SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office said Wednesday that the suspect in the 1978 sexual assault and murder of 15-year-old Marissa Harvey must appear in court.
In a press release, the District Attorney’s office said the case sat cold for 43 years until a hit in a genealogical database linked DNA taken from the crime scene to 76-year-old Marc Stanley Personnette.
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Personette was arrested in Conifer, Colorado, last December, on suspicion of murder in Harvey’s death. He is scheduled to appear in court in San Francisco on Thursday at 9 p.m.
In 1978, Harvey traveled from New York to San Francisco to visit family. She went to Golden Gate Park on March 27 but did not return, police said. Her body was found in Sutro Heights Park on March 28, 1978.
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At the time, the city’s homicide details investigated the case using the best available technology and exhausted every single trace, Scott said.
However, the investigation went cold until October 2020, when the department’s homicide cold-case unit reopened the case using advanced investigative methods used by the department’s forensic department.
“For more than four decades, Marissa Harvey’s family members have been relentless advocates of bringing her killer to justice, and we hope that this development in the case begins to bring a degree of healing and closure that they have long been denied,” the police chief said. said Bill Scott last December.
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“We are proud of our team and our cooperation with the SFPD to solve this crime,” Boudin said in the press release. “We will work to ensure that Mr Personnette is held accountable for the brutal and heinous acts that took Marissa’s life and to bring an end to her family, which has never stopped defending justice.”
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