Esther Gonzalez, 17, was attacked and killed while walking from her parents’ house to her sister’s house, officials in California said.
A man who passed a lie detector test in 1979 clearing him in the rape and murder of a 17-year-old girl was identified as her suspected killer, authorities announced Wednesday.
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 in a news release. 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, the district attorney’s office said. 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, according to the news release. 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.
Detectives continued to investigate the case for years and uploaded a semen sample taken from the crime scene into the Combined DNA Index System.
“In 2023, members of the cold case homicide team sent various items of evidence to Othram, Inc. in Texas, initiating a Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy investigation, in hopes of developing additional leads,” the district attorney’s office said. “Earlier this year, a crime analyst assigned to the cold case team determined that, although Williamson was seemingly cleared by the polygraph in 1979, he was never cleared through DNA because the technology had not yet been developed.”
Authorities 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.
