Man Who 'Found' Teen's Body ID'd as Killer 45 Years Later

An unidentified caller who reported finding a body by a highway in 1979 has been identified as the killer nearly five decades later. The Riverside County District Attorney's Office in California has named the late Lewis Randolph Williamson as the murderer of 17-year-old Esther Gonzalez, reports NBC News. The cold case began in February 1979 when the county sheriff's office received a call from an "argumentative" man who reported seeing a body off Highway 243, per the Los Angeles Times.

The caller would not give his name, but authorities identified him as Williamson a few days later and asked him to come in for a polygraph test. Williamson did so—and passed. The case went unsolved, and Williamson enlisted in the Marines and "lived a normal life" before dying in Florida in 2014, per the Times. The break came when investigators reexamining the cold case found a close match for DNA evidence preserved from the crime scene on a genealogical database. That relative led them to Williamson, and they were able to match blood from his autopsy with that of the killer.

"This killing still haunts them," says DA investigator Jason Corey, referring to the teen's family. "But Esther was never forgotten by us all these years." She was killed while walking from her parents' home in Beaumont to her sister's house in Banning. (More cold cases stories.)