Her murder case lay cold for 48 years. Then a thumbprint on a cigarette carton finally got a hit

San Francisco Chronicle​

09-05-2025

The victim was found in the back seat of her Volkswagen Beetle in the parking lot of an apartment complex she didn't live in, a few minutes away from a bar where her friends had last seen her alive on the night of January 31, 1977.
She had been stuffed in the back of the Beetle, wedged tightly in the small crevice of the backseat. Detectives determined she had been strangled with the sleeve of her own shirt and had been sexually assaulted. The killer tried to light her car on fire, but it didn't ignite.
For 49 years, since 24-year-old Jeanette Ralston, a San Mateo resident, was found dead, her case lay cold, save for a sketch of an unknown man her friends saw her leave the bar with the night before she was found. Her friend told detectives that upon leaving, Ralston said she would be 'back in 10 minutes,' but never came back.
But a critical piece of evidence, a carton of 'Eve' cigarettes found on her floorboard, and the rapid advancement of forensic science, has changed everything.
This week, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office charged a 69-year-old man in her killing, Ohio resident Willie Eugene Sims, then a 21-year-old Army private assigned to Fort Ord in Monterey Bay. He was extradited to San Jose, where he was scheduled to be arraigned in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Friday afternoon.
Police collected many latent fingerprints in the case, but all of them had been searched several times before using the FBI's fingerprint database, said Deputy District Attorney Rob Baker, who heads the cold-case unit. But last summer, after investigators decided to search the database again, they got a hit.
'It was an old-school solve,' Baker told the Chronicle. 'It all started with a thumbprint, and that thumbprint led our investigators across the country to Mr. Sims' front door in Jefferson, Ohio.'
Investigators flew out to Ohio to collect Sims' DNA. That, combined with other pieces of evidence, including the sketch they had of the suspect and DNA found on Ralston's fingernails as well as the sleeve used as a ligature to kill her, helped them build the case.
Sims had been convicted of assault to commit murder and robbery of a woman using a knife in Monterey County just a year after Ralston's killing. He spent four years in state prison, officials said. But his criminal record after that was clean and he moved out of the state before his DNA could be entered into CODIS, the federal DNA database.
'Every day, forensic science grows better, and every day criminals are closer to being caught,' said Jeff Rosen, District Attorney for the county. 'Cases may grow old and be forgotten by the public. We don't forget and we don't give up.'
If convicted, Sims faces 25 years to life in prison, officials said.
The county's cold case unit was established when Rosen took office in 2011. Since then, the department has solved more than 30 homicides, and over half of them were solved in the past five years, in part due to a $500,000 federal grant it received to investigate cold cases, said Baker.
Last month, San Jose police identified a suspect in the killing of 28-year-old Karen Gevorkov in 1997, who died from blunt-force trauma after an attack in a park. The suspect, Victor Lamong Ferguson, a Kansas resident, died in 2022 at the age of 47.
Ralston's son did not respond to multiple requests for interviews but wrote about the break in the case on social media, saying that he lost his mother shortly before his 7th birthday.
He thanked law enforcement and the district attorney's office for their work in the case, even if, he said, he was not clear on how to 'actually move forward or navigate this shocking news.'
'Your persistence, dedication and devotion to me in my family is unquestionably some of the greatest form of respect and love for my mother,' he said. 'You have undoubtedly made a 6-year-old kid happy after all of these years.'