Closure finally came for 25-year-old Karen Percifield’s family after advanced DNA analysis identified her killer, but he will never spend a day behind bars for her murder.
“To the detectives, and forensic team, I appreciate them not giving up. This has been weighing on me my whole life, not having a memory of my mom and just wondering who it could have been, this just means so much. I’m just so grateful you didn’t give up,” said Percifield's daughter, according to The Californian.
On May 28, 1976, Percifield was declared dead in Aptos Village Park after the Santa Cruz Sheriff’s Department responded to reports of a dead woman at the scene. They suspected foul play and collected forensic evidence. Despite several leads, investigators identified Richard Sommerhalder as a person of interest. Still, they were unable to make an arrest due to the lack of direct evidence linking him to the homicide. As a result, the case went cold.
Later, Sommerhalder became a known entity in the law enforcement community after he was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison in connection with two other murders, several months after Percifield’s demise.
Then, in 2019, the California Department of Justice Bureau of Forensic Services developed a male DNA profile from the forensic evidence collected years earlier, but did not get a match in the state’s database. However, in 2023, they partnered with a Texas-based forensic lab, Othram Laboratories, which identified Summerhalder, who died in 1994, as the killer using genetic genealogy.
No matter how much time has passed, we will never stop seeking the truth. Advances in DNA technology continue to provide new opportunities to deliver justice and closure to victims and their families. This case is a powerful example of how those advancements can give us the answers we’ve been searching for," said Santa Cruz Sheriff Chris Clark, reported KTVU.
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