On the afternoon of Friday, November 8, 1974, Elizabeth Ortega did not come home from school. She was fifteen, a student at Roosevelt High School in Fresno, California, and she lived with her mother, Ramona Soriano, and her four younger half-siblings. Her mother called the police. The next day, November 9, Elizabeth's body was found on the bank of Avocado Lake, a reservoir in Fresno County that people went to for fishing. She was fully clothed. There were marks on her neck.
One block from the Ortega home lived a man named Ray Dell Sims. Nobody connected him to Elizabeth's death for more than twenty years. By the time anyone did, he had been in prison for most of that time, serving a life sentence for the 1977 murder of another Fresno teenager, seventeen-year-old Janet Herstein, who was taken while delivering newspapers on her route. In 2008, thirty-four years after Elizabeth Ortega died, a Fresno County jury convicted him of her murder on the strength of DNA evidence. Prosecutors said they believed he had sexually assaulted and killed five girls and young women in Fresno between 1974 and 1977. Two of those killings have been proved in court. The other three were charged and never tried.
Very little has been reported about Ray Dell Sims's life before Fresno. The Court of Appeal opinion in his case describes him as African American. He was 66 when he was charged in December 2001 and 73 at his trial in 2008, which places his birth in about 1935, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) listed his age as 91 in October 2026.
In 1974 he was living in Fresno, a block from Elizabeth Ortega's home. He was married at the time to a woman named Carolyn Turner. She later divorced him, and at his 2008 trial she testified for the prosecution. According to the Court of Appeal's summary of her testimony, Sims forced her to have sex with him on more than one occasion, and once choked her until she pretended to lose consciousness.
When detectives questioned him in 2001, Sims described himself as a fisherman. He said he did not know Elizabeth Ortega and had never been to Avocado Lake.
The CDCR record lists two counties as committing him to state prison: Fresno and Alameda. The record does not say what the Alameda commitment was for, and no published account explains it. By the time of his second murder conviction in 2008, his lawyer said he had spent nearly half his life at San Quentin.
The first of the five deaths that prosecutors would later attribute to Sims was that of Katherine Marie Stark, known as Kathy. She was seventeen and was killed in Fresno in 1974. Sims was charged with her murder in December 2001. That count was still pending when he went on trial for Elizabeth Ortega's murder in 2008, and after the Ortega verdict prosecutors asked the judge to dismiss it. Of Kathy Stark's life, the date she died and how her case was investigated, the reports say nothing more.
Elizabeth Ann Ortega was the eldest of her mother's children. "I just want everybody to know, she was a good girl. She was my first baby," Ramona Soriano said in court in October 2008, when she finally faced the man convicted of killing her daughter.
Elizabeth's closest friend was a Roosevelt High classmate named Ann Hernandez, who described herself at the 2008 trial as Elizabeth's best friend. The household had been through a crisis shortly before Elizabeth died. About two months before the murder, Elizabeth told her mother that Rudy Soriano, the father of her four half-siblings, had molested her, and her mother made him leave the house. He became one of the suspects in her death.
Elizabeth did not come home from school on November 8, 1974. Her body was found the next day at Avocado Lake. The autopsy found that she had died of ligature strangulation, that there was also evidence of an attempt at manual strangulation, and that she had a recent vaginal injury. Investigators kept her clothing, including her underwear, in storage. In 1974 there was no forensic test that could tell them whose semen it held. The case went unsolved.
Prosecutors later named two more young women among the victims they attributed to Sims. Robin Mcculler (the spelling used by ABC30 in 2008) was killed in Fresno in 1975. Eva Hernandez Lucio, who was fifteen, was killed in 1976. Sims was charged in both deaths in 2001, and in Eva Lucio's case the Los Angeles Times reported that DNA testing had matched him to the killing. Both cases were dropped some years before the 2008 trial. No reason was reported, and the accounts say nothing more about either young woman's life or death.
Janet Herstein was seventeen years old and lived in Fresno. In 1977 she was working as a newspaper carrier, delivering the Fresno Guide. She was abducted and killed while she was out on her paper route.
Her mother, Edna Herstein, spent the next three decades keeping her daughter's case in front of the people who decided Sims's future. "He took a life deliberately, so I don't think he should be free," she told the Fresno television station KFSN (ABC30) in 1987. More than twenty years later she sat through the whole of the Ortega trial. "I needed to be there. It was for Janet," she said after the verdict. "It's been building all these years, did he or didn't he? Now they know." After the October 2008 sentencing she said: "Janet is still my daughter, and she always will be, so the next parole hearing I will be there."
Sims was arrested, tried and convicted of first-degree murder in Janet Herstein's death in the late 1970s. ABC30 reported that jurors found him guilty of abducting and killing her. He received what the Court of Appeal called an indeterminate life sentence. The CDCR record gives his admission date to state prison as June 8, 1978.
The reports do not give the date Janet disappeared or was found, the details of the investigation that led to Sims, or the date of the verdict. The Herstein case, as far as the record shows, was not a DNA case. It was solved in the 1970s by ordinary police work, and it was the only killing for which Sims was in prison until 2008.
The timing of the killings mattered to every later decision in the case. All of the deaths attributed to Sims happened before California reinstated capital punishment, so he could not face the death penalty for any of them. And, as Fresno County prosecutors explained in 2008, the law at the time had no sentence of life without the possibility of parole. A life sentence for a murder committed then carried a right to parole hearings.
So, from 1983 onward, Sims came before the state parole board on a regular schedule. According to the CDCR's record, he was denied parole at hearings on April 25, 1983; April 22, 1985; April 14, 1987; August 22, 1989; July 17, 1991; and September 3, 1993, each time for two years. At hearings on December 6, 1995, and August 8, 2001, he was denied for five years. A hearing set for December 18, 2006, was postponed. Edna Herstein's 1987 interview with ABC30 was given in the context of those hearings.
Elizabeth Ortega's case was reopened in 1991, when Fresno County Sheriff's Deputy Chris Curtice and criminalist Allen Boudreau decided that DNA technology had advanced far enough to make it worth another look. They collected blood samples from Elizabeth's biological parents, so that her own DNA could be told apart from anyone else's, and from three suspects. Sims was one of them. Rudy Soriano was another.
Preliminary tests were done in Fresno. In 1996, Elizabeth's clothing and the blood samples were sent to Cellmark Diagnostics, an out-of-state private laboratory, where an analyst named Melissa Staples did the testing. The Los Angeles Times, reporting in 2001, put it slightly differently: deputies had long suspected Sims in the other killings, it said, but could not get a sample of his blood until 1996, and test results received in 1997 matched him to Elizabeth's killing.
The Cellmark testing produced two findings. The first concerned sperm found on Elizabeth's underwear. Sims could not be excluded as its source, and the lab estimated that the profile would be found in about one in 1.1 billion Caucasian people, one in 2.4 million African American people and one in 11 million Hispanic people. The sperm DNA did not match either of the other suspects. The second finding concerned DNA from other cells on the same garment. Elizabeth was one contributor. There appeared to be another contributor, though it could have been an artifact of the testing. Sims could not be excluded as that second contributor either.
The investigators did not stop with Ortega. In November 2001, according to the Los Angeles Times, new results came back on a hair that had been found under a ring worn by one of the other girls, and those results matched Sims to the killing of Eva Lucio.
After the Ortega match was confirmed, Deputy Curtice went to talk to Sims, who agreed to an interview in November 2001. Curtice confronted him with the DNA results several times. Sims never admitted any involvement. He said he did not know Elizabeth Ortega and did not know Avocado Lake. He said he was a fisherman and had never been there, although Curtice later testified that it was a common fishing spot.
Curtice asked him what he would do if a retest identified him. Sims said that "whatever it be, it would be." Curtice told him the results would be the same if the samples were tested again. "Then I'll pay," Sims said. The Court of Appeal would later list that remark among the evidence that pointed to his guilt.
On November 29, 2001, Curtice went back to San Quentin with Sergeant Toby Rien and Deputy District Attorney John Skiles to question Sims about several murders, including Elizabeth Ortega's. Sims waived his Miranda rights. The interview lasted less than an hour, according to Curtice. The officers told Sims he could face new charges. Sims said repeatedly that he wanted to go to trial.
Skiles told him that nothing was guaranteed, but that if he pleaded guilty he would get life without parole rather than face a capital murder trial. Sims disagreed. "I can't get a death penalty," he said. When Skiles said, "What can happen is a death sentence," Sims answered, "you can't put a death row then." He told them: "I have no guilt" and "I don't want the offer to be there." He again denied knowing Elizabeth and said the semen should not come back to him.
Sims was right about the law. Skiles testified later that he had believed at the time that Sims could face the death penalty, and learned afterward that he could not for a 1974 murder.
In early December 2001, Sims was taken from San Quentin to Fresno. On or about December 5, 2001, he appeared in Fresno Superior Court on four counts of murder and two counts of rape, covering the deaths of Elizabeth Ortega, Eva Lucio, Kathy Stark and Robin Mcculler, and pleaded not guilty to all of them. He was 66. Wire reports carried in the Los Angeles Times described him as a suspected serial killer.
Nearly seven years passed before trial. No reason for the delay was reported, and neither was the exact date the Lucio and Mcculler counts were dropped; ABC30 said in 2008 only that those two cases had been dropped several years earlier. By the time of trial, two counts remained: Ortega and Stark. The prosecution tried the Ortega count first.
The trial in Fresno County Superior Court was prosecuted by Deputy District Attorney Blake Gunderson. Its core was the DNA. The jury heard the Cellmark results and the statistics behind them. It heard Carolyn Turner's testimony about her former husband's violence toward her. It heard that Sims had lived a block from the victim and that he had told the detective "Then I'll pay."
The defense did not seriously dispute that the semen was Sims's. Its own expert, Norah Rudin, a private forensic DNA consultant, agreed that the sperm matched him. Where she disagreed with the prosecution was over the non-sperm DNA. Rudin believed it came from someone other than Sims or Elizabeth, and the defense built its case on that. Defense counsel told the jurors that they could not adopt an inference of guilt if there was a reasonable inference that "somebody else's DNA is on this young girl's underwear." In ABC30's words, the defense blamed the murder on someone else throughout.
The defense also called Ann Hernandez, Elizabeth's best friend. She testified about a boy named Mark Masingale, who she said had liked Elizabeth, had once shoved and choked Hernandez, and had claimed to have killed Elizabeth. On cross-examination, her memory proved unreliable, and she agreed that Masingale was known as a chronic liar.
On Thursday, September 4, 2008, the jury found Sims guilty of first-degree murder. He showed no visible reaction. Elizabeth's mother cried out as the verdict was read. "I thank God for that. Cause God knew he was guilty. That's all I have to say," Ramona Soriano said outside the courtroom.
One of the jurors, Kyndra Galloway, explained to ABC30 how the DNA had decided it for her: "That's unrebuttable. You know it's there, if he raped her, it's very likely he killed her."
Gunderson told KMPH Fox 26: "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." He defended the decision to try a man who was already serving a life term. "I can't think of circumstances where it's not worthwhile to try him even if it's only for the satisfaction of the family and knowing if it was a third of a century later, the defendant would be brought to justice."
After the verdict, prosecutors asked the judge to dismiss the remaining count, the murder of Kathy Stark. Gunderson's explanation was blunt. Sims could not serve any additional time for these murders, he said, so his office had decided that if it won a guilty verdict for Elizabeth Ortega it would not try the Stark count "until and unless the board of prison hearings is stupid enough" to release him. KMPH described the dismissal as one "for now." ABC30 reported simply that the office had decided to dismiss the charge, because the absence of a death penalty in 1974 meant no additional punishment was available.
Sims's own attorney, who is not named in the reports, said Sims had had some hope of being acquitted and was now eager to get back to San Quentin.
At a sentencing hearing in October 2008, Sims's lawyer asked for a continuance so that he could file a motion for a new trial, arguing that the judge had left out a standard jury instruction. The judge refused, finding that the instructions as given had covered the point. Sims was sentenced to life in prison, his second life term.
Ramona Soriano spoke to him directly at that hearing. "It was like something came out from the depth of hell to destroy the goodness here," she said. Elizabeth's aunt, Rosie Beltran, told ABC30: "He's going to die alone in that prison."
Sims appealed to the California Court of Appeal, Fifth Appellate District, in case number F056256. He was represented by appointed counsel, Robert D. Bacon. The panel of Acting Presiding Justice Vartabedian and Justices Levy and Hill decided the case on August 25, 2009, in an opinion not certified for publication.
Sims raised three issues. The first was the jury instructions. The trial court had given CALCRIM No. 225, which tells jurors how to evaluate circumstantial evidence of intent or mental state, but not CALCRIM No. 224, the general instruction on circumstantial evidence. Sims argued that the jury might have understood the rule about choosing the reasonable inference that points to innocence as applying only to his state of mind. The Attorney General conceded the omission was an error. The court agreed it was error but held it harmless. It pointed out that No. 225 itself contained general language, that the jury had been instructed on reasonable doubt and on direct and circumstantial evidence, and that defense counsel had made the argument directly to the jurors. It also called the evidence strong: the sperm DNA, Sims's home a block away, Carolyn Turner's testimony and his "Then I'll pay" remark.
The second issue, the refusal to postpone sentencing, the court treated as moot, because it had already decided the instruction question on the merits.
The third issue was the San Quentin interview. Sims argued that the prosecutor's talk of a death sentence, which was legally impossible for a 1974 murder, had made his statements involuntary. The trial court had found that Skiles's statements were not intentionally deceptive, were not coercive or illegal, and had no coercive effect. The Court of Appeal distinguished earlier California cases in which confessions were thrown out, noting that those cases involved several coercive factors at once, and that here the death penalty reference was the only one. It also noted that Sims had argued back, insisted on going to trial, showed he understood the law and never changed his account. The court concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that the remark had not induced him to keep talking.
The judgment was affirmed. Whether Sims then sought review in the California Supreme Court, or filed any later petition, has not been reported.
On October 14, 2026, the CDCR's online inmate record showed him in custody at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, aged 91, under CDCR number B00358. It listed his parole eligible date as October 2014.
The record shows that after the Ortega conviction the parole board denied him parole on January 22, 2009, for fifteen years. In July 2022 a petition to move his next hearing forward was approved, and on January 11, 2023, he was denied parole for three years. In January 2024 an administrative review to advance his next hearing was denied. On December 16, 2025, he was denied parole for another three years. His next parole suitability hearing is tentatively set for December 2028.
The Stark count remains dismissed. Under the position the district attorney's office took in 2008, it would be refiled only if he were ever granted parole.
Two killings are proved by convictions: Janet Herstein, at a 1970s trial, and Elizabeth Ortega, by the 2008 jury verdict that the Court of Appeal affirmed in 2009.
One more was charged and set aside without a trial: Kathy Stark. Prosecutors chose not to try that count because it could not add to his punishment. No court has ever weighed the evidence in her case.
Two more were charged in 2001 and later dropped: Eva Hernandez Lucio and Robin Mcculler. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2001 that DNA from a hair found under a ring had matched Sims to Eva Lucio's killing. Why that count was dropped was never explained in the reports, and no court has found it proved.
The figure of five victims is the prosecution's view, stated by Gunderson in 2008. Sims has never admitted any of the killings, and he denied knowing Elizabeth Ortega. The defense theory at the Ortega trial, that a second person's DNA on her clothing pointed to another killer, was rejected by the jury. The other men raised in that case, Rudy Soriano and Mark Masingale, were never charged, and the sperm DNA did not match the other suspects whose blood was tested.
About 1935: Ray Dell Sims born (inferred from his reported ages).
1974: Kathy Stark, 17, killed in Fresno.
November 8, 1974: Elizabeth Ortega, 15, does not come home from school; her mother calls police.
November 9, 1974: Elizabeth's body is found at Avocado Lake. Sims lives a block from her home.
1975: Robin Mcculler killed.
1976: Eva Hernandez Lucio, 15, killed.
1977: Janet Herstein, 17, abducted and killed on her Fresno Guide paper route. Sims is arrested and later convicted of her first-degree murder.
June 8, 1978: Sims admitted to state prison, per CDCR.
1983 to 1993: parole denied six times, two years each time.
1987: Edna Herstein tells ABC30 Sims should not be free.
1991: Deputy Chris Curtice and criminalist Allen Boudreau reopen the Ortega case and collect blood samples.
December 6, 1995: parole denied for five years.
1996 to 1997: Cellmark Diagnostics testing links sperm on Elizabeth's clothing to Sims.
August 8, 2001: parole denied for five years.
November 2001: DNA from a hair under a ring links Sims to Eva Lucio's killing (Los Angeles Times); Curtice interviews Sims ("Then I'll pay").
November 29, 2001: Sims interviewed at San Quentin by Curtice, Sgt. Toby Rien and Deputy DA John Skiles.
Early December 2001: Sims brought to Fresno and pleads not guilty to four counts of murder and two of rape.
December 18, 2006: parole hearing postponed.
By 2008: Lucio and Mcculler counts dropped.
September 4, 2008: Fresno County jury convicts Sims of Elizabeth Ortega's murder; prosecutors ask for the Stark count to be dismissed.
October 2008: Sims sentenced to a second life term.
January 22, 2009: parole denied for fifteen years.
August 25, 2009: Court of Appeal, Fifth District, affirms the Ortega conviction (F056256).
January 11, 2023: parole denied for three years.
December 16, 2025: parole denied for three years.
October 14, 2026: CDCR lists Sims, 91, at the California Medical Facility, Vacaville; next hearing tentatively December 2028.