Solved cold cases in California
4 documented cases.
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.
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.