Authorities Armed With Advances in Technology

Theresa was 15, blond and pretty, but ran with a rough crowd. They used drugs, hitched rides, even at night. So when her beaten and strangled body was discovered in a creek bed off Highway 33 in May 1978, detectives believed a careful study of her associates would flush out the killer.

They were wrong. Twenty years later, no one was behind bars. The trail had gone cold.

Then a detective in the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department Major Crimes Unit got an anonymous call. That killing back in 1978? It was a sacrifice, the caller told Senior Deputy Steven Sagely two months ago. The “Students of Life” did it.

Sagely had never heard of the Students of Life, and he is still not sure the caller knew what he was talking about. But it gave him a reason to dust off the file and start working it again.

Sheriff Bob Brooks is about to give his deputies even more reason to dig into unsolved homicide cases. The department will soon hire two detectives to staff a cold case unit, solely dedicated to closing the book on Theresa’s death as well as 63 other open homicide cases.

“It’s been something that has been talked about for a long, long time,” said Capt. Kelly Fadler, who runs the major crimes unit. “But I think people just now probably started to realize it is a priority and that with the new technology, it was time.”

And, finally, there was the money. That came from Proposition 172, which raises millions of dollars a year for local law enforcement.

Brooks and others in the department say the goal is to take advantage of the giant steps forward in forensic science. New technology, such as DNA typing, could open the door to suspects who have long run free because of a lack of evidence.

Already, four investigators have been assigned to pore over volumes of old case reports, looking for preserved blood samples, hair strands or fingernail clippings that finally could bring a killer to justice.

DNA technology is advancing so quickly that the techniques used as recently as the O.J. Simpson case are already out of date. DNA technology no longer means narrowing the field of suspects to a group of people with similar genetic typing.

“Now we can just about say this genetic profile belongs to this one person,” said Michael Parigian, supervising forensic scientist who oversees the Sheriff Department’s DNA lab. “We used to say there is a one out of 20 chance this blood belongs to this person. Now we are getting to where we can say this blood came from that person.”

“DNA offers a tremendous opportunity to open cases we were unable to work before,” Brooks said. “That’s the reason a lot of agencies are opening cases that have gone dormant. With the advantage of DNA, these cases become solvable again.”

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Better computer technology is also helping detectives piece together old whodunits.

Until recently, detectives had to painstakingly sift through voluminous notebooks searching for a match to fingerprints, shoe prints or bullet shell casings taken from a crime scene.

Today, such images are simply scanned into a computer. In a matter of hours, sometimes minutes, the computer can search for a match through the databases of other police agencies, the FBI and the Department of Justice.

“That is probably the most dramatic change,” said Jim Roberts, forensic scientist for the Sheriff’s Department crime lab. “We can get the computer to do a lot of work that just would have been unmanageable otherwise. Now we just run through a database.”

Despite the new technology, time is a formidable opponent when solving cold cases, investigators said. Witnesses move and become impossible to track down. Some die.

And as the weeks, months and years pass, memories are clouded.

For these reasons, investigator say they work around the clock to solve a new homicide. Most cases are solved in the first 24 hours.

Sagely struggled to overcome a number of hurdles built by time when he took the anonymous call about Theresa’s death. Sheriff’s officials asked that her last name not be used.

The stranger’s tip about a strangled teenage girl even pinpointed where the girl’s body was found.

That piqued Sagely’s interest. He immersed himself in volumes of old case reports stored in a room at the Sheriff’s Department headquarters, searching for a case that fit the caller’s description. After wading through hundreds of pages, Sagely thought he found his match in case number 78-7465--the strangulation of a 15-year-old Ventura girl. Theresa.

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Sagely tried to track down the girl’s six siblings, most of whom now lived in other parts of the country and rarely spoke to each other. The girl’s mother, still a Californian, said she couldn’t remember much about the events surrounding her daughter’s death. The father died of cancer in 1993.

Still, Sagely reread 10-year-old interviews with Theresa’s siblings. As he read, his suspicions grew. The siblings had accused their stepfather, Theresa’s father, of molesting them. They had also recalled physical abuse, including being choked.

Sagely believes the killing had nothing to do with ritual sacrifice. Instead, he suspects the girl’s now-deceased father.

A DNA test on hair found under Theresa’s fingernails would almost certainly clear up the mystery. But Sagely would also need a hair sample from the girl’s father--which would require exhuming his body. That would necessitate obtaining a court order, which Sagely has not yet requested.

Though his main suspect is deceased, Sagely is working on the case to bring closure to other family members.

“And to clean it off the books,” Sagely said. “Otherwise, someone else will come in and have to work the case from the beginning.”

Despite his recent experience working a cold case, Sagely, ordinarily assigned to solve robbery and assault cases, said he has no plans to ask for an assignment in the new unit.

“If you solve a case like this, it’s great,” Sagely said, “just a great feeling. But it can be frustrating work, too. There’s a lot to overcome.”

Because of the unique demands of solving cold cases, Fadler is not certain if he will assign two detectives to work them full time or rotate the assignment.

Either way, Brooks said, the cold cases will get unprecedented attention from major crimes unit detectives.

“We never close a homicide,” Brooks said. “No matter how much time passes, we’ll always go after a workable case.”