At about a quarter past six on the evening of May 2, 1992, San Francisco police officers were called to Hang Ah Alley, off Clay Street in Chinatown, and found a woman lying on the ground inside a utility corridor. She had multiple traumatic injuries, and the autopsy found that she had been strangled. It took time to learn who she was. She was Nancy Hernandez, forty-five, and she had been using the corridor as a place to sleep.
Her case sat for more than thirty years. The San Francisco Police Department's Homicide Cold Case Unit reopened it in 2023, and DNA from swabs taken in 1992 was matched to Ricky Dawson. By then he was already known to investigators in three other states, and the match joined his name to a pattern: women strangled, beaten and sexually assaulted, in San Francisco, Denver, Florida and Seattle, over the course of the 1990s.
Dawson was born around 1961. In Florida he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in a sexual assault killing and was sentenced to twenty-five years; the conviction dates from 2004. In December 2004 a Denver detective traveled to Florida to interview him about a Denver case, and the police there announced that year that it was solved, but he was not charged for almost two decades.
That case was the death of Terri Turachak, thirty-five, found in her apartment on East 17th Avenue in east Denver on October 5, 1996. She had been sexually assaulted, and the autopsy found she had died of strangulation and blunt force trauma to the head. Records showed Dawson had been arrested in Denver in August and September 1996, placing him in the city at the time. He was charged with her murder in February 2023, about three months before he was due to be released in Florida, and extradited to Colorado that month. "My hope would be that he would get the death penalty but I know that's not possible in Colorado," her daughter, Sarah Oakland, said in 2023.
On March 17, 2026, a Denver jury convicted him of first-degree murder. He faced a mandatory sentence of life without the possibility of parole, with sentencing set for April 29. "Today's verdict can't bring back Terri Turachak, but it brings a powerful measure of justice in this case, that Ricky Dawson will spend the rest of his life in prison," said Denver District Attorney John Walsh.
San Francisco police had issued a warrant for him in the Hernandez killing in January 2025. After the Denver trial he was extradited to California, and on July 22, 2026, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced that he had been charged with murder, with special circumstances alleging a prior murder conviction, based on the Florida case, and allegations of rape and sodomy. He was arraigned on July 20, pleaded not guilty and denied the allegations. The court ordered him held without bail, and a preliminary hearing was set for July 30.
Investigators also said the DNA profile taken from him in Florida matched evidence from a 2000 killing in Seattle. The victim, Debbie Cashio, had suffered multiple blunt force injuries and died of strangulation. He has not been charged in her death, and the San Francisco charge had not been tried as of late July 2026.