A California man who passed a polygraph test and denied his involvement in a sadistic murder nearly fifty years ago has been identified as the suspected killer.
Esther Gonzalez, 17, was raped and beaten to death as she walked from her parents’ home in Beaumont to her sister’s home in Banning on February 9, 1979. The Riverside County District Attorney’s Office said.
Her body was found the next day “dumped in a pile of snow” along Highway 243 in Banning, after an unknown man called the Sheriff’s Department to report he had found a body.
Officers said he was “argumentative” and declined to say whether the victim was male or female.
After five days of investigation, police identified the caller as Randolph “Randy” Williamson, whom they asked to submit to a polygraph test.
“He agreed and approved it, which cleared him of any wrongdoing at that time,” the prosecutor’s office said.
Williamson, a U.S. Marine Corps vet, went on to live a normal life for the next 35 years, eventually moving to Florida, where he died in 2014.
But California detectives continued to work on the cold case, determining earlier this year that “although Williamson was apparently exonerated by polygraph in 1979, he was never exonerated by DNA because the technology had not yet been developed.”
Randolph “Randy” Williamson, who passed a polygraph test denying his involvement in the gruesome 1979 murder of 17-year-old Esther Gonzalez, has now been identified as her likely killer
Gonzalez was raped and beaten to death while walking from her parents’ home in Beaumont to her sister’s home in Banning on February 9, 1979.
The breakthrough came last year, when homicide detectives took several pieces of evidence to Othram, Inc. in Texas to conduct a forensic genealogy, which they hoped could lead them to the killer.
Among the DNA samples sent to the lab was a blood sample collected during Williamson’s autopsy after his death in 2014.
That turned out to match the semen sample collected from Gonzalez’s body and previously uploaded to the Combined DNA Index System, which catalogs DNA samples.
It is unclear whether Williamson knew Gonzalez or had a motive to kill her.
Police said they found some old assault allegations against Williamson, but he had no convictions for violent crimes and his DNA never matched any of her rapes or murders. reports the Los Angeles Times.
District Attorney’s Office officials are now seeking information about Williamson, Gonzalez and “other potential victims.”
But they say they are happy that after all these years they have found an answer for Gonzalez’s family.
“This murder still haunts them,” Jason Corey, an investigator with the District Attorney’s Office, told the LA Times. ‘But Esther has never been forgotten by us all these years;