Esther Gonzalez’s body was found in a snowpack off a highway near Banning, California, on Feb. 10, 1979, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office said.
She had been attacked and killed the previous day while she was walking from her parents' house in Beaumont to her sister’s house in Banning, the district attorney's office said.
The suspect was identified as Lewis Randolph "Randy" Williamson. He was found through forensic genealogy, the news release says. Williamson died in Florida in 2014.Authorities determined that Gonzalez had been raped and bludgeoned to death. Her body was found by an unidentified man, whom deputies at the time described as argumentative.
The man, later identified as Williamson, told the deputies that he did not know whether the body was male or female. Days after he made the call, Williamson was asked to take a polygraph test.
"He agreed and passed which, at the time, cleared him of any wrongdoing." the district attorney's office said.https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...ler-rcna181148Detectives continued to investigate the case for years and uploaded a semen sample taken from the crime scene into the Combined DNA Index System and were able to obtain a blood sample that had been collected during Williamson's autopsy and compared it to the DNA recovered from the 1979 crime scene.
The Justice Department "recently confirmed that Williamson’s DNA matches the DNA recovered from Esther’s body," the district attorney's office said.
Officials are seeking any information about Williamson, Gonzalez's case and "other potential victims," the news release says.
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