Presentation: Was There a Serial Killer in Early San Francisco?

Robin Flinchum, author of the new book The Redemption of Julia Bulette: Murder, Myth and the Hunt for a Serial Killer in Early Virginia City, discusses the lives and brutal deaths of four women working as prostitutes who lived in the neighborhood above San Francisco's Portsmouth Square in the 1850s and 1860s. Before the area became today's Chinatown, it was home to sex workers from all over the world. Using surviving records of the murder investigations conducted at the time, Flinchum was able to glimpse a way of life normally shrouded in anonymity and silence and reveal the compelling stories of real women.

Presenter: Robin Flinchum is an award-winning journalist and historian whose work explores crime, myth and memory in the early American West. Trained in journalism at San Francisco State University, she brings investigative rigor and narrative precision to nineteenth-century sources. She is the author of Red Light Women of Death Valley, the first book to recover the lives of women long erased from the region’s mining-camp history. Her research has reshaped the historical record and inspired permanent museum exhibits. As a longtime independent journalist, Flinchum covered the Death Valley region for fifteen years and has written historical features for Nevada Magazine. She lives and works in the desert West.