BY EMILY MIBACH
Daily Post Staff Writer
It appears investigators today will announce an arrest in the 1974 strangulation murder of a 21-year-old woman whose body was dumped on Sand Hill Road near Woodside.
Janet Ann Taylor was killed on March 25, 1974, after leaving the Stanford campus. Taylor was the daughter of former Stanford athletic director Chuck Taylor. Her death was one of five murders on or near the Stanford campus between 1972 and 1976.
The sheriff’s office announced yesterday that it will hold a press conference today (May 16) at 10 a.m. to talk about the arrest of “a suspect associated to a cold case murder from the 1970s.”
There are multiple unsolved murders from the 1970s, but District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said that the murder occurred on Sand Hill Road in 1973 or 1974.
The only unsolved murder that occurred at that time on Sand Hill Road was that of Taylor.
Authorities declined to say who they have arrested in Taylor’s murder. However, a criminal case listing John Arthur Getreu as the defendant was entered into the San Mateo County Court system on Friday. The item in the online court database didn’t say what charge he would be facing.
Similar murder
Getreu, 74, was arrested in November in connection to the 1973 murder of Stanford graduate Leslie Marie Perlov.
Police at the time of the Taylor murder said that it’s possible that the two homicides were committed by the same person, since both were killed by strangulation, neither victim was sexually molested and both were found barefoot and without their purses that they had been carrying when they were last seen.
Taylor had been last seen less than a mile from where Perlov’s body had been found.
Taylor had been visiting her friend on campus on March 24, 1974 and was last seen around 7 p.m. hitchhiking back to her La Honda home, the Stanford Daily reported at the time. After leaving her friend’s home on Gerona Road, she walked to Junipero Serra and Mayfield, where she was last seen around 7:06 p.m. and was picked up by 7:35 p.m.
Taylor had attended Canada College in Redwood City until January 1974 and was working at Oceanside Inc., a maritime information firm in Palo Alto. Her family resided in Atherton at the time.
In addition to closing the book in the Perlov and Taylor murders, a third homicide from that period was solved last year.
The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office determined last June that the Oct. 13, 1974 murder of Arlis Perry, 19, in the Stanford Memorial Church was committed by Steve Crawford, a night watchman at the church. When deputies went to the 72-year-old Crawford’s San Jose home to place him under arrest, he shot himself to death.
