20 years ago, cold case suspect warned that he might ‘slip’ again
Advancements in DNA testing amplified partial sample, and federal database concluded a match
ANTIOCH >> Twenty years before he would be arrested in the 1980 kidnapping, rape and murder of 14-year-old honor roll student Suzanne Bombardier, Mitchell Lynn Bacom admitted in a 1997 interview that he had tried to kill another woman and might “slip” again.
“I tried to kill her but my heart wasn’t really in it, so she lived,” Bacom told a reporter at the Antioch Ledger Dispatch, referring to a 1973 stabbing.
“If I do it again, I’d be facing life in prison under (the) three-strikes (law). And I have a lot of friends and family who are watching me and making sure I don’t slip. I hope and pray that I don’t, and the people around me, they keep an eye on me.”
On Tuesday, Bacom’s wife, Teri Bacom, was shocked at the news that her husband stood accused of one of the area’s most notorious unsolved homicides.
“He loved me so much … I can’t believe he did it. I can’t believe he did it. He didn’t do it, there must be a mistake,” Teri Bacom said on Tuesday.
Mitchell Lynn Bacom was arrested Monday by Antioch police and is being held on suspicion of murder, kidnapping, rape and oral copulation of 14-year-old Suzanne more than 37 years ago, cracking the oldest homicide cold case in the department’s history.
Suzanne was abducted be-
tween 1:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. on June 22, 1980, while babysitting her two nieces alone in her sister’s Hudson Court apartment.
Bacom, a Knightsen native and Antioch resident, was tied to the killing through DNA evidence, and is expected to be charged with murder Wednesday. But because he fits the profile of a serial offender, he is also being investigated for possible involvement in similar sex crimes and homicides, according to multiple law enforcement sources.
Bacom had been a prime suspect in Suzanne’s death for decades, but the only hope authorities had to tie him to the case were two badly degraded samples of semen taken from her body.
But late last year new technological advancements were made that improve forensic scientists’ ability to conduct so-called polymerase chain reaction tests, a technique where a partial DNA sample can be amplified and recreated to create a full DNA profile. When that was done in Suzanne’s case, the DNA was run through a federal database that collects DNA of convicted felons and set off a cold hit, leading back to Bacom.
Ron Rackley, a former Antioch cop who initiated the investigation and, along with retired detective Greg Glod, continued to research the case in the years after they left the police department, said Bacom had long been in their sights. He had first asked out Suzanne’s mother but then pursued her older sister, whose children Suzanne had been babysitting, Rackley said. Bacom was persistent, and Suzanne’s sister went out with him only once, but he continued to bring her flowers.
“Our understanding is that the night Suzanne was kidnapped, the sister she was babysitting for was supposed to go out with Bacom and she went out with someone else,” Rackley said. “Greg (Glod) and I always suspected that Bacom went out that night looking for the sister and when he couldn’t find her, he took (Suzanne).”
In the mid-to-late 1990s, after Bacom had been released from custody on a rape, robbery and sodomy conviction, there were a string of seemingly connected homicides of young women in East Contra Costa. In at least one case, the victim was stabbed, and in several others, a rope had been tied around her neck. Police later publicly suggested a serial killer was behind some of the killings.
Contra Costa District Attorney Office’s chief of forensics Paul Holes said Bacom was a person of interest in several crimes that appeared similar to Suzanne’s killing, but he also
cautioned against “over linkage” in cases involving someone who fits the profile of a serial offender.
Bacom lived in Brentwood from 1993 to 1997 and became the second person Contra Costa County residents were warned of under Megan’s Law.
According to Contra Costa Times archives from 1997, Brentwood residents didn’t like the idea of a twice-convicted rapist coming to live in their neighborhood. Police said Bacom was a high-risk offender with a likelihood of recidivism.
One Brentwood resident suggested at the time that Bacom may have killed children; he had been convicted in an attempted murder case in 1973 after stabbing a San Jose woman in the throat and subsequently spent six years in prison.
When asked to explain the crime, Bacom stammered, then explained that the woman was sleeping in the nude.
“I was young,” Bacom said to Antioch Ledger reporter Michael Sears in 1997. “I don’t know why I did it. I guess I thought that if she was dead, there wouldn’t be any witnesses.”
Bacom went on to say that he understood why people feared him and the possibility of being his neighbor, but he repeated that he would never hurt kids. “Child molesters are different because they hurt kids and kids can’t fight back,” he said.
Marsha Wooldridge, Bacom’s sister, described Bacon on Tuesday as an evengoing guy who enjoyed NASCAR and camping. Growing up, they liked to do “normal kid stuff” like pretend they were in the 1963 film PT-109 and were stranded on a deserted island. They moved around a lot, because their father was a naval officer who was a “real mean S.O.B. Pretty stiff,” Wooldridge said.
While the break in the case made headlines across the country Tuesday, those closest to Suzanne and the investigation see her as much more than a footnote in the developing story about her alleged killer.
“I felt it was my job to write about somebody who didn’t make it — a lost girl,” said former Lafayette resident Jennifer Kathleen Gibbons, who began blogging about the teen in late 2013 after coming across her headstone and learning that she’d been murdered.
Suzanne’s memory also lives on with Leesa Meintzer, who met the girl she considered her best friend at the end of seventh grade.
“Her ability to make people laugh was amazing. I think that’s what I took from that friendship,” she said.