The man lived near both sites of cold case strangulations. Eric Leonard reports Feb. 9, 2023.
Murder charges were filed Thursday against a former karate instructor and carpenter allegedly linked by DNA evidence to the 1981 rapes and murders of two young women.
For more than four decades the man now accused in the strangulation killings lived undetected a few miles from the crime scenes, only connected to the cases recently through genealogical research aided by public family tree databases.
"The fact is, this suspect has been hiding in plain sight, for over 40 years," Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff told reporters.
He said investigators learned through DNA testing in 2004 that the murders of Rachel Zendejas in Camarillo in January 1981, and Lisa Gondek in Oxnard in December 1981, had been committed by the same person, but the profile that linked the killings could not be found in state or federal DNA databases.
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In 2019 detectives began to explore the possibility of finding the identity of a relative of the killer in commercial or public ancestry databases, in which people had voluntarily shared their DNA profiles for use in research.
"They later developed leads that identified the suspect as Tony Garcia," Fryhoff said.
Garcia, 65, was arrested Monday and stands accused of first degree murder with special circumstances for both homicides, said Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko.
"After more than four decades the long arm of the law has brought justice to the Gondek and Zendejas families," he said.
Police knew there were significant similarities in the manner and circumstances of the killings long before the DNA proof.
Both women visited the same now-defunct nightclub in Oxnard shortly before they were murdered.
"We have identified a number of common denominators that link the cases," Oxnard Police Chief Jason Benites said, but declined to share details publicly.
He and other officials at the announcement Thursday said they did not know if Garcia was ever questioned or considered a suspect in the initial investigations.
