Notorious Bakersfield

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His name probably isn’t familiar to you—and that’s what makes the story of Percy Douglas so intriguing. In Bakersfield’s Wild West days, he was feared, violent, and impossible to ignore… yet today he survives only as an obscure footnote in local history. 

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Long before Colonel Thomas Baker arrived in what we now call Bakersfield, a solitary hill rose from the valley floor near the site of today’s Mercy Hospital. For generations, that hill was home to a Yokuts village, a place chosen for both its visibility and its safety from the river’s floods. 

After the Native Americans left, some of Kern County’s earliest white pioneers settled on the same hill, unknowingly building their lives atop a much older history. 

Years later, when the hill was leveled to make way for railroad tracks, workers uncovered something unexpected—an unsettling mystery buried deep within the soil itself.

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Who knew there has been more than one murder on the Bakersfield College campus? 

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I'm took a couple of weeks off for the holidays. Enjoy this encore episode. 

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For years, Woody’s Toy Circus was a Bakersfield landmark—a place where childhood excitement filled the aisles and memories were made by the cartload. Built by a larger-than-life local personality, the store became more than a toy shop; it was a Bakersfield institution.  

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Today, finding out whether a convicted sex offender lives nearby takes just a few clicks — but decades ago, communities had no such warning system. Long before Megan’s Law made that information public, one small Kern County town was forced to confront a terrifying question: what happens when everyone knows a child predator is coming back, and there’s nothing the law seems able to do about it.

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