Steele Canyon Cold

Unlike Proctor Valley Jane, this murder victim was identifiable. Yet from the little  that San Diego sheriffs have released on her murder, it seems her death had to be determined to be a murder– so it seems it wasn’t too evident at face value such as an obvious knifing or shooting.

Proctor Valley Road marked by the yellow arrow– showing the relationship to Highway 94 and Steele Canyon Road. 

In fact, there is too little, and unnecessarily too little, information on the death of Elizabeth Heidt. Two days before Christmas 1977– a month and a half before Proctor Valley Jane’s body was found in a ditch off Proctor Valley Road in Otay– Heidt’s body was found in a drainage ditch a mile east of where Steele Canyon Road meets with Route 94 in Jamul (pronounced Hamool), east of San Diego.

She too was young, far too young. heidt2

Her murder is a cold case, and there is little likelihood of it being solved let alone linked to Proctor Valley Jane of one and a half months later in Otay unless there is much more information released on the circumstances.

The area of Steele Canyon Road where her body was found remains undeveloped. The map shows how close Proctor Valley Road is. The difference is Highway 94 is the main backroad out of San Diego going east for whatever reason. It becomes Campo Road. Proctor Valley Road remains quite outback to this day, and it would take a little knowledge to know where it is.  But if the same killer is afoot he had enough time to find it.

Much more information needs to come out about the murder of Heidt.

If a killer was passing through San Diego for these months, he made it a point to drop bodies in the rural areas southeast. It is likely he headed to Arizona after this. I don’t know of any other cold cases that come close to the MO here. . . and  sadly the way the bodies were discarded is a common MO. Proctor Valley Jane being poisoned, however, is pretty unique.

Not saying either of the above are the location of the body drop, but such ditches are all along Highway 94 here approaching Jamul.


* * *


4 thoughts on “Steele Canyon Cold

    1. Yes, but it is an impersonal account. I toyed with the idea PVJ was dumped nearby to make it look like a pattern. But we know little about how Heidt made her money, if you know what I mean.


  1. Yep. It’s hard to tell what really happened at such a distance in time, what the details of the crime are, etc. Also, since the authorities were looking for a roommate of the victim, who knows what her associates were like, or, as you say, how she made her money. People in bad situations/environments are so susceptible to violence. Especially women and children.


  2. Since she was murdered in the same way as her baby, it sounds like she was silenced. Still, in her environment she also may have bene in a position to have fallen victim to a random. More details are needed. Proctor Valley Jane is truly strange– someone should have remembered who she was.


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s