Georgina Pacheco & Robert Parks
Accompanied by a DNA analyst from the state’s Department of Justice office in Eureka, Sheriff Tom Allman announced Tuesday that the 1988 rape and murder of Georgina Pacheco had been solved.
Robert James Parks, a Fort Bragg fisherman, and a brother-in-law of the victim, has been identified as the killer. Parks committed suicide in 1999 in Long Beach Harbor by chaining himself to a boat in 30 feet of water and sinking it. Parks was the last person to have been seen with Miss Pacheco. He’d picked her up at her place of work, the Sea Pal Restaurant in Fort Bragg.
The DNA science applied to the case was complicated. The FBI’s samples taken from the murder scene had, over time, become unusable for identification purposes. But the persistence of Sheriff’s detective Andy Porter, and DA’s investigator Tim Kiely, persuaded the state’s Department of Justice laboratory to take another look at the post-mortem rape kit. The lab soon found identifiable DNA on the wooden handles of swabs preserved at the time of the murder, a time when DNA as a forensics tool was in its infancy.
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