material and sodomy with a minor. Mordecai was at the time a youth volunteer group leader at New Vintage Church in Santa Rosa, which the victim also attended. He is scheduled to be sentenced in October.

Jenner Beach Murders

The deaths of Lindsay Cutshall and Jason Allen, young Christian camp counselors found shot to death on a Jenner beach in August 2004, shocked Sonoma County and the nation and went unpunished for more than a decade.