A man who was initially ruled out in the 1979 death of a 17-year-old girl after passing a polygraph test has now been named a suspect in the case, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office in California announced Wednesday.
Esther Gonzalez, 17, was sexually assaulted and killed while walking from her parents’ house in Beaumont to her sister’s house in Banning on Feb. 10, 1979, according to the news release. Lewis Randolph “Randy” Williamson reported finding her body the following day in a snowpack off a highway near Banning.
Riverside County District Attorney’s Office
According to the news release, deputies from the Riverside County Sheriff’s Station described Williamson as “argumentative” when he reported her death. He was later asked to take a polygraph test, which he passed, and he was considered cleared of any wrongdoing, authorities said. Williamson died in Florida in 2014.
Investigators continued working on Gonzalez’s case over the years, according to the release from the district attorney’s office. In 2023, the cold case team submitted several pieces of evidence from the crime scene, including semen recovered from Gonzalez’s body, to Othram, a private DNA laboratory in Texas, for testing and genealogy research.
A crime analyst assigned to the cold case team noted that Williamson’s DNA was never compared to the evidence because the technology was not available at the time, according to the release. However, a sample of Williamson’s blood was collected during his autopsy, and the California Department of Justice confirmed that Williamson’s DNA matches the DNA recovered from Gonzalez’s body, the district attorney’s office says.
The Riverside County Regional Cold Case Homicide Team is now asking the public for any information pertaining to Gonzalez’s case — or to Williamson’s other potential victims.
Polygraph tests, which measure certain physiological responses that supposedly correlate with stress triggered by the act of lying, are widely considered to be unreliable.