Jeannette Ralston was in the Lion’s bar in San Jose, California, when she told her friends that she would be ‘back in 10 minutes’.
She never returned.
The next morning, on February 1, 1977, police officers found the 24-year-old woman strangled with the long sleeve of a shirt with red women and in the backseat of her Volkswagen Beetle in a parking lot a few minutes away from the bar.
Almost 50 years later, the authorities believe that they know who strangled her.
Willie Eugene Sims, 69, from Jefferson, Ohio, was forth on Friday for accusation of murder in San Jose, California, and held without bail, after his extradition from Ohio.
He did not introduce a plea and his next judicial date was set for August. It was unclear whether Mr. Sims had a lawyer.
The investigation into the killing of Mrs. Ralston, a mother and resident of San Mateo, California, became cold after initially no credible leads had been developed.
The police found a box of Eve cigarettes, a popular brand for women in the 1970s and the shirt with which she was strangled. They had also pulled a sketch of a non -misered man that her friends saw her leave the bar with the evening before she was found.
“This was really an old -fashioned solution in many ways,” said Rob Baker, a deputy public prosecutor who leads the cold case of the Santa Clara County District Attorney Office. “This case was resolved by the original researchers in 1977 when they cancel that print.”
Although the original researchers had collected many fingerprints in the case, none of them corresponded to those in the FBIs fingerprint database, despite different attempts.
“We never give up,” Mr Baker said in an interview on Saturday.
“Last year we threw an orphan greeting by carrying out all the prints from the crime scene via the FBI database one last time,” he said. “The big break happened last summer when the examiners of the San Jose Police print told us that we had a competition that led our researchers to a small city in Ohio six months later.”
He said the difference this time was the upgrade of the FBI of his fingerprint search algorithm, which took place in 2018.
The police in San Jose identified Mr. Sims on the cigarette cardboard. In 1977 he was assigned a 21-year private of the army to Fort Ord, about 70 miles away from San Jose in Monterey County, California, the basis was closed in 1994.
Mr Sims was convicted of assaulting to commit murder and theft with the help of a knife in Monterey County, a year after murder of Mrs. Ralston. He spent four years in the state prison, Mr Baker said.
He did not have a criminal record then and he moved from California before his DNA could be entered in Codis, the federal DNA database managed by the FBI
Armed with a search order, researchers went to Ohio for the DNA of Mr. Collecting Sims and used DNA to match on the fingernails of Mrs. Ralston and the long sleeve that was used to kill her.
In addition, the old sketch of the person sought in the murder of Mrs. Ralston “showed a striking similarity” with the booking photo of Mr. Sims in his attempted murder and theft of 1977 said researchers.
Mr. Baker said that the Sheriff’s Office of Ashtabula County and the province in Ohio “were indispensable partners to get justice for Jeanette.”
The only child of Mrs. Ralston, all Ralston, was six at the time of her death.
He said in an interview on Saturday that he did not know that the authorities were still working on his mother’s case. He said that in May 2024, for his birthday, his father had given him pictures of his mother that he had never seen before, including a photo of her on the phone.
Mr. Ralston said that months later a detective called to tell him that they were close to making an arrest.
“How do you thank someone for something like that?” he said. “Many of these people, such as the first investigators who were on site, who gathered the evidence, died.”
It is not the oldest of the more than 30 cold cases that Mr Baker’s unit, which was founded in 2011, has resolved. One dates from 1969.
Mr. Baker said that the day Mr. Sims was arrested emotional for the Santa Clara County District Attorney, Jeff Rosen, and for the entire cold case unit.
Mr. Ralston said he had no words to describe his gratitude.
“I mean what a great Mother’s Day gift and birthday present rolled in one,” he said, just a few days away from his 55th birthday. “You know, I have never understood my entire life what Mother’s Day even means.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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