"She was reportedly walking home from a friend's house in quiet downtown Cloverdale when she was forcibly dragged down an alley to a secluded location where she was, according to the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office, "brutally raped" and "strangled ... to death using her own shorts as a ligature." The killer left behind plenty of DNA evidence, however that DNA was not tested until many years later, and the case went entirely cold."
"It was over 20 years go, in 2003, that a DNA profile was developed from semen found on Geer's clothing, however it was not a match to anyone in existing law enforcement databases. That all changed, as KRON4 reports, after a private investigator was hired by the Cloverdale Police Department in 2021, and with the help of the FBI, they employed the same technique used to find the Golden State Killer, the use of genetic genealogy."
"Prosecutors say that Geer's killer was determined to be one of four brothers, and investigators homed in on 66-year-old James Unick, a resident of Glenn County, California, who would have been 22 at the time of the murder, and who lived in Cloverdale at the time. After collecting a cigarette smoked by Unick and testing it for DNA, Unick came up as a complete match for the DNA found on Geer's clothing, and he was arrested in July 2024."
"Earlier this month, while on trial for the murder, Unick took the stand and admitted to having had sex with the 13-year-old, but said he did not kill her, as the Press Democrat reported. Unick told the jury that the girl had propositioned him for sex, and because he knew it was wrong, due to her age, he had kept it secret. "I did not strangle anybody," Unick said in court."
Sarah Ann Geer, 13, was killed May 23, 1982 in Cloverdale after being forcibly dragged into an alley, brutally raped, and strangled with her own shorts. Seminal DNA was left on her clothing but went untested for many years. A DNA profile was developed in 2003 but produced no matches in law enforcement databases. In 2021 a private investigator working with the Cloverdale Police and the FBI used genetic genealogy to identify a suspect cluster and investigators focused on James Unick. Cigarette DNA matched the evidence and Unick was arrested in July 2024. He admitted to sexual contact but denied the killing at trial.
Read at sfist.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]