Recording grades on the last day of the school year nearly 50 years ago, a Bay Area high school teacher was stabbed in the chest by a man police wouldn’t be able to find for decades.
Diane Peterson, a 26-year-old English teacher at Branham High School in San Jose, had just been told she would be laid off because of dwindling enrollment in the school, newspapers reported in 1978.
But she was stabbed in the chest before the day’s end. Bleeding profusely from the wound, she ran screaming across the campus for 70 yards before collapsing. Her colleagues tried to stop the flow of blood, but she died at a local hospital…