USA – After 45 years, authorities in California were finally able to tell the Gonzalez family who they believe killed their loved one. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office used DNA and forensic genealogy to identify the suspected killer, who turned out to be the same man who reported finding Esther Gonzalez’s body to authorities.

On February 9, 1979, 17-year-old Gonzalez was walking to her sister’s house in Banning, California, about 85 miles east of Los Angeles. She never made it home. The next day, her body was found in a snowpack off a highway near Banning, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office said in a news release. She was attacked during her walk, raped and bludgeoned to death, authorities said.

Deputies described the unidentified man who found the body as “argumentative,” according to the news release. The man, later identified as Lewis Randolph “Randy” Williamson, called the county sheriff to report the body and said he didn’t know whether it was a man or woman. Williamson was later asked by sheriff’s investigators to take a polygraph test. The district attorney’s office said he agreed to the test and passed, which “at the time, cleared him of any wrongdoing,” according to the release.

Nearly five decades later, the district attorney’s office said a cold case homicide team used forensic genealogy to confirm Williamson is Gonzalez’s suspected killer. Forensic genealogy is surging across the country as investigators analyze DNA in addition to traditional genealogy research to generate leads for unsolved cases. Jason Corey, the master investigator for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, said the technique is a tremendous addition to an investigator’s toolbox.

“I think it will be a great investigative tool moving forward in the future,” Corey said. “It will help do a lot of good and not only identify victims, but it will help point the investigators in a direction with their investigative leads that will help bring those suspects to justice.” Even as the Gonzalez case went cold, Riverside County detectives kept searching. The homicide team continued to investigate the case for decades after Gonzalez’s death. The team uploaded a semen sample from the crime scene into the Combined DNA Index System but there weren’t any leads.

In 2023, detectives sent various items of evidence to a genetic lab in Texas that specializes in forensic genealogy and identifying victims in unsolved murders. Earlier this year, a crime analyst laid out all the facts of the case. Then, the light bulb went off. “Although Williamson was seemingly cleared by the polygraph in 1979, he was never cleared through DNA because the technology had not yet been developed,” the district attorney’s office said. (CNN) …[+]