Familial DNA was used to solve a case that had gone cold for over 40 years in Sonoma County, the case of the 1982 murder of 13-year-old Sarah Geer in Cloverdale.
Sarah Ann Geer was killed May 23, 1982. 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…