APTOS — After remaining unsolved for nearly 50 years, the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office has identified 25-year-old Karen Percifield’s killer through the use of genetic genealogy and familial DNA evidence.
“No matter how much time has passed, we will never stop seeking the truth,” said Santa Cruz County Sheriff Chris Clark in a statement. “Advances in DNA technology continue to provide new opportunities to deliver justice and closure to victims and their families. This case is a powerful example of how those advancements can give us the answers we’ve been searching for.”
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The death was investigated as a homicide and detectives collected forensic evidence at that time. According to the 1976 Sentinel article, Richard Anthony Sommerhalder, then 29 years old, was already being held for the murder of two women — Vicki Bezore and Mary Gorman — and was named a person of interest in the murder of Percifield. However, the original investigators didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him, and the case went cold.
Through the use of DNA evidence, now deceased convicted murderer Richard Sommerhalder was identified as the killer of Karen Percifield. (Sentinel Archive)Sommerhalder was later found guilty of the murders of Bezore and Gorman and served about eight years in prison before he was released and moved out of state.
According to a statement from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, in 2019, criminalists at the Sheriff’s Office found multiple evidentiary items to develop a DNA profile of Percifield’s murderer, which they sent to the California Department of Justice Bureau of Forensic Services for further testing. However, the suspect was not in the agency’s DNA database.
Investigators then tried to locate Sommerhalder to obtain a sample of his DNA, but soon discovered that he had died in 1994. According to the Sheriff’s Office, “through genetic genealogy and familial DNA testing, and with the help of Department of Justice and Othram Laboratories, detectives were able to identify Sommerhalder as the suspect responsible for the murder of Karen. While he was not held accountable for this tragic murder, we are proud to give the family of Karen Percifield this bit of closure.”
Santa Cruz County District Attorney Jeff Rosell said in a statement, “Despite the passage of time and death of the perpetrator, the closure that solving this murder brings to the Percifield family is incredibly important. The Sheriff’s Office is to be commended for their diligence and commitment to solving this crime.”
Percifield’s sister and daughter also praised investigators for their diligent pursuit of the killer.
“To the detectives, and forensic team, I appreciate them not giving up,” Percifield’s daughter said in a statement. “This has been weighing on me my whole life, not having a memory of my mom and just wondering who it could have been, this just means so much. I’m just so grateful you didn’t give up.”
Percifield’s sister added, “It’s nice to know this is finally not an open case, even though it was closed in my mind. It just proves that DNA is a good vehicle to solve these things and put things to rest. I was so young then and wasn’t equipped to understand everything and I’m just so grateful it’s finally over.”
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