2 Teenagers Were Murdered on Torrey Pines Beach 6 Years Apart

Located between La Jolla and Del Mar in California, Torrey Pines State Beach serves as a picturesque destination for surfers and swimmers and has been named one of San Diego’s best beaches multiple times. But the sandy shores of Torrey Pines have brought out the worst of humanity on more than one occasion.

In 1978 and 1984, two teenage girls, 15-year-old Barbara Nantais in 1978 and 14-year-old Claire Hough in 1984, respectively, were found dead on Torrey Pines State Beach. Both had been beaten, strangled, sustained injuries consistent with sexual assault, had a mutilated breast and had wet sand packed in their mouths, according to The San Diego Tribune. Police didn’t immediately link the crimes in public, but eventually suspected they were committed by the same perpetrator. However, that changed over the years, and today, authorities believe the similar crimes are not connected.

In Nantais’s case, she was not on the beach alone. Her boyfriend, 17-year-old James Alt, had been with her. The couple and two of their friends had gone to the beach the night before, and while the friends spent the night in the group’s station wagon, Alt and Nantais had brought their sleeping bags down to the sand.

Alt told a CBS reporter that the last thing he remembers about that night was zipping their sleeping bags together, and Nantais falling asleep in his arms. When Alt awoke on the morning of August 13, 1978, he was disoriented, his eyes swollen shut, his head covered in blood. He had no recollection of it, but he had been severely beaten with a log from a fire pit and a jagged rock later found nearby. Alt managed to crawl his way to his friends in the car and told them, “Go find Barb.” His friend Rick Selga raced down to the beach, discovering Nantais dead.

“This happened when she was asleep in my arms—where she should have been safe and sound,” Alt tells A&E Crime + Investigation. He recalled falling for Nantais immediately upon meeting her and taking solace in the happy, close-knit family in the Nantais home. “She took my breath away, just the most beautiful girl I had ever seen,” he said.

After police were called to the scene at the beach, Alt was rushed to the hospital. A titanium plate was put in his skull, his nose had to be completely reconstructed and physicians put him in a medically induced coma to heal. Upon waking up from his coma, Alt claims he was “revictimized” by the police, who interrogated him after giving him sodium pentanol. “They doped me up,” he alleges. “And they hypnotized me. I think it was for about four hours, they asked me why I killed Barbara and who killed Barbara? Did I know?”

Ultimately, suspicion on Alt lifted; his injuries were simply too severe for him to have committed the crime, according to his doctors. Many years later, Alt was told he’d get to listen to his interrogation tapes, but that offer was rescinded after he wrote something critical about the police department on social media, Alt claims.

Alt and Nantais’s case went cold—and then came Hough’s murder in August 1984.

Hough, a poetry-loving Kiss fan from Rhode Island, had been staying with her grandparents in Del Mar Heights, Calif. On the night she was killed on August 24, 1984, she’d snuck out of her bedroom window, heading down to Torrey Pines Beach, a popular hangout, with her boom box, according to The Atlantic. She was found the next morning by a beachcomber, Wallace Wheeler, then 61.

Wheeler’s persistent interest in the case was unnerving for Hough’s parents; he insisted he was psychic and wrote them long letters about being visited by Hough’s spirit, saying they had an intimate relationship. The San Diego Police Department suspected he was Hough’s killer, but there wasn’t DNA evidence or a confession. In 1988, after a long battle with mental health issues, Wheeler died by suicide at his apartment building.

Hough’s case went cold.

Then in 2012, the physical evidence was revisited. A DNA match was made between blood stains on Hough’s clothing to Ronald Tatro, a convicted rapist and suspect in another murder, who had died in what was ruled a boating accident in 2011, the 27th anniversary of Hough’s death. (There was some suspicion that Tatro had died by suicide, The Atlantic reports.)

But there was more DNA evidence, a second hit: a small sample of semen was found and linked to a lab technician who had worked in the San Diego Police Department at the time of Hough’s death. That since-retired lab tech, Kevin Brown, argued that it had to have been caused by a cross-contamination error, noting that it was the lab’s practice in the 1980s to have technicians provide samples of their own fluids to be used as scientific controls in testing, something colleagues confirmed.

The cold case detectives pursued Brown anyway, searching for a link between him and Tatro. The weight of the suspicion that he’d been involved in Hough’s murder led Brown to die by suicide in 2014, according to his wife Rebecca.

After his death, cops released a statement listing him as a suspect along with Tatro. Supreme Court records show that Rebecca accused the lead detective Michael Lambert of misrepresenting his evidence in order to get a search warrant for their home and for the wrongful death of her husband. As Brown’s estate, Rebecca sued the San Diego Police Department and was awarded $6 million for police misconduct.

Alt also believes in Brown’s innocence. “I don’t think Kevin was a murderer,” Alt says. He would like a deeper investigation into alternative suspects and Tatro, who he believes killed Hough, but who authorities say could not have been the perpetrator in Alt and Nantais’s case because he was in jail at the time of their attack.

Since surviving that night in 1978, Alt says he has “severe, complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, along with a high anxiety and depression.” He has become an advocate for other survivors and affected families, starting a Facebook group called Surviving Victims of Violent Crimes.

“When I first put this group together, I was so selfish,” he tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “I put it together for me. Then a year or two later, I was getting [direct] messages and phone calls from people thanking me for making it.” He’s also worked with a filmmaker on a short documentary on the still-open cases.

For years, Alt was joined by Nantais’s sister Lorraine at meetings with the police to review the status of Nantais and Alt’s case. “Lorraine was my rock,” Alt says. But they haven’t met with the police since 2018. He would like the FBI to take on the case now  as a dark cloud remains over Torrey Pines Beach. During a human trafficking incident in May 2025, four people, including two children, drowned off its shores.