On March 7, 1981, police entered an apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and found the body of a 23-year-old woman named Keryn Barnes. She had been beaten over the head with a blunt object and stabbed 13 times around the face, neck, and mouth. Her skull was crushed. Someone had wrapped her in a blanket and concealed her in the basement. When investigators moved through the rest of the apartment, they found the walls covered in strange religious symbols. One word had been written across them, over and over: Suzan.
The name led nowhere at first. Police traced it to a couple who had been living with Keryn, a man and a woman operating under the surname “Bear.” Those names did not exist in any database. The couple was gone. The investigation stalled. It would be almost two years, three bodies, and one catastrophic police error before Suzan and Michael Bear Carson were finally arrested. By then, investigators suspected they had killed not three people but closer to a dozen, across California, Oregon, and Europe.
Two lost people found each other
James Clifford Carson (Michael Bear Carson) was born in 1950 in Oklahoma. He spent his twenties in Phoenix, Arizona, raising a daughter named Jenn with his first wife while dealing marijuana on the side. By Jenn’s account, he was gentle and attentive in those years, a man with a growing interest in radical religious philosophy that had not yet curdled into anything dangerous.
By 1977, it had. His behavior turned volatile and erratic. His wife took Jenn and left. Alone and already losing his grip on reality, Carson went to a party and met a woman named Susan Barnes. She was almost a decade older, recently divorced, and by her own reckoning, a prophet.
She told him he was no longer James. God, she said, had given him a new name: Michael, after the archangel who fought the devil in the Christian Bible. He accepted it without question.
Susan Barnes (Suzan Bear Carson) had spent the 1960s as a wealthy suburban housewife in Scottsdale, Arizona, before her marriage collapsed under the weight of drug use, infidelity, and deepening mental illness. She had been taking LSD, mescaline, and peyote for years and had convinced herself that the hallucinations she was experiencing were not symptoms but divine visions. She changed the spelling of her name to Suzan to mark the transformation. She was not mentally ill, she decided. She was a prophet, waiting for a disciple who would execute her commands without question.
James Carson was exactly that. The two married quickly, spent what remained of Suzan’s savings on hallucinogenic drugs, and traveled through Europe preaching their emerging theology. They held a marriage ceremony by moonlight at Stonehenge. Back in the United States in 1980, broke and still delusional, they settled in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, where they described themselves to anyone who would listen as “vegetarian Muslim warriors” on a holy mission.
Their doctrine had two pillars. The world, Suzan had determined, was secretly controlled by witches. She had the power to identify them through visions delivered directly from God. Michael had the sacred duty to kill whoever she named. In Haight-Ashbury, searching for recruits, they crossed paths with a young actress from Georgia named Keryn Barnes at a party. She found them fascinating. She invited them to move in with her.
Keryn Barnes died first
Keryn Barnes was 23 years old, an aspiring actress who had moved from Georgia to California in search of a career in film. She had settled in Haight-Ashbury, open-minded and trusting, drawn to the neighborhood’s eclectic counterculture scene. The Carsons were strange, but strangeness was abundant in Haight-Ashbury.
She did not understand what they believed.
When Michael expressed attraction to the young actress, Suzan’s jealousy filtered through her belief system and arrived at its formal verdict. But jealousy alone was not sufficient justification, not even in their theology. Suzan issued her official diagnosis: Keryn was, she later told police, a “psychic vampire witch” who was “draining Miss Carson of her health and yogic powers.” Keryn had also declined to enter into a polyamorous relationship with the couple. In Suzan’s theology, rejection and spiritual threat were indistinguishable.
On the night of March 6, 1981, Michael followed Keryn into the kitchen as she was preparing herself something to eat. He beat her over the head repeatedly with a cast iron frying pan. When she was still moving, he stabbed her 13 times around the face, neck, and mouth. Suzan wrapped the body in a blanket and concealed it in the basement. Before leaving, they covered the apartment walls in religious symbols and wrote Suzan’s name across them repeatedly.
Keryn’s body was discovered the following morning. Police identified the Carsons as suspects within days, but the names “Michael Bear” and “Suzan Bear” produced nothing in any database. The couple had already fled north. They hid for over a year near Grants Pass, Oregon, moving between residences, never staying long enough to be found. In the spring of 1982, they moved south to a marijuana farm near Alderpoint, California, deep in the hills of Humboldt County.
Clark Stephens was killed
The marijuana farm outside Alderpoint was remote and largely lawless. Suzan cultivated the crop. Michael worked security. Among the other workers, they were known as anarchists who predicted a coming nuclear apocalypse. No one on the farm knew what they had already done.
In the spring of 1982, a man named Clark Stephens joined the workforce. He was an outspoken surfer from Southern California, direct and physically confident, not inclined toward deference. An argument broke out over how to properly trim marijuana plants. Stephens pushed back against Suzan’s authority. In the Carsons’ religion, disrespecting the prophet was sufficient grounds for a death sentence. Suzan later told investigators that Stephens had sexually assaulted her. Whether or not she believed it herself, the accusation served its function: it made him a witch.
On April 24, 1982, Michael shot Clark Stephens in the head. He and Suzan then poured gasoline over the body, set it on fire, and buried what remained beneath a pile of chicken manure in a shallow grave in the woods near the farm. Two weeks later, Stephens was reported missing to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. His burnt remains were discovered.
The Carsons had already fled, abandoning their belongings. Searching what they left behind, detectives found a handwritten manifesto calling for nuclear war, targeted assassinations, and the killing of named public figures. At the bottom of a kill list consisting mostly of celebrities and politicians sat two names: Ronald Reagan and Johnny Carson. The Secret Service was immediately brought in.
But the Carsons were still invisible. In November 1982, an acquaintance spotted Michael hitchhiking in Los Angeles and called police, knowing he was wanted for murder in Humboldt County. Officers picked him up. Through a catastrophic error, the Los Angeles police had no record of the Humboldt County murder warrant and freed him before the right detectives arrived. Michael walked away, leaving behind a mugshot, address information, and a gun he had hidden in the back of the police car.
Two months later, he killed again.
Jon Hellyar was murdered
Jon Charles Hellyar had grown up in Lakeside, in San Diego County. He was 30 years old in January 1983, heading north toward Santa Rosa, when he pulled over near Bakersfield to offer two hitchhikers a ride. Three people in a bench seat meant bodies pressed together. Suzan’s leg brushed against Jon’s as he drove. She announced that she had received a vision. Jon Hellyar was a witch. He had to die.
Suzan’s stated justification, offered later to investigators, was that Jon had allegedly called her a witch and sexually abused her during the ride. The accusation arrived with the same absolute conviction she applied to every verdict she issued.
Michael drew his gun. Jon grabbed for it. The two men wrestled over the pistol for more than ten minutes on River Road in Sonoma County, in full view of passing motorists. A witness at a roadside stand had already called the police. Then Suzan produced a knife and began stabbing Jon from behind. Bleeding and losing strength, he let go of the gun. Michael shot him twice in the head.
The Carsons climbed back into Hellyar’s truck and drove. A high-speed chase ended when they crashed into a ditch. They ran on foot toward a nearby river. Officers tracked them there and arrested them both that same day, January 12, 1983.
Jon Hellyar was 30 years old. He had stopped for strangers on the side of a highway because that was the kind of person he was. He was dead within minutes of making room for them in his cab.
The trial and what remained
Detective Frank Falzon had already connected the Carsons to the deaths of Keryn Barnes and Clark Stephens. But before the case went to trial, Michael and Suzan made a demand: a nationally televised press conference. In exchange for camera time, they would confess to all three murders.
They performed for hours. They called Ronald Reagan a witch. They called Johnny Carson a witch. They ranted about nuclear war, George Orwell, and the coming apocalypse. Suzan stood before the cameras and demanded of the assembled press, “What is my crime? To be beautiful, to be an artist?” Michael explained, with evident satisfaction, that Suzan had the divine power to identify witches and that he had the sacred duty to destroy them.
Then, before the trial began, they recanted every word. Both entered pleas of not guilty.
The coroner’s photographs of Keryn Barnes’s face told the jury everything the Carsons would not.
The Carsons were tried separately for each murder. On June 12, 1984, they were convicted first of Keryn Barnes’s murder and sentenced to 25 years each. Separate convictions for the murders of Clark Stephens and Jon Charles Hellyar followed, adding 50 years to life and then 75 years to life on top of those sentences. The press had already named them the “San Francisco Witch Killers.” Neither objected to the title.
The three confirmed murders were almost certainly not all of them. According to journalist Richard D. Reynolds, who investigated the case and wrote a book about it, the Carsons were suspects in nearly a dozen other deaths across the United States and Europe during the years they spent drifting between cities, preaching their theology, and living off the grid. The full count has never been established. As Michael’s daughter Jenn said following his parole hearing: “We may never know how many people were killed by my father or where they are buried.”
As of 2025, following multiple parole denials, both Michael and Suzan Carson remain incarcerated. Michael at Mule Creek State Prison. Suzan at the Central California Women’s Facility. Neither has expressed remorse. Neither has abandoned the beliefs that produced three confirmed murders and, by most accounts, a great many more.
Keryn Barnes was 23 years old. She had left Georgia for California because she believed in what she might become. She opened her door to strangers. She said no to something that felt wrong. She was stabbed 13 times in her own kitchen, and her name was nearly erased from the story entirely when the people who killed her disappeared into the woods under someone else’s names. She deserves to be remembered.
