The Associated Press
Sacramento (AP) -- DNA evidence from a 1980 double murder matches that of a 55-year-old Washington state prison inmate, Sacramento County sheriff’s detectives said.
Richard Joseph Hirschfield, who is serving a 13-year sentence for the 1997 rape of a child, is expected to be brought to California within weeks to be charged in the 1980 deaths of two University of California, Davis, students.
Sabrina Gonsalves and John Riggins, both 18, were last seen in Davis on the evening of Dec. 20, 1980. Their bodies were found two days later near Lake Natoma in Sacramento County.
Detectives say a DNA profile gleaned from semen on a blanket found inside Riggins’ abandoned van matches that of Hirschfield, who is scheduled to be released in November 2010.
“We’re getting the arrest warrant now, and it should be served in the next two to three weeks,” homicide Sgt. Craig Hill said. “Then we’ll make arrangements to have him brought back.”
Prosecutors initially believed the murders were connected to convicted serial murderer Gerald Gallego. Gallego, who was in jail at the time of Gonsalves’ and Riggins’ deaths, was eventually linked to 10 murders, including the slaying of two Sacramento college students who were abducted from a mall just a month before the Davis couple were killed.
Authorities investigated whether the Davis students were killed to steer suspicion from Gallego, who was eventually convicted of four of the murders and died of natural causes in a Nevada prison.
Prosecutors charged four of Gallego’s associates, including his half brother, with the Davis students’ murders in 1989, but later dismissed the charges after the DNA found on the blanket didn’t match any of the suspects.
The DNA profile also didn’t match any samples in the state data bank. But, in 2002 Sacramento prosecutors got word that a national database of DNA profiles matched their evidence to Hirschfield.
Without the ability to recover DNA profiles, the murders would probably never have been solved, said Dave Ducat, an investigator with the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office.
Hill said the department didn’t make an immediate arrest so they could gather other evidence, and because Hirschfield was not endangering the public.
He sent detectives to question Hirschfield’s brother, Joseph, in Oregon. Joseph Hirschfield didn’t tell detectives anything, but the next day, he wrote a note implicating himself and his brother in the couples’ murder, Hill said. Then, he turned on the car engine in his garage and killed himself.
Investigators are still searching for anyone who knew Hirschfield, who reportedly audited college classes because he couldn’t afford tuition. Besides the DNA evidence, there is nothing that ties the former butcher and sheet-metal worker to Davis, said Hill.
At the time of the murders, he was stationed at Mather Air Force Base and living in Rancho Cordova, Hill said.