What happened to Dolores Wulff? New podcast follows the story of a decades-long Woodland mystery

In 1979, Dolores Wulff disappeared from her home in Yolo County, kicking off a decades-long mystery.

Questions circled around the fate of the Woodland mother and wife for more than 40 years. Family members were convinced that her husband, Carl Wulff, was responsible for her disappearance, with some taking drastic steps to make their feelings towards him known.

The case remained cold for decades, with Dolores Wulff’s remains not being identified until October 2020. Her body had been found just weeks after her disappearance in Solano County, but had been labeled and buried as a Jane Doe.

 A pair of ESPN reporters, Kyle Bonagura and Adam Rittenberg, covered the story shortly after the news broke through the perspective of Dolores’s son Paul Wulff, now the head football coach at Cal Poly.

More recently, the duo has highlighted the mystery in a new podcast they co-host called “The Unforgotten Season 3: Finding Dolores Wulff,” which released its final episode this week.

Bonagura and Rittenberg spoke with Insight Host Vicki Gonzalez about the circumstances around Dolores Wulff’s disappearance and identification, and why it took her family decades to get a sense of closure.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview highlights

How did you two first learn about this story, and when did you decide to spin this off into a true crime podcast?

RITTENBERG: It was the fall of 2020, and we're trying to cover college football as best we could during the pandemic. I got a Facebook message from a friend of mine about this discovery of the remains of Dolores Wulff, who was the mother of Paul Wulff, a longtime college football coach who’s now the head coach at Cal Poly. 

Paul Wulff comments moments after being named Cal Poly's head football coach at a press conference in 2022.Owen Main/Cal Poly Athletics

I had always known that something really bad had happened in Paul's past. But I didn't know the full story - the involvement of his father and his mother's family, and what they did following her disappearance from Woodland in 1979. I reached out to Kyle and said,  “we got to work on this together.” We did a story for ESPN back in 2021, focused mainly on Paul and his experience through the lens of college football, but we realized there are so many more characters and so many more layers to how this happened. 

BONAGURA: Just the characters, the storytellers in this family, are all incredible. If people could just hear the way they tell the stories and share their experience, it would be so impactful. I said, “we need to get some equipment, we need to get some of these people on tape now.”  

It took some time after we published our ESPN piece to kind of move forward with it, but we always knew in the back of our head this was a project that should be told, deserved to be told, and we’re really happy that we were able to eventually cross the finish line.

When and how did Dolores go missing?

RITTENBERG: She went missing July 31, 1979, from her home in Woodland… really in a rural area about five miles outside of downtown. From the very beginning, everyone suspected her husband Carl because they'd had a number of problems in their marriage. She had moved out a few times, she always came back to live with him. 

He had openly threatened her in front of her family, but they never believed he would kind of go through with anything. He had a lot of problems with alcohol, and I think her relatives in hindsight attribute his threats and ramblings [as] sort of those of an alcoholic, rather than somebody who could follow through with something more sinister.

But essentially in the middle of the night she was last seen… and by the next morning she’s gone. And he, when asked, wouldn’t say that he did anything, but just said, "hey, she's gone and she's not coming back." And was saying that from the very start.

Did Carl ever admit to the crime? Was he ever charged or prosecuted?

BONAGURA: It was a very layered investigation. Immediately, Yolo County authorities believed that Carl was responsible, but without a body the DA at the time was unwilling to move forward with pressing charges. The way he told it to us was that without a body, there was enough reasonable doubt… or he wasn't confident that he would get a conviction.

That’s something that still upsets the family to this day. They all felt that there was enough at the time if he had pursued the case initially, if he was adamant about it and pursued prosecution, they would have been able to convict [Carl.] But he kind of sat on it, and it took six years. They did eventually end up filing charges, [Carl] did face a murder charge. But ultimately after almost a year's worth of evidentiary hearings in Yolo County, a judge from another county determined that the delay in charging him violated Carl's right to a speedy trial and [he] ultimately was set free. Really it wasn't about the evidence, it wasn't about his culpability, it was just a procedural deal that let him walk.

It impacted his relationship with everyone in his life. They did try to press him on it at times, but he went to his grave never having admitted any fault in her disappearance. 

A recent episode reveals how Dolores’s body was finally identified decades after her disappearance, just a county away in Solano County. How was she found, and why did it take so long?

RITTENBERG: That's probably the hardest part for her family, and for many who were involved in the initial investigation. There was a body that was discovered in the San Francisco Bay near Benicia about six weeks after the disappearance, in September 1979. It was labeled as a Jane Doe and essentially was buried in a nearby cemetery for decades. 

Dolores Wulff, shown around 1954 when she would have been 20 years old.Courtesy of Kyle Bonagura

And through the work of those in the internet detective community… especially a group called the Doe Network, which tries to match missing people with unidentified remains, and ultimately through the work of one of the detectives in Benicia, Kenny Hart, who really looked into this Jane Doe. He initially suspected that she was the wife of a serial killer and then eliminated those possibilities, and everything ultimately came back to Dolores. He was able to obtain DNA from Paul, and that’s how they were able to ultimately find this was a match.

Her family searched the fields around Woodland for years, and [a] local detective Ron Heilaman was so committed to this case, maybe more than any in his career. And the fact that she was just a county away and there wasn’t communication, I think was really hard for people.

I imagine that news provided a lot of relief, but it must have been heartbreaking as well. How does Dolores’s family reconcile getting this identification with knowing it could have happened decades earlier?

BONAGURA: That was the range of emotions they cycled through. There is a shock, it’s news that they never expected they would receive. And then there’s some relief. She’ll have a final resting place, we can have a proper burial for her. All of those things kind of provide positive feelings about the resolution.

And then for others, it quickly turned to anger… 48 days after she went missing, one county over, an hour’s drive away. For them to hear that this was a case that should have been solved four decades ago and it wasn’t, and it allowed Carl Wulff to live the rest of his life without facing real justice — at least through the legal system — that stung and took some processing.

I think as time has passed the members of the family who were a little bit more critical, more angry initially, when they found out the circumstances [they] have come to kind of accept [it.] Communication was different, the body was found without a head [or] arms attached. Being able to make the connection wasn’t a sure thing, no DNA technology at the time. There were some identifying characteristics that might have helped and Ron Heilaman, the original detective, was confident they would have been able to make the connection but conceded it wasn’t 100%. They have to process this from every angle, and ultimately I think they're just more appreciative than anything else [to] have closure in the end.

What is the status of Dolores's case today, is it still an active investigation?

RITTENBERG: Technically it’s an open case. Her husband passed in 2005 and there’s certainly an acknowledgement that he was always the only real, legitimate suspect in the case. But I think for her family, especially a few years removed from the identification… I think they are very much at peace with how this ended up, even though it’s still painful. Thinking back to that time, I just know it’s been challenging from some of her family members to listen to the recounting, and certain voices and viewpoints.

I know her children are all still alive, and they’ve come together maybe in ways they hadn’t before she was identified. There’s been these gatherings since the identification that have been really meaningful… but as far as the case itself, I don’t expect it to ever be solved.