Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office has put an end to nearly half a century of mystery surrounding the brutal murder of Jeanette Ralston, a young Californian woman found dead in her car in San Jose in February 1977.
The case, considered for years one of the area’s great unsolved mysteries, has been solved thanks to a fingerprint forgotten for decades and cross-referencing data in an updated FBI database.
Willie Eugene Sims, a 69-year-old Ohio man, has been arrested and charged with murder. He has been held without bail since last Friday, when he was arraigned for the crime.
In 1977, Sims was a private in the U.S. Army stationed about 100 miles south of San Jose. A year after the crime, he was convicted of assault and robbery with a weapon in Monterey County.
A night interrupted forever
Ralston’s body was found on February 1, 1977, in the back seat of her Volkswagen Beetle, parked in a garage near the Lion’s Den bar, where she had last been seen. Her friends told police that she went out that night with an unknown man, saying she would be back in “ten minutes.”
She never returned. The body showed signs of sexual assault and had been strangled with a long-sleeved shirt. The vehicle also showed signs of a failed arson attempt.
During the initial investigation, officers recovered a pack of Eve cigarettes—popular with women in the 1970s—on which they found a fingerprint. However, the technology of the time made it impossible to identify the suspect, and the case remained closed for decades.
New techniques, old tests
The breakthrough came in the summer of 2023, when the county’s cold case unit decided to rerun the prints using the F.B.I. database, which had been updated with a new search algorithm in 2018.
“This was really an old-fashioned solution in many ways,” Rob Baker, an assistant district attorney, told The New York Times. “The big breakthrough came when the San Jose police fingerprint experts informed us that we had a match that led our investigators to a small town in Ohio six months later.”
Once they found a match to Sims, officers traveled to Ohio to collect a DNA sample. It matched traces found under Ralston’s fingernails and on the garment used to strangle her. Sims will be transferred to California, where he must face justice for a crime that has remained unsolved for nearly five decades.