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Police have long suspected Jane Morton Antunez, on the right, and Patricia Dwyer were killed by the same person. (San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office)
The disease passing through his body and the passing of time, Arthur Rudy Martinez surrenders.
That was in April 2014. Twenty years earlier, Martinez had escaped from a Washington State prison where he was serving a life sentence for robbery. and rape. Fleeing the authorities, Martinez headed south, where he slipped into a pseudonym and lived under the radar around Fresno, California.
The true identity of the fugitive may never have been revealed if he had not been diagnosed with terminal cancer. According to law enforcement, Martinez would have returned to Washington and surrendered on April 30, 2014. He knew that he would receive medical treatment in jail. Two months later, he died at age 65.
But law enforcement has not been done with Martinez. On Wednesday, Ian Parkinson, Sheriff of San Luis Obispo County, California, held a press conference to announce that his office had solved two homicides committed since the late 1970s.
Using up-to-date DNA techniques, including genealogical research, the investigators linked Martinez to both crimes. But as the San Luis Obispo Tribune reported on Wednesday, the solution of decades-old killings also depended on something so commonplace in almost every home – a crowded medicine cabinet in the bathroom.
Jane Morton Antunez was found first.
According to a press release from the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office, the 30-year-old girl was found in the back seat of her car on an isolated dirt road in Atascadero, California, in the aftermath of -Midi November 18, 1977. She had her throat slit and she had been sexually assaulted. The night before, Antunez had gone to see her best friend, but had never been there.
Less than two months later, on January 11, 1978, Patricia Dwyer, 28, was found dead on the floor of her home in Atascadero. She was also sexually assaulted and stabbed in the chest with a knife from her kitchen.
Although they shared common friends and they were known to frequent one of the Atascadero water points called the Tally Ho Bar, very little seemed to connect the two women. But as reported by the Tribune, investigators of the time thought that Antunez and Dwyer had been attacked by the same person. Both were sexually assaulted and found their hands tied behind their backs.
Arthur Rudy Martinez is one of the names that went around the survey. In early 1977, Martinez was released on parole in the region after serving a 10-year prison sentence for attempted murder and rape in Fresno, the daily Tribune reported. According to the authorities, Martinez was working in a local welding shop at the time of the murders.
But the police found no evidence establishing a direct link between Martinez and the murders. The only witness who saw a man near Antunez's car the night of his death did not even show Martinez's picture.
Shortly after the crimes, Martinez left California for Washington where, at the end of 1978, he was convicted of several thefts and two rapes. He died in June 2014, leaving no indication of his role in the unresolved murders in California.
In 2005, investigators from the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Office had in mind breakthroughs in the field of DNA and submitted DNA from crime scenes in 1977 and 1978 for the purpose of analysis. This conclusively proves that Antunez and Dwyer were killed by the same attacker. But the analysis did not allow to direct the authorities towards this murderer.
As Parkinson told reporters on Wednesday, the county found money in 2016 for a cold sheriff's office detective. The work was assigned to an inspector named Clint Cole, who began in 2017 to review unsolved murders in the late 1970s.
Parkinson said Wednesday that the suspect's DNA analysis was being presented to the Justice Department's family-based DNA research team in Richmond, California in March 2018. Its Results indicated that Antunez the murderer was linked to an inmate who had then been charged with a different offense.
The investigators finally determined that the related inmate had a relative living in San Luis Obispo County at the time of the murders: Martinez.
But with the long-dead suspect, the investigators faced another problem: they needed Martinez's DNA to be compared with the crime scene sample.
According to the Tribune, the investigators would have found a girlfriend who was living with Martinez when he was in the area before 2014 in the Fresno area. Remarkably, the woman entered her medicine cabinet and took out an old razor used by Martinez.
This razor was tested and came back as a DNA match with the material taken from the crime scene.
In addition, the investigators contacted the witness who had seen a man near the crime scene in Antunez.
"Over the years, this witness has seen many pictures of possible suspects and has not been able to identify at any time," Parkinson told reporters on Wednesday. "She immediately identified Martinez as the suspect she saw about 40 years later."
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