Investigators in Riverside, Calif., have linked a man's DNA to a 1979 cold case murder of a teenage girl, years after the same man passed a lie detector test for that crime, authorities said. It was announced that the .
In 1979, the body of 17-year-old Esther Gonzalez was found dumped in the snow on the side of Highway 243 in Banning, California, and detectives discovered that the boy had been raped and bludgeoned to death. It was determined that it was.
Last week, the Riverside County District Attorney's Office announced in a press release that the case was solved after more than 45 years using forensic genealogy.
On November 20, the Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team identified the killer as Lewis Randolph “Randy” Williamson, who died in 2014.
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Gonzalez was attacked and killed on February 9, 1979, as he walked from his parents' home in Beaumont to his sister's home in Banning.
Her body was discovered a day after an unidentified man, whom Riverside County Sheriff's Office deputies described as “reasonable,” reported finding the body. The man, later identified as Williamson, said he did not know whether the victim was a man or a woman.
Detectives identified Williamson as the caller five days after he reported the body, and investigators asked him if he would take a polygraph test. Williamson agreed to and passed the test, at which point he was cleared of any wrongdoing.
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Pipette the sample into a vial for extracting DNA evidence in a forensic laboratory. (Andrew Brooks, via Getty Images)
After exhausting numerous leads in the case over several years, investigators finally submitted a semen sample from the crime scene to the Combined DNA Index System, also known as CODIS.
The county's Cold Case Homicide Team sent various pieces of evidence to Osram in 2023 to begin a forensic genetic genealogy investigation in hopes of developing further leads.
Earlier this year, the team came close to solving the case.
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Laboratory technicians conduct DNA tests on the remains. (Boris Horvat/AFP via Getty Images)
A crime analyst assigned to the team determined that although Williamson had been exonerated by a polygraph test in 1979, DNA testing could not have exonerated him because the technology had not yet been developed.
When Williamson died in Florida in 2014, a blood sample was taken during an autopsy. With assistance from the Broward County Sheriff's Office, samples were sent to the California Department of Justice.
It was eventually confirmed that Williamson's DNA matched the DNA recovered from Esther's body.
Williamson's DNA was a match, but the circumstances leading to Gonzalez's death are still under investigation.
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The Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team asks anyone who knows Williamson or has information about the case or other potential victims to contact 951-955-277 or coldcaseunit@rivcoda.gov I recommend it.
