Eight Minutes

Two Gravel Roads

I wanted to visit Cesar Chavez Park to get a sense of how long it would take someone to walk from the site of Rainbow Village to the approximate location of where Mary and Greg were shot. I also wanted to see if I could find some indication of where the entrance to the Berkeley dump might have been, because Vincent Johnson testified that he saw Ralph Thomas with Mary and Greg near the entrance. 

When I arrived I assumed that the terrain of the Park is very different from the terrain of the dump, but I also assumed that a section of what's now the Dorothy Stegmann perimeter trail roughly follows what was once the access road to the dump and to Rainbow Village.

To get an overview of the area of the park I'm talking about, you may want to go to Google Maps and take a look at the satellite image of Cesar Chavez Park. To me, the park looks like a rhombus, and the side I'm focusing on is the east side of that figure. If you follow the Stegmann trail from the southeast corner toward the northeast corner, you will come across three pads with picnic tables, and between the first two pads you'll find the memorial to Greg and Mary. Mary's mother placed the memorial on this spot because she believed this was where the murders had occurred. If you continue up the trail you'll come across what appear to have been two gravel roads, and this is where I believe the entrance and the office to have been located. If you continue to walk along the trail you will come to the northeast corner where Rainbow Village was located.

Using the stopwatch on my phone to calculate the time it would probably take someone to walk from what I assumed was the dump entrance to the site of Rainbow Village, it took me about eight minutes to walk the distance a normal pace. So, assuming Thomas committed the murders, it would have taken him about eight or nine minutes to walk from where Vincent Johnson saw him with Mary and Greg back to his car and grab his rifle, and it would have taken him about the same amount of time to walk back to where he'd left them. 

Thomas could have returned to his car, grabbed his rifle and some ammunition, and returned to the area near the entrance in a relatively short amount of time.

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