Arrest in 1983 rape, slaying of S.F. teen
Thirty-two years after the body of a teenage girl from San Francisco was found half-buried in the sand at Pescadero State Beach in San Mateo County, authorities on Wednesday announced the arrest of a longtime suspect in the cold case.
John Joseph Scott, 67, was arrested Monday in the small community of Topock in Arizona’s Mohave County, where he lives, said the San Mateo County Sheriff ’s Office.
He was booked into jail there on a $5 million arrest warrant alleging that he murdered 19-year-old Sharon Ray, whose hand was spotted poking out of the sand by sightseers on Oct. 30, 1983, north of Pescadero Creek. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Scott, who then was 35, was said to have been identified as a suspect in the original investigation, because he was the last person seen with Ray in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.
But the case “could not be prosecuted due to insufficient evidence,” sheriff ’s officials said. “Thereafter,
the investigation went cold.”
Ray’s killing, however, was reopened this year along with a slew of other cold cases identified by authorities as having possible DNA evidence that could enable a break, said Detective Salvador Zuno, a San Mateo County Sheriff ’s Office spokesman.
Evidence sent to the county crime lab yielded a DNA profile of the suspect, sheriff ’s officials said, adding that the lab results confirmed Scott as the killer.
At his first court appearance in Kingman, Ariz., Scott expressed confidence that the charges against him wouldn’t stick, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“I beat this case twice already,” Scott said. “This is the third time they’ve picked me up on this.”
Zuno said he did not know how Scott had spent the past 32 years, or how his DNA profile ended up in the criminal database that was matched against evidence in Ray’s killing. But he said he believed Scott was a mechanic who was out on disability leave at the time of his arrest.
Zuno said deputies have been in touch with Ray’s family.
“They were shocked,” he said. “They did not expect to get a phone call after all this time.”
San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said his office charged Scott with one count of murder, but Mohave County authorities said Scott refused to waive extradition at his first court appearance Tuesday, which will prolong the process of returning him to the Bay Area.
He is scheduled to appear in court next in Mohave County on Dec. 17.