DNA tests show that the man who found the girl’s body in 1979 was actually her killer

Lewis Randy Williamson found the girl’s body on Highway 243.

Esther Gonzalez, 17 at the time, had been raped, killed and dumped on a snowbank on the side of the highway. Williamson called the Riverside County sheriff on February 9, 1979, and reported his discovery. Investigators noted at the time that he was having an argument. Five days later, he sat down for an interview with law enforcement officials, who cleared him of any possible wrongdoing in the case after passing a polygraph test.

For the next 35 years, Williamson, who served in the US Navy, lived a normal life and eventually moved to Florida, where he died in 2014.

After authorities solved the case recently using the newly discovered technique of forensic DNA, they were able to match the DNA from a sperm left at the crime scene to a sample of Williamson’s blood taken during his autopsy. Williamson was Gonzalez’s rapist and killer, the Riverside County district attorney’s office said.

Investigative genealogy is a tool by which modern investigators build family trees using crime scene DNA entered into a database. Family trees allow them to find potential suspects they can investigate using traditional methods, such as finding old arrest records.

When the Riverside County district attorney’s office entered the DNA from Gonzalez’s cold case into the database, they found a woman who could be a relative of the unknown killer.

The woman died in Beaumont and a newspaper article listed her son as her executor. His name was Lewis Randy Williamson.

Authorities identified the woman’s son as the same man who reported finding Gonzalez’s body in 1979.

The detective who connected the woman to Williamson “called me right away and said, ‘Hey, you might be a person of interest,'” said Jason Corey, an investigator with the Riverside County DA’s office.

The polygraph report could easily be ignored. It was one piece of paper among dozens of pieces of evidence in the nearly 50-year-old case.

While investigators found past assault allegations against Williamson, he does not appear to have a history of violent crime, Corey said. And his DNA in the national DNA system called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, has never been matched to any other rape or murder.

In the end, Corey is happy that the Gonzalez family finally knows who killed Esther as she walks from her parents’ home in Beaumont to her sister’s in Banning.

“This killing still haunts them,” Corey said. But we didn’t forget Esther all these years.