Dismembered San Jose woman identified in cold case homicide
(KRON) — Forty-four years ago, a dismembered woman's torso and two religious pendants were found dumped in a field in San Jose. A team of cold case investigators used genealogy technology to uncover the woman's identity.
The slain woman was Vivian Moss, a 54-year-old grandmother and member of Mt. Zion Spiritual Church, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Cold Case Unit announced Tuesday.
Moss' torso was found in an empty field along Mabury Road on July 11, 1981. The killer had dismembered her body, investigators said. She had no identification with her, but San Jose Police Department officers found two religious medallion pendants near the homicide victim's partial remains.
One medallion was inscribed, 'Saint Christopher Protect Us.' The second medallion had a figure of the Virgin Mary surrounded by the words, 'Mary conceived without sin. Pray for us who have recourse to thee.'
Moss had been stabbed multiple times in the chest, the district attorney's office said.
Since then, a VTA Berryessa Transit Center and a BART station parking structure were built over the field.
While the woman's identity was still a mystery, the DA's Office partnered with forensic genealogists at Parabon NanoLabs. Last year, Parabon hypothesized that the victim was likely Moss, who was born in Arkansas in 1927. In 2024, DA investigators found and interviewed Moss' granddaughter, as well as compared their DNA.
'(The granddaughter) told investigators that when she was a young girl, Vivian was supposed to pick her up to stay the night at her home. Vivian didn't show and she never saw her grandmother again,' the DA's office wrote.
Cold case team members and Moss' surviving family members are now hoping to identify and find her killer. They are asking the public to come forward with any information about Moss and her tragic fate.
District Attorney Jeff Rosen said, 'Vivian Moss was her name. I know it. Her family knows it. And now our community knows it. One day soon, I hope we will know the depraved person who took her life and left her in a field, hoping she would be forgotten. If her murderer is still alive, they will know that we don't forget in Santa Clara County.'
'American Nightmare' kidnapper pleads guilty in South Bay cold cases
As a follower of the Mt. Zion Spiritual Church, Moss was close with the church's leader, Louis H. Narcisse, who died in 1989. She also may have worked at an elementary school in Oakland at some point before she disappeared, according to investigators.
The Santa Clara County District Attorney's Cold Case Unit was established in 2011. The team has solved over 30 cold case murders committed as early as 1969. More than half of those cases were cracked due to advances in DNA analysis and forensic genealogy.
Anyone who has any information about Moss or this cold case homicide is encouraged to call 408-792-2466 or email coldcasetips@dao.sccgov.org.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Timelapse: Northern Lights visible in Sonoma County
(KRON) — The aurora borealis was visible in the northernmost region of the Bay Area Saturday night and early Sunday morning. Local photographer Alexander Glavtchev sent these images of last night's Northern Lights from Windsor, Calif. Watch the video at the top of this story for a timelapse of the event. There's another chance the northern lights will be visible in northern Sonoma County between Sunday night and early Monday morning. Stargazers in the city won't be able to view the lights. However, the lights may be visible online using AlertWidlfire cameras. The Northern Lights occur when energetic particles from the sun collide with atoms and molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, creating glowing colorful skies, according to NASA. Video: Second cliff rescue at San Francisco's Battery Crosby in two days 'Auroras, also known as the northern or southern lights, are colorful and dynamic displays that glow in the night sky,' the NASA website reads. 'Auroras occur in an upper layer of Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere, but they typically originate with activity on the sun. Occasionally, during explosions called coronal mass ejections, the sun releases charged particles that speed across the solar system.' The best regions for viewing tonight's aurora borealis are highlighted in a map provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Little earthquake shakes Oakland
(KRON) — A magnitude 2.5 earthquake struck near Highway 24 in Oakland between Piedmont and Berkeley around 8:50 p.m., according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The quake struck at a depth of 3.8 miles below the Earth's surface. Timelapse: Northern Lights visible in Sonoma County On Friday, a magnitude 3.2 earthquake was felt in the East Bay. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Post
16 hours ago
- New York Post
Here are some of the most mispronounced neighborhoods, streets and bridges in NYC
What's in a name? A lot of lost history. New York City is home to some of the most uniquely named streets, neighborhoods and more — the pronunciations of which have become marbled and mangled over time.7 Tourists and residents alike, even locals whose families have been around since the dawn of the country, are guilty of butchering the Dutch tongue that lent its history to the metro area to a point where no one is truly sure what the correct pronunciations are anymore for certain landmarks. 4 Houston Street is the 'most abused' name of any Big Apple street or neighborhood, said Moss. Robbie Green – The culprit: the very melting pot for which New York is famously known. 'What happens is over time, we have people come in and they bring a bit of a language they have here, so a lot of things that were Dutch have become Americanized, which means they lost some of the Dutch color,' explained Mitchell Moss, a linguistics expert at New York University. 'There are words that are too hard for people to understand, like the concept of the boroughs. No one uses the word borough, they use Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island … People tend to not adapt to New York speech, they try to fit it into how we speak words, how they pronounce words.' Here are some of the most mispronounced names in New York City: Houston Street This misstep is perhaps the most well-known, and yet the 'most abused,' according to Moss. The iconic street is frequently pronounced like the Texas city, but, like any native New Yorker will tell you, the name should be pronounced as 'how-sten.' The major thoroughfare was named after William Houstoun, one of the Founding Fathers of the US, whose father-in-law's land was once encompassed in the lower Manhattan area. The spelling of the Houstoun became corrupted sometime after 1811, kicking off the confusion that persists today. 4 Fort Schuyler is pronounced like 'Skylar.' Alamy Stock Photo Fort Schuyler Directly below the Throggs Neck Bridge and on SUNY Maritime's campus in the Bronx lies the 18th-century fortification whose name is diecievingly pronounced as 'Fort Skylar.' 'Everybody who comes from anywhere in the world calls it 'schooler' because it's 'SCHU,'' Moss explained. The mistake could simply be blamed on a declining interest in the city's history, Moss theorized — the 1856 fort was named after General Philip Schuyler, who commanded the Continental Army in 1777 before representing New York in the 1st United States Congress. Van Wyck Expressway The roughly 30,000 daily commuters who use the 14-mile-long expressway running through the Bronx and Queens almost ubiquitously call the roadway 'Van Wick' — and they are wrong. 'Van Wyck is an old Dutch name. 'Van Wike' is the right term, but 'Van Wyck' is the way it's abused here,' said Moss. The expressway was named after Robert Van Wyck, who was the first mayor of New York City after the five boroughs were consolidated in 1898. 4 The Van Wyck Expressway is mispronounced as 'wick,' although its namesake is pronounced as 'wike.' Getty Images The story goes, according to The New Yorker, that the pronunciation was lost when the expressway was built between 1947 and 1963 by Robert Moses, who when apparently corrected on his mispronunciation as 'Wick,' barked: 'I'm Robert Moses. I can call it whatever I damn please!' Kosciuszko Bridge The Kosciuszko Bridge, which connects Brooklyn and Queens, is possibly the most mispronounced namesake in the five boroughs — but there's a catch. Many New Yorkers refer to the cable-stayed bridge as 'Koz-ee-as-ko' or 'Koz-ee-uhs-ko,' but the most correct pronunciation would be 'Ko-shoo-sko,' according to the Brooklyn library's historical team. The bridge was named after Polish military leader Tadeusz Kościuszko, who fought alongside the Americans in the Revolutionary War, but the 'Polish flair' is too difficult for many Americans, Moss theorizes. 4 According to Moss, the pronunciation of the Kosciuszko Bridge gets so mangled that any version has come to be accepted. demerzel21 – 'Now, this is what makes New York different. We don't have a pronunciation czar. It's kind of like a free-for-all,' said Moss. 'This is a case where New Yorkers are very tolerant. As long as you can pronounce it, it's acceptable.' Bonus: Spuyten Duyvil The Bronx neighborhood just across the creek from Inwood isn't so much bastardized as it is completely ignored. Spuyten Duyvil and its namesake railroad bridge — pronounced like 'Spy-tin Die-vul' — literally translates in Dutch to 'Spouting Devil' and is a reference to the strong currents found in the creek, with 'Spui' in Dutch meaning a body of water. But the neighborhood is commonly usurped by its neighboring community, Riverdale, with mostly only locals bothering to learn the original name, according to Moss. 'That's kind of an inside name for people in New York, who know when they're leaving Manhattan to get to the Bronx,' said Moss.
