Tom Wulff was away at basketball camp the night his mother, Dolores, vanished from the family’s rural Woodland home.
He recalls returning home a couple of days later and having a conversation with his father, Carl, and younger brother Paul, then 12.
“My father told us that she was gone and was never coming back,” said Tom Wulff, who was 16 at the time and had borne the brunt of Carl Wulff’s abuse in recent years. “I knew immediately that he had done something.”
Dolores, a Davis native and Woodland High School secretary known for her joyful, positive demeanor, would never have left her four children including a 21-year-old son, Carl Jr., and daughter Anna Marie, 19, according to her son.
“Her kids were everything,” Tom Wulff said. That night, he and Paul left to stay with their uncle Matthew Rocha in Davis, “and we never returned.”
For more than four decades, Dolores Wulff’s disappearance remained a mystery that haunted her family, the community and Yolo County Sheriff’s Office detectives who, despite the passage of time, never let the case go.
“I have memories of the department working it a lot,” said Yolo County Sheriff Tom Lopez, who became a rookie deputy not long after Dolores Wulff went missing from her Hillcrest home west of Woodland.
“Most of the family suspected Carl right away,” added Lopez, noting that investigators found a bloodied blanket in the trunk of the family car, but never located a body. Detectives regularly followed Wulff, “even with airplanes, just trying to figure out what his travels were, in case he tried going back to the scene.”
Carl Wulff was arrested and charged but never tried, his case ultimately dismissed due to lack of evidence. He died in 2005.
“Back in the day, unless you had a body, it was hard to get a conviction,” Lopez said, an obstacle that law enforcement would start to overcome more than two decades later with advancements in DNA science.
Dogged police work
Meanwhile, investigators at the Benicia Police Department had a mystery of their own.
On Sept. 17, 1979 — just six weeks after Dolores Wulff’s disappearance — sailboaters out for a leisurely cruise discovered a lower torso that had washed upon along the Carquinez Strait shoreline.
With no available fingerprints or dental work to use for comparison, the remains went unidentified, buried as a Jane Doe in a Solano County cemetery.
“We didn’t have the technology like we have today to link the cases together,” Lopez said. Law-enforcement agencies, then protective of their respective cases, also were less communicative with one another.
Fast-forward 41 years to this past July, when the Doe Network — a nonprofit organization of volunteers who work with police to match missing persons to John and Jane Doe cases — contacted the Solano County Coroner’s Office with a possible identity for the Benicia remains.
While the two turned out not to be a match, Benicia Detective Sgt. Kenneth Hart continued to work on the case, expanding the search to include women who went missing between Sacramento and San Francisco in 1979.
“While 11 results returned similar, one stood out: Dolores Wulff,” Benicia police said in a news release issued late last week.
In cooperation with the Yolo County Sheriff’s Office, including Deputy Coroner Laurel Weeks, whose caseload includes the county’s John and Jane Does, Hart obtained a DNA swab from Paul Wulff, now a football coach at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.
Back in Solano County, sheriff’s officials exhumed the unidentified remains and collected DNA from a femur bone. On Tuesday, Benicia police learned from the state Department of Justice DNA lab that the two genetic samples proved a match.
Investigation continues
At his home in Bozeman, Mont., where he operates an angus cattle ranch, Tom Wulff experienced mixed reactions to the news.
“I think my first emotion was anger, because of the fact that she was found a month and a half after she disappeared, and we’re only finding out now that it was her,” Wulff said in a phone interview Friday.
Eventually, anger gave way to gratitude — for finally having answers, and for being able to soon bury his mother’s remains alongside those of her beloved parents and brother.
“I think it will be a very good experience for our family and friends,” said Wulff, noting that he’s been flooded with messages from well-wishers in the past few days. “The amount of support we’ve had has been phenomenal.”
Wulff also acknowledged investigators’ consistent efforts over the years to determine what happened to his mother that summer night.
“It’s a blessing that they continue to work these cases,” he said. “We’re all grateful for everybody keeping the light on the story.”
Still, the case isn’t closed. Lopez said his department plans to hand over its evidence to the Department of Justice for further analysis, which he said could potentially point to other suspects in Dolores Wulff’s death.
“We’ll make a determination whether we’re going to pursue any other leads for let it lie where it is,” Lopez said. “It’s all about trying to get closure for the family, and prosecuting people. But closure is the primary thing, especially after all these years.”
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene