California 1979 Cold Case EXPOSED by the Man Who Found Her

On February 10, 1979, a man called the Riverside County Sheriff’s Station in Banning, California, to report a body located off Highway 243 in the San Jacinto Mountains. He stated that he did not know if the deceased was a man or a woman. Deputies were dispatched to the highway, and in the packed snow south of Poppet Flats Road, they discovered a 17-year-old girl who had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death. The evidence collected from the scene remained in storage for 45 years before it could be matched to a name. The victim was Esther Gonzalez, the youngest of the Gonzalez siblings, who resided with her parents in Beaumont, California. Beaumont and Banning are adjacent towns in the San Gorgonio Pass, located approximately 85 miles east of Los Angeles. The pass serves as a narrow corridor of land situated between the San Bernardino Mountains to the north and the San Jacinto Mountains to the south. In 1979, the stretch of land between the two towns was still partially rural, featuring open land, citrus groves, and long segments of road where one could walk for some time without encountering anyone. The combined population of both towns was less than 20,000 people.

Esther’s older sister, Elizabeth, known as Liz, lived in Banning. They were a year apart in age and had grown up very close, sharing clothes, friends, and moving through their childhoods at the same pace. Their older brother, Eddie, was also part of this tight-knit community and attended the local high school, where he was familiar with most of the area’s youth by name. On February 9, 1979, Esther left her parents’ house in Beaumont and began walking toward Liz’s house in Banning. The distance between the two towns was short enough that walking on a clear February day was something a teenager would do without hesitation. The route followed roads she had traveled before, passing through neighborhoods and open land that she recognized. She never reached her sister’s house. Somewhere along the way, a man intercepted her, forced her off the road into the area near Highway 243, which runs south from Banning into the San Jacinto Mountains toward a town called Idyllwild. He sexually assaulted her and beat her to death, then left her body in the packed snow on the shoulder of the highway south of Poppet Flats Road before driving away.

February in the San Gorgonio Pass brings cold weather from the mountains. The pass sits at an elevation of about 2,600 feet, while the surrounding peaks rise to nearly 10,000 feet. Snow collects in drifts along the shoulders of the mountain roads during the winter. He left her in one of these drifts—not buried or hidden, just abandoned on the shoulder of a highway climbing into the mountains. Deputies drove to the location provided by the caller and found Esther, who was partially clothed and lying in the snow. The scene showed clear evidence of sexual assault and blunt force trauma. Investigators from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office processed the area, collecting biological evidence, including a semen sample. They documented everything found along the roadside and the surrounding vicinity, photographing the scene, the position of the body, and the tire tracks and footprints visible in the snow.

In 1979, there was no method to cross-reference this evidence against a database. DNA testing had not yet been invented, and the national databases used to match crime scene evidence to offenders were nearly two decades away. However, the investigators preserved what they found, sealing it into evidence storage at the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, and proceeded with the case using the tools available to them. They canvassed the area around the highway and the road between Beaumont and Banning, interviewing people who might have seen Esther walking or noticed an unfamiliar vehicle. They knocked on doors along her likely route and questioned residents living near the highway turnoff. They checked gas stations, stores, and businesses, asking if anyone had seen a teenage girl walking alone on the afternoon of February 9. They checked criminal records for anyone with a history of violence against women in the Riverside County area and conducted background checks on names gathered from tips and interviews. They contacted the California Department of Justice to check for similar attacks elsewhere in the state and reviewed unsolved cases from neighboring counties to see if Esther’s murder fit a pattern. Nothing connected. No witnesses came forward, and no one reported seeing Esther after she left her parents’ house. The stretch of road between Beaumont and Banning was quiet enough in February that a man could pull over, force someone into a vehicle, and drive away without notice. The investigation produced numerous interviews and tips but no viable suspect.

Five days after the initial call, sheriff’s investigators identified the man who had reported finding the body. Tracing the call through phone records, they matched it to a local resident named Lewis Randolph Williamson, known as Randy. He had grown up in the San Gorgonio Pass and attended the local high school around the same time as Eddie Gonzalez. In a small, tight-knit community, Williamson was a familiar face with no criminal record or history of violence. Deputies brought him in for questioning. They wanted to know how he had found the body, his purpose on the mountain highway that morning, why he had chosen that specific road, and why his behavior on the phone had been peculiar. The deputies who took his call noted his tone as argumentative; most callers reporting a deceased person are shaken or frightened, but Williamson had been impatient, as if checking an item off a list. He did not ask if the victim was okay, nor did he offer to stay or help guide officers to the scene. He provided the location, pushed back against their questions, and hung up.

Williamson provided his account of why he had been on Highway 243 and how he had spotted the body. He agreed to take a polygraph test and passed it. Polygraphs measure physiological responses, which an examiner interprets as truthful or deceptive. While courts do not admit them as evidence because they are unreliable—a calm person can produce truthful readings while lying, and a nervous person can appear deceptive while telling the truth—a passed polygraph in 1979 carried significant weight. If the examiner indicated the subject was truthful, investigators typically moved on to the next lead. Because Williamson passed, investigators turned their attention elsewhere, and the man who had called to report the body was released and never questioned again. Every subsequent detective who reviewed the case saw the notation: “polygraphed, cleared.” The DNA collected from the scene could have conclusively connected or excluded him, but the technology did not exist then and would not for another decade. With no other suspects or witnesses, the evidence remained sealed in its containers.

The case stalled. The Gonzalez family had to absorb the loss of their youngest member without answers. Esther had been 17, walking to her sister’s house on a path she had known since childhood. She did not have a car and walked because that was standard in a community where the next town was close enough to see from one’s front porch. Liz carried the absence of her sister through every year that followed. Having grown up sharing the same home, friends, and routine, their closeness became the defining shape of the loss after February 9. Eddie remained in the area and, knowing most of the community, would have seen Williamson around town for his entire life. He had no reason to link the man to his sister’s murder, and the fact that Williamson had been released early in the investigation never reached the family. The case went cold shortly after Williamson’s release, and the evidence sat in storage while the family waited for answers.

One year turned into five, then ten, then twenty. Liz and Eddie kept Esther’s memory alive through four decades of holidays and gatherings. They regularly contacted the detective’s office, only to receive the same result. Different detectives inherited the file over the decades, reading the original reports, noting the clearance next to Williamson’s name, and returning the file to the shelf. No one revisited the man who had called in the body. In 1998, CODIS—the FBI’s national DNA database—came online, allowing crime scene profiles to be run against millions of convicted offenders. An investigator submitted the evidence from Esther’s case, but no match returned because Williamson had never been arrested for an offense requiring a DNA sample. He remained outside the system.

Williamson eventually left California and moved to Broward County, Florida. He was not fleeing an investigation; there was no warrant or person-of-interest flag, and no detective was tracking him. He settled in South Florida, living and working there for years while the evidence from a frozen highway shoulder in California remained sealed 2,500 miles away. He was never arrested for any crime in any state and was never connected to other offenses. He grew old, while the Gonzalez family in the San Gorgonio Pass continued to wait for answers. In 2014, Williamson died in Florida. He had never been charged or questioned again after that day in February 1979. During his autopsy in Broward County, a blood sample was collected as standard procedure and stored by the medical examiner’s office alongside thousands of other samples. No one in California knew the sample existed, and no one in Florida knew it was linked to a 45-year-old murder.

In 2023, the Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team decided to pursue an avenue previously unavailable. They sent evidence from Esther’s case to Othram Inc., a forensic laboratory in Texas specializing in advanced DNA testing and genetic genealogy. The evidence had been preserved properly since 1979, sealed in storage for 44 years. Othram scientists used advanced sequencing methods to extract a full DNA profile from the biological evidence. Although the sample was 44 years old, the proper storage allowed the lab to build a profile robust enough for ancestry databases. Genetic genealogy differs from CODIS; rather than matching against convicted offenders, it uploads the profile to public databases to look for biological relatives. Investigators then build a family tree using public records, tracing generations until narrowing the match to a specific individual.

Othram built the profile and returned it to law enforcement. The team performed a genealogical search and found matches. The matches pointed to a family, which in turn pointed to Lewis Randolph Williamson—the man who had been questioned, passed a polygraph, and walked free. The team required his actual DNA to confirm the match, but Williamson had been dead for nine years. In most genealogy cases, investigators obtain DNA from discarded items like coffee cups, but that was impossible here. Investigators discovered that the blood sample from his 2014 autopsy still existed in Broward County. The medical examiner’s office had stored it without knowing it would be relevant to a cold case on the other side of the country.

California investigators coordinated with the Broward County Sheriff’s Office to request that the decade-old sample be pulled from the refrigerator and shipped to a California crime lab. The Florida agency located the sample and sent it to the California Department of Justice Laboratory. When the DOJ lab tested Williamson’s autopsy blood against the semen evidence recovered from Esther Gonzalez’s body, it was a match. Blood drawn in a Florida morgue in 2014 and evidence collected on a frozen highway shoulder in California in 1979 belonged to the same person. Two pieces of biological evidence, separated by 35 years and the width of the country, confirmed what had been hidden since the week after the murder. The man who had called the station to report finding the body was the man who had placed it there. He had reported his own crime, passed a polygraph, and lived the rest of his life free. A crime analyst for the team noted that while Williamson was seemingly cleared by the polygraph in 1979, he was never cleared by DNA because the technology did not exist.

On November 20, 2024, the Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team held a press conference at the sheriff’s station in Banning and publicly identified Williamson as the man who killed Esther Gonzalez 45 years earlier. No charges were filed because he had been dead for a decade; there was no arrest, trial, or sentence. The announcement provided the family with only a name attached to the events of February 1979. Eddie Gonzalez learned that his sister’s killer was someone he had attended school with and passed in the hallways for years. He expressed surprise, stating he did not think Williamson was capable of such an act and wishing the man had lived long enough to serve a life sentence. Liz Gonzalez wrote in an email that the family was very happy to finally have closure. After 45 years, they knew the name of the man who had killed Esther and that he had stood before investigators five days after the murder, only for a single, flawed test to send the investigation in the wrong direction for four decades. They knew he had called the police himself to report the body he had left in the snow. Investigators asked the public for any information regarding other potential victims or further details about Williamson. Whether he attacked or killed anyone else remains an open question that the team continues to investigate. Esther Gonzalez was 17 years old. She was walking to her sister’s house on a February afternoon, and the man who killed her called the police the next morning to report where to find her body.