Fifty years after a California mother was murdered a breakthrough in DNA has identified her killer – offering long-awaited closure to the daughter she never had the chance to raise.
In 1976, Karen Percifield, 25, traveled to Santa Cruz to visit family and a family dispute saw her storm out the house and to a nearby bar.
She was never seen alive again and police discovered her body days later in a ravine near Aptos Village Park, in Santa Cruz County, with two stab wounds to the chest.
At the time, investigators named Richard Sommerhalder, a then 29-year-old Sonoma County man, as a person of interest in the case – but couldn’t find enough evidence to charge him…