An Ohio’s man has been accused in the murder of a woman from California after the authorities linked him to digital footprints found in a cigarette in the victim’s Volkswagen Beetle, the authorities said.
The impressions belonged to Willie Eugene Sims, 69, and was discovered in the 24 -year -old Jeanette Ralston car, said the deputy prosecutor of the District of Santa Clara Clear, Rob Baker, in a press release, in a press release.
Ralston seemed to have been strangled and sexually assaulted when his body was found embedded in the VW rear seat on February 1, 1977, near a bar in San José, Baker said.
The DNA found on Ralston’s nails and in the alleged homicide weapon, a shirt used to strangle it, was later found to coincide with Sims, Baker said.
Sims is scheduled to be prosecuted on Thursday in San José for a murder charge, Baker said in an email. It was not clear immediately if you have a lawyer to speak in your name.
He faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years to life imprisonment.
Baker said researchers had previously tried to identify impressions through an FBI database. But those efforts had been useless, he said.
Then, last year, Baker said his office “launched a Hail Mary” and made the impressions again after the FBI updated the search algorithm in the digital fingerprint database. The effort was successful, he said, and produced a “success” for Sims, who lived in Ashtabula County, northeast of Cleveland.
Baker told the NBC Bay area that Ralston’s son, who was 6 when his mother was killed, told him that he was grateful for Sims’s arrest.
“His birthday approaches,” Baker said. “He said this was a great birthday gift.”
Ralston was found dead after his friends told the authorities that he left the bar with an unknown man just before midnight on January 31, 1977, Baker said. His VW was found the next day in the garage area of an apartment complex near the bar.
His murderer had tried to burn the vehicle, but failed, Baker said.
At that time, Sims was a private assigned to what was then an army base in Monterey County, south of San Francisco, Baker said.
In 1978, he was sentenced by assault with the intention of committing murder and robbery in a case of Monterey County, California, who involved another woman, according to judicial documents. Sims was sentenced to four years in prison.
Sims left California long before DNA became an essential forensic tool for the application of the law, Baker said, and although his impressions were in the FBI database, it was not until last August when Baker was notified of Sims’s identity.
“Forensic genealogy receives all the attention these days,” Baker said. “But a prosecutor retired from the San Diego case office told me years ago that he never underestimated the search for latent printing since the FBI updated the algorithm.”
Baker also said they trusted a powerful forensic tool known as Strmix to help develop DNA profiles from the evidence of the crime scene.
The tool uses statistical models to analyze small and complex mixtures of genetic material that would probably have been considered unusable a decade ago.
