California

Frank Courtney Westmore (April 13, 1923 – May 14, 1985) was a Hollywood make-up artist, part of the Westmore family who were credited with introducing the art of make-up to the Hollywood movie industry.He was born in Maywood, California, and died of a heart ailment in St. Joseph's Medical Center in Burbank, California. Frank was the last surviving Westmore brother.
After apprenticing at Paramount Pictures with his brother Wally, he worked on films such as Farewell, My Lovely, The Ten Commandments, Houseboat, Two for the Seesaw and The Towering Inferno, and television series such as The Munsters, Planet of the Apes, Bonanza, Hart to Hart and Kung Fu. For the last of these he won the Emmy Award for "Outstanding Achievement in Makeup" in 1972, and was also nominated unsuccessfully the following year. He was nominated a third time in 1978 with his nephew Michael for A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story. He also co-wrote a biography of the family, The Westmores of Hollywood in 1976.

Guy Madison (born Robert Ozell Moseley; January 19, 1922 – February 6, 1996) was an American film, television, and radio actor. He is best known for playing Wild Bill Hickok in the Western television series The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok from 1951 to 1958.
During his career, Madison was given a special Golden Globe Award in 1954 and two stars (radio, television) on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

Sally Blane (born Elizabeth Jane Young; July 11, 1910 – August 27, 1997) was an American actress who appeared in more than 100 movies.

Sig Arno (born Siegfried Aron; 27 December 1895 – 17 August 1975) was a German-Jewish film actor who appeared in such films as Pardon My Sarong and The Mummy's Hand. He may be best remembered from The Palm Beach Story (1942) as Toto, the nonsense-talking, mustachioed man who hopelessly pursues Mary Astor's Princess Centimillia.

Steven Gregory Stayner (April 18, 1965 – September 16, 1989) was an American kidnapping victim. On December 4, 1972, seven-year-old Stayner was abducted in Merced, California, by child molester Kenneth Parnell. He was held by his abductor 38 miles (61 km) away in Mariposa County, California, and later in Mendocino County, California, until he was aged 14, when he managed to escape with another of Parnell's victims, five-year-old Timothy White.

Herbert William Mullin (April 18, 1947 – August 18, 2022) was an American serial killer who killed 13 people in California in the early 1970s. He confessed to the killings, which he claimed prevented earthquakes. In 1973, after a trial to determine whether he was legally insane or culpable, he was convicted of two murders in the first-degree and nine in the second-degree, and sentenced to life imprisonment. During his imprisonment, he was denied parole eight times.Mullin and Edmund Kemper overlapped in their 1972 to 1973 murder sprees, adding confusion to the police investigations and ending with both being arrested, within a few weeks of each other, after the deaths of 21 people.

Ross Macdonald was the main pseudonym used by the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (; December 13, 1915 – July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in Southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Since the 1970s, Macdonald's works (particularly the Archer novels) have received attention in academic circles for their psychological depth, sense of place, use of language, sophisticated imagery and integration of philosophy into genre fiction. Brought up in the province of Ontario, Canada, Macdonald eventually settled in the state of California, where he died in 1983.

The Wall Street Journal wrote that:"... it is the sheer beauty of Macdonald’s laconic style—with its seductive rhythms and elegant plainness—that holds us spellbound. 'Hard-boiled,' 'noir,' 'mystery,' it doesn’t matter what you call it. Macdonald, with insolent grace, blows past the barrier constructed by Dorothy Sayers between 'the literature of escape' and 'the literature of expression.' These novels, triumphs of his literary alchemy, dare to be both."

Robert Louis Leggett (July 26, 1926 – August 13, 1997) was an American lawyer and politician who served eight terms as a U.S. Representative from California from 1963 to 1979.

Jerry Michael Heard (born May 1, 1947) is an American professional golfer who won several PGA Tour events in the 1970s.

Michaela Joy Garecht (January 24, 1979 — disappeared November 19, 1988) was nine years old when she was abducted in Hayward, California, in broad daylight at the corner of Mission Boulevard and Lafayette Avenue.
Sketches of Garecht's abductor were distributed along with missing person flyers throughout the San Francisco Bay Area within 24 hours of her disappearance, but search efforts proved fruitless. Her case was featured in national media, including profiles on the documentary series Unsolved Mysteries.
After the 2009 release of Jaycee Dugard, who had been kidnapped in Meyers, California, and held captive by Phillip and Nancy Garrido for nearly two decades, renewed interest was brought on Garecht's case, and Garrido was interviewed regarding Garecht's abduction. In 2012, Wesley Shermantine, a convicted serial killer who committed various murders with his accomplice, Loren Herzog—known collectively as the Speed Freak Killers—brought to the attention of law enforcement that the original sketches of Garecht's abductor bore a striking similarity to Herzog, who had committed suicide while on parole from prison in January 2012. While bone fragments discovered in one of Herzog and Shermantine's disposal sites was thought to belong to Garecht, DNA profiling completed in late 2012 proved they were not hers.
On December 21, 2020, thirty-two years after the abduction of Garecht, David Emery Misch was charged with her abduction and murder.