A man who was cleared in the 1979 rape and murder of a teenage girl after passing a polygraph test has now been identified as her suspected killer due to DNA evidence, California authorities announced.
The body of Esther Gonzalez was found in a snowpack off a highway near Banning, California, on 10 February 1979. Gonzalez had been walking from her parents’ home to her sister’s house the previous night when she was attacked, raped and bludgeoned to death, according to authorities. She was 17 years old.
Authorities say her body was found by an unidentified man, whom deputies at the time described as being “argumentative”, according to a news release from the Riverside county district attorney’s office.
The man was later identified as Lewis Randolph “Randy” Williamson. He was asked to take a polygraph test days after making the call to investigators. He agreed and passed, which “at the time, cleared him of any wrongdoing”, according to the district attorney’s office news release.
However, tragically, the district attorney’s office is now confident that they have identified Gonzalez’s killer nearly five decades later. A cold case homicide team used forensic genealogy, the practice of analyzing genetic information for legal purposes, to confirm that Williamson is the suspected killer after all.
Even after the case went cold, the homicide team continued to investigate the case for decades, uploading a semen sample from the crime scene into their DNA Index System. But there still weren’t getting anywhere.
That was, until investigators realized that though Williamson had passed a polygraph in 1979, he had never been cleared through DNA testing because the technology didn’t exist yet.
Williamson died in Florida in 2014, so investigators couldn’t ask for a DNA sample. However, a blood sample had been taken during his autopsy.
Florida authorities agreed to send the blood sample to the California department of justice. From there, the cold case unit was at last able to confirm that Williamson’s DNA matched the DNA semen sample recovered from Gonzalez’s body.
Jason Corey, the master investigator for the Riverside county sheriff’s office, told CNN that the murder had been in Riverside county’s cold case unit since the unit’s launch about five years ago, and multiple investigators have worked to solve it.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like for them,” Corey said to CNN. “That whole family has just been devastated over the years. This is a day in and day in, day out thing. I don’t think this is something that ever got easier for them as time went on.”
“I don’t know if you can say you’re happy that it’s done, because it’s still, it’s still a terrible tragedy, but I hope it can bring them some closure,” Corey said.
Because of the advances in forensic genealogy, the Gonzalez family is able to have at least the peace of mind of knowing who killed Esther.
“The Gonzalez family would like to thank the Riverside County sheriff’s department on a job well done after 40 years the Gonzalez family has closure”, Esther’s oldest brother, Eddie, wrote on Facebook.
Authorities in Riverside county are asking that anyone who knew Williamson or may have information about Esther’s case or other potential victims, to please contact them.
