“DNA evidence and new technology is leading investigators to answers in cold cases that have gone unsolved, in this case, for 45 years! Thank you to criminalists at California DOJ who work to evaluate evidence and provide answers for law enforcement.”
CSLEA President Alan Barcelona
RIVERSIDE COUNTY –On November 20, 2024, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office announced the identity of a man it concludes raped and killed a 17-year-old girl 45 years ago.
On February 9, 1979, Esther Gonzalez was attacked and murdered while walking from her parents’ house in Beaumont to her sister’s house in Banning. Her body was found the next day dumped in a snowpack off Highway 243 near Banning. Authorities determined she had been raped and bludgeoned to death.
Gonzalez’s body was found after an unidentified man, described by deputies as argumentative, called the Riverside County Sheriff’s Station in Banning to report finding a body, saying he didn’t know if it was a male or female. Five days later, sheriff’s investigators were able to identify the caller as Lewis Randolph “Randy” Williamson and asked him to take a polygraph. He agreed and passed which, at the time, cleared him of any wrongdoing.
Investigators continued to work on the case for years and eventually uploaded a semen sample from the crime scene into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). In 2023, members of the cold case homicide team sent various items of evidence to Othram, Inc. in Texas, initiating a Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy investigation, in hopes of developing additional leads. Earlier this year, a crime analyst assigned to the cold case team determined that, although Williamson was seemingly cleared by the polygraph in 1979, he was never cleared through DNA because the technology had not yet been developed.
Williamson died in Florida in 2014. A blood sample was collected during his autopsy and with the assistance of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, the sample was sent to the California Department of Justice (DOJ). DOJ recently confirmed that Williamson’s DNA matched the DNA recovered from Gonzalez’s body.
