The State - News from Dec. 24, 1987

A woman told San Francisco police someone took her purse containing $615,000 worth of jewelry when she stopped to peek at the Christmas windows at a fashionable department store. Ami Cheri Hower told investigators the jewelry included a ring with a pear-shaped 8.8-carat diamond and six smaller diamonds. The ring had an appraised value of $401,967, police said. Hower of Sonoma said she was in San Francisco to shop and have her jewelry cleaned and inspected when she stopped at the windows of Gumps and her purse was snatched. In addition to the ring, she said the jewelry included two emerald and diamond rings, a star sapphire and diamond ring and a pearl necklace, all insured.