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Fresno Jury Convicts Ray Dell Sims, 73, of the 1974 Rape and Murder of 15-Year-Old Elizabeth Ortega

DNA tests in 1996 linked Sims to the killing. He was already serving life for the 1977 murder of a 17-year-old newspaper carrier.

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Illustration of empty courtroom gallery benches in afternoon light with a jacket left on one bench. Not an actual scene from the case.

Elizabeth Ortega, a 15-year-old Roosevelt High School student, was raped and murdered near Fresno in 1974, and the case went unsolved for decades. On September 4, 2008, a Fresno County jury convicted Ray Dell Sims, 73, of her first-degree murder.

The case stumped detectives until 1996, when tests linked semen found on Ortega to Sims's DNA. Sims was already serving a life term for the 1977 murder of Janet Herstein, 17, who was abducted and killed on her newspaper route, and he was brought back to Fresno from San Quentin in 2001 to face charges in the older killings. "We're talking about a serial killer. We're talking about a guy, who in our opinion, sexually assaulted and brutally murdered five young girls," said Deputy District Attorney Blake Gunderson.

Sims could not face the death penalty because the murders predated the reinstatement of capital punishment in California. After the verdict, prosecutors moved to dismiss a third charge, in the 1974 murder of Kathy Stark, 17, saying they would try it only if Sims were ever paroled. He was also suspected in two other killings in the 1970s, but those cases had been dropped years earlier.

ABC30 reported that prosecutors decided to dismiss the Kathy Stark charge, while KMPH reported that they asked for it to be dismissed only for now.

Sources