Posted on 11/27/2024 8:20:31 PM PST by nickcarraway
A man who passed a lie detector test and was released from custody after the brutal slaying of a 17-year-old girl in California has been identified as her killer, 45 years later.
In February 1979, an unidentified man called the the sheriff’s office in Riverside County to report a body dumped in a snowpack off Highway 243, near Banning. Deputies described the caller as “argumentative” and said the caller could not identify if the victim was male or female.
Authorities later found the body south of Poppet Flats Road and identified the victim as Esther Gonzalez. On Feb. 7, the teenager was walking from her parents’ house in Beaumont to her sister’s house in Banning when she was raped and bludgeoned to death, the Riverside District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
Five days after receiving the call about the body, authorities identified the man as Lewis Randolph “Randy” Williamson and asked him to come in to take a polygraph test. Williamson agreed, passed the test and was cleared of any wrongdoing. No arrests were ever made in the case.
Riverside County District Attorney's Office
When Williamson died in Florida in 2014, a DNA sample was taken during his autopsy. Ten years later, through forensic genealogical advancements, Othram labs in Texas was able to positively match Williamson’s DNA to the semen taken from the crime scene.
“Although Williamson was seemingly cleared by the polygraph in 1979, he was never cleared through DNA because the technology had not yet been developed,” the district attorney’s office said.
The California Department of Justice has now confirmed Williamson as Gonzalez’s rapist and killer.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Pathological liars and psychopaths usually pass polygraphs with ease.
Can’t remember the wording but someone said a polygraph test can only catch someone who cares about lying to people. Others can skate. Such as sociopaths.
Ding Ding Ding.
Ding ding.
….or, possibly a piss-poor polygrapher.
Poppet Flats Rd., where the body was dumped in a snowbank, is normally not high enough for snow. However, in February 1979, the snow level dropped so low that even Banning and Beaumont were briefly snowed in.
OJ Simpson took a polygraph because he was utterly convinced of his prowess as a liar. He failed horribly
shame on the lame justice system.
You may not remember but alliteration triggers the poet in me.
Perhaps a peripatetic but persuasive and perspicacious piss-poor polygrapher despite a lack of prerequisites was permitted this pursuit palliatively, proving a paucity of plausibly pertinent professional propensity and a preponderance of prominently pathetic produced pratfalls.
Polygraph is bunk science, as is voice-stress analysis. Thats why they are not admissible evidence. Most people can be trained to alter their responses enough to fool them one way or another.
No polygraphs test on other side. Unnecessary. Go straight to jail.
And those who have been trained to beat the box.
“This is supposed to be a good outcome?...its a horrible outcome..that scum out and about while this girl died a terrible death..”
The only thing it does is show that our sick and pathetic justice system didn’t just become sick and pathetic.
Thomas Sowell writes that to understand the bureaucratic mindset, one has to realize that bureaucrats are concerned about processes, not outcomes. So this is a triumph for the SF Chronicle and state of California to find out the guy did it ten years after he died and was never punished. The girl or any further victims of his are of no consequence at all. Same way back then as now.
So you and I agree that this article is ghastly and appalling. But I think the libs wrote it to justify more DNA collection.
My wife can look at me and ask " what's wrong?" Just as I'm thinking about the rough idle in the car yesterday..
Prodigiously positive!
Pish Posh!
Preternaturally Pedantic!
Punishment Pending!
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