Solved cold cases in California
10 documented cases.
Diane Peterson
On June 16, 1978, the day after the school year ended, Diane Peterson, an English teacher at Branham High School in San Jose, California, was found on the floor near her classroom with a single stab wound to the chest while teachers were cleaning out their classrooms. A student had heard her calling for help and seen the attacker flee. Four days later police booked a 16-year-old, Harry "Nicky" Nickerson, on an unrelated matter. Prosecutors said his booking photo resembled a composite sketch made from eyewitness accounts; he denied killing her and denied owning a knife. In the years that followed a witness said he had confessed and carried a knife marked "Teacher Dear," a student's family said their son had seen the killing, and another witness said Nickerson had implicated himself, but none of it could be corroborated and he was never charged. He was later convicted of armed robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and kidnapping, and died by suicide in 1993. Extensive DNA work in 2023 and 2024 identified no one. In 2025 cold case detectives asked people close to Nickerson what he had said, and a relative told them he had come to their home minutes after the killing and confessed. On June 2, 2025, prosecutors and San Jose police named him as her killer, 47 years on. He could not be tried.
Jeanette Ralston
Jeanette Ralston, 24, of San Mateo, California, was last seen leaving the Lion's Den Bar in San Jose with an unknown man just before midnight on January 31, 1977. She told friends she would be back in ten minutes. The next day, February 1, her body was found wedged in the back seat of her Volkswagen Beetle in the carport area of an apartment complex near the bar. Prosecutors said she had been strangled with a long-sleeve dress shirt and that the evidence showed she had been sexually assaulted; someone had also tried and failed to set the car on fire. Police interviewed her friends and other witnesses and made a suspect sketch, but no suspect was identified and the case went cold for nearly half a century. Prosecutors said a latent fingerprint on a cigarette pack in her car could not at first be identified through an FBI database. After the FBI upgraded its fingerprint search algorithm, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's cold case prosecutors ran the prints again in 2024 and, in August, matched them to Willie Eugene Sims, who in 1977 was an Army private at Fort Ord. Investigators then collected his DNA in Ohio, and prosecutors said it matched DNA on Ralston's fingernails and on the shirt used to strangle her. Sims, 69, was charged with murder in May 2025. He is presumed innocent; as of the latest reports found, from May 2025, he had not entered a plea.
Kristin Smart
Kristin Smart, a 19-year-old Cal Poly freshman from Stockton, left an off-campus party in San Luis Obispo around 2 a.m. on May 25, 1996, so drunk that two students had to walk her toward campus. A classmate, Paul Flores, joined them, said he would get her home safely, and was the last person seen with her on Grand Avenue. Flores, who had a black eye, invoked the Fifth Amendment for decades, and Smart was declared legally dead in 2002. A 2016 dig on the campus hillside found nothing. In 2019 a podcast, Your Own Backyard, brought forward witnesses who had never been interviewed, and with them came new evidence: an order to intercept his communications, searches in 2020 that turned up date-rape drugs and videos, and in March 2021 an excavation beneath the deck of his father Ruben Flores's home in Arroyo Grande that found a casket-sized soil disturbance and human blood too degraded for DNA. Father and son were arrested on April 13, 2021. After a four-month trial in Salinas before two juries, Paul Flores was convicted of first-degree murder on October 18, 2022; Ruben was acquitted as an accessory. Paul Flores was sentenced to 25 years to life in March 2023; the conviction was affirmed in 2025 and the California Supreme Court declined review in January 2026. A May 2026 search of his mother's home ended without finding Kristin, who has never been recovered.
Linda O'Keefe
On July 6, 1973, 11-year-old Linda Ann O'Keefe was abducted while walking home from summer school at Lincoln Intermediate School in Corona del Mar, a neighborhood of Newport Beach, California, after she was last seen near a turquoise van. Her body was found the next morning in a ditch in the Back Bay area of Upper Newport Bay; she had been strangled. The case stayed cold for more than 45 years until investigative genetic genealogy by Parabon NanoLabs and genealogist CeCe Moore, working from DNA preserved on Linda's clothing, pointed investigators to James Alan Neal. Neal, then 72 and living in Colorado, was arrested in February 2019. He had used the name James Layton at the time of the crime. He died in custody in July 2020 before he could be tried.
Marshall Adams
Marshall Adams, a 74-year-old jeweler who had spent about 25 years as a schoolteacher before opening his own jewelry store in San Bernardino, California, was found beaten and stabbed to death on the floor of his store on December 2, 1999. His wallet and several pieces of display-case jewelry were missing. San Bernardino police, assisted by the Scientific Investigations Division of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, collected latent fingerprints, palmprints, and blood from a knife, the doors, and a store catalog; an identification technician also found a bloody palmprint on the victim's face. With no suspect in local files, the case went cold. In September 2001 the sheriff's department linked electronically to the FBI's national fingerprint database, IAFIS, through the California Department of Justice, and as a test of the new system it submitted a latent print recovered from the jewelry catalog at the Adams scene. IAFIS returned a list of candidates, and supervising fingerprint examiner James Nursall identified the print as belonging to Jad Salem, a man who had been arrested in Texas roughly two weeks after Adams was killed, which is how his prints had entered the national system. Confronted with the evidence, Salem pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 32 years in prison. The FBI later recognized the work with its 2013 Latent Hit of the Year Award.
Milton Curtis and Richard Phillips
In the early hours of July 22, 1957, El Segundo, California police officers Milton Curtis, 25, and Richard Phillips, 28, were shot to death during a routine traffic stop after pulling over a stolen 1949 Ford that had run a red light. The gunman had spent the previous hours robbing and terrorizing four teenagers at a Hawthorne lovers' lane and raping a teenage girl. He fled wounded, abandoned the stolen car, and vanished, leaving the double murder of two officers unsolved for 45 years. The case broke in September 2002 when latent thumbprints lifted from the stolen car's steering wheel in 1957 were searched through the FBI's national IAFIS database and matched a 1956 South Carolina burglary arrest card belonging to Gerald Fiten Mason, by then a prosperous retiree in Columbia, South Carolina. Mason pleaded guilty to both murders in 2003 and was sentenced to two consecutive life terms; he died in prison in 2017.
Priscilla Strole
Priscilla Lee Strole, 40, lived with her 15-year-old son on Buchanan Street in Fairfield, California, where she sold dinnerware to friends and neighbours. On the evening of August 31, 1983, her son went out with a friend; she asked him to be home before ten. He came back at about 9:45 p.m., got no answer at the door, looked through a window and saw his mother on the living-room floor. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death with objects from her own kitchen. The house had been ransacked, a jewelry box was gone, and there was no sign of forced entry, so police believed she had let her killer in. Fingerprints and semen were collected, but when the prints were run through the state's automated fingerprint system on September 27, 1983, nothing matched, and the case went cold. Fairfield cold-case detectives began reworking it in 2012. In January 2014 they sent the prints to the Solano County latent-print bureau, and on January 28 the prints matched Robert Hathaway, a Fairfield man of 48 who had been 17 in 1983, a school friend of the victim's son who had visited the house. His prints were on file only because of a burglary arrest in December 1986. Detectives served a court-ordered warrant for his DNA on February 11, 2014; he denied any involvement. Four days later he hanged himself at home, leaving a note to his wife that said he had taken the coward's way out. The state crime lab matched his DNA to the semen from the scene, and the case was officially closed on February 20, 2014. Police said he acted alone, and that the family would never know why.
Richard Finney
Richard Finney, 75, a retiree who lived alone in an apartment on East Mission Avenue in Escondido, California, was found stabbed to death on the morning of November 13, 1986. Money, jewelry and other items had been taken. Detectives collected knives, fingerprints and blood, including a bloody handprint on a wall, but could identify no suspect, and the case went cold. Escondido police cold-case investigators reopened it in 2007, when newer testing of the blood produced a DNA profile that matched no one in a national database. In 2016 an Escondido police fingerprint expert, Cassaundra Barnes, re-photographed a fingerprint from the apartment with newer equipment and submitted it for a match. Police said the higher-quality print and advances in fingerprint comparison databases led them to Nathan Eugene Mathis, a retired security guard from Ontario, California, who had lived in northern San Diego County at the time of the killing. Prosecutors said his prints, submitted with a security guard job application, matched prints left at the scene. He was arrested on April 18, 2018, at 62, and pleaded not guilty. On May 23, 2022, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, and on July 22, 2022, he was sentenced to 15 years to life. Police and prosecutors have not said why Finney was killed or whether the two men knew each other.
Sherri Rasmussen
Sherri Rae Rasmussen, a 29-year-old registered nurse and director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, was beaten and shot three times in the chest inside the Van Nuys condominium she shared with her new husband, John Ruetten, on February 24, 1986, just months after their wedding. The Los Angeles Police Department treated the killing as a botched burglary and the case went cold for more than two decades, even though Sherri's father, Nels Rasmussen, repeatedly told detectives that an LAPD officer named Stephanie Lazarus, a former girlfriend of Ruetten, had threatened and confronted his daughter. The case turned on a saliva swab taken from a bite mark on Sherri's arm and preserved since 1986. When that swab was tested years later it revealed female DNA, contradicting the male-burglar theory. In 2009 cold-case detectives covertly collected DNA from a cup and straw Lazarus discarded at a Costco in Simi Valley; it matched the bite-mark saliva. Lazarus, by then a veteran LAPD detective, was arrested on June 5, 2009, convicted of first-degree murder on March 8, 2012, and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison.
Susan Berman
Susan Berman, 55, a writer and the daughter of a Las Vegas mob figure, was found on Christmas Eve 2000 on the floor of her home in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles, shot once in the back of the head. Police had been sent there by an anonymous note, in block capitals and misaddressed to the "Beverley Hills" police, giving her address and the word "cadaver." Berman was a close friend of the New York real estate heir Robert Durst, had acted as his spokeswoman after his wife Kathie vanished in 1982, and had recently received $50,000 from him as New York investigators reopened the Kathie case and prepared to talk to her. Durst was a suspect but was never placed at the scene, and the case went cold for fourteen years. In 2015 the HBO series "The Jinx" showed a 1999 letter from Durst to Berman, found by her stepson, in the same block lettering with the same misspelling, and ended with Durst muttering into a live microphone that he had "killed them all." Los Angeles prosecutors reopened the case and Durst was arrested in New Orleans on March 14, 2015. A longtime friend of both testified that Durst had told him over dinner in 2014, "It was her or me. I had no choice." At trial Durst admitted writing the note. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder on September 17, 2021; he was sentenced to life without parole, charged in New York with Kathie's murder weeks later, and died in custody on January 10, 2022. Because his appeal was pending, the conviction was abated.