Riverside City College (RCC) is a community college in Riverside, California, where Cheri Josephine Bates was enrolled as a freshman. She was studying at the campus library on 1966-10-30 and was murdered on the college grounds that evening. Her body was found near Terracina Drive the next morning.
Six months after the murder, a custodian discovered a macabre poem scratched into the underside of a foldable desk in the RCC library — see Cheri Jo Bates desk poem. The Bates family later established the Cheri Jo Bates Memorial Endowed Scholarship at the college.