They Match DNA of Predator in Prison to Make the Arrest
By Harriet Chiang, San Francisco Chronicle Legal Affairs Writer
It was a speck of evidence, barely detectable to the human eye, but carefully preserved for 35 years.
That stroke of foresight was enough to help San Francisco police solve a horrible crime in which a 14-year-old San Francisco girl was brutally raped, beaten and stabbed to death in 1968 while she was baby-sitting at a neighbor’s house.
Suspects in the slaying of Linda Harmon were questioned at the time, but no one was arrested, and the case was left unsolved. Until last week.
San Francisco Police Chief Alex Fagan announced Tuesday that an arrest warrant had been issued Friday for William Speer, 61, a sexually violent predator who was in a mental hospital in Phoenix after serving prison time for rape.
DNA tests of a swab of semen taken during an autopsy of the girl’s body at the time of the killing matched Speer’s genetic fingerprint.
Speer, who police say has prior convictions in California for sex offenses, is currently in the custody of sheriffs in Maricopa County, Ariz., awaiting extradition to San Francisco. His bail has been set at $10 million.
“Advances in technology have allowed us to come to this point where we can give closure to a family,” Fagan said. He said the department had as many as 150 cases in the pipeline that investigators hoped could be solved through DNA testing.
Even 35 years later, the facts of the girl’s death are chilling.
Linda was a blond junior high school student who lived with her sister and widowed mother on Sunnydale Avenue in San Francisco. On a Friday night in March 1968, she had a job baby-sitting with a neighbor’s two boys, ages 7 and 3, two doors down from her home. Her mother checked on her shortly before 9:30 p.m. and told police later that she had heard her daughter replace the chain lock on the door after she left.
Linda briefly returned to her home about 10 p.m. and then went back to the neighbor’s flat to complete her baby-sitting task, according to news accounts at the time.
The next morning, the neighbor returned home to find a gruesome scene: Linda’s body covered with blood from multiple stab wounds and left propped against a couch in a sitting position on the floor.
Pieces of a vase, apparently used to strike the girl, were found around her body. She had been stabbed repeatedly by a 13-inch carving fork that the girl appeared to have picked up to defend herself.
Linda had apparently put up a desperate struggle for her life, police said at the time. Pieces of an ashtray were found at the home, and two trails of blood led from the flat to nearby John McLaren Park golf course.
Speer, an acquaintance of Linda’s mother’s, was questioned, but police didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him, and her slaying remained a mystery.
In the meantime, the swab of evidence remained in safe storage. “Someone, somewhere had the foresight” to preserve it, San Francisco Police Inspector Kelly Carroll said Tuesday.
Two years ago, San Francisco police began a systematic effort to solve unsolved crimes with the help of DNA.
What broke the Harmon case was a collaborative effort by the medical examiner’s office, which had kept the evidence, the San Francisco Police Department’s crime lab, which conducted the DNA tests, and the homicide inspectors who went to Phoenix in November to see Speer.
The effort was coordinated by Police Inspector Pam Wermes, who went to Carroll after the DNA sample from the Harmon case matched on a cold hit a DNA sample of Speer’s that was in the FBI’s nationwide database.
Carroll said police were still trying to piece together Speer’s life and couldn’t say Tuesday where he was from originally.
In the meantime, Linda’s mother has died, and police are trying to find other family members.
“This was a poor little girl,” Carroll said. “She looked like anybody’s kid. And she was brutally assaulted and murdered. It’s every parent’s nightmare.”
Despite the number of years that have passed, he said, “her spirit still cried out for justice.”
He said the Harmon case showed that other murder victims whose crimes have not been solved would not be forgotten either. “Wherever these guys are,” Carroll said, “we’ll go get them.”