Police say they’ve cracked 43-year-old cold case
‘For more than four decades, Marissa Harvey’s family members have been relentless advocates to bring her killer to justice,’ police chief says
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Police have made an arrest in the murder of a 15-year-old girl who died by strangulation in March 1978.
Mark Stanley Personette, 76, has been arrested for the murder of Marissa Rolf Harvey, 43 years after her death.
Marissa had been adopted at the age of three, but on Christmas 1977, a woman in her 30s had visited the Port Washington, New York home, claiming to be her biological sister, according to SFGATE. Marissa asked her parents to let her visit her sister in San Francisco, but her parents didn’t want her to go. In the end, they felt it would be unjust to force her to stay.
Marissa then travelled from Queens, New York to visit her sister in San Francisco over Easter. Her body was found in Golden Gate Park a few days later.
The San Francisco Police Department investigated her death, but the case grew cold. A little over a year after the case was reopened in October 2020, an arrest was finally made on Thursday.
San Francisco officers went to Colorado to arrest Mr Personette, who has been charged with one count of homicide.
The arrest took place following a joint operation in the Denver suburbs conducted by the San Francisco Police Department’s homicide unit, the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the FBI, and the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado.
The suspect was taken to the Jefferson County Jail and is set to appear in court on 10 January.
“For more than four decades, Marissa Harvey’s family members have been relentless advocates to bring her killer to justice,” San Francisco police chief Bill Scott said in a statement. “We hope this development in the case begins to bring a measure of healing and closure they’ve been too long denied.”
Marissa was driven to Golden State Park on 27 March 1978 to spend an afternoon horseback riding, The New York Times reported at the time. Her body was found near Sutro Heights Park the following day.
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the stable where you could rent horses was closed on the day Marissa went to the park to ride. Coroner Boyd Stephen reportedly said that Marissa was discovered “badly beaten and strangled with a cordlike device”. She had also been sexually assaulted.
Her sister, Miriam Wadeiff, identified her body. At the time, she was a graduate student and teacher at the San Francisco Institute. Marissa’s stepmother said she was studying at St Dominic’s School in Oyster Bay, on Long Island.
The San Francisco Police Department said on Sunday that its homicide unit “led an investigation that employed the best available technology at the time and exhausted every lead”.
“Despite their best efforts, the investigation went cold,” they said. The department’s unit for cold cases picked the murder back up in October of last year, using “advanced investigative methods”.
“To the families and friends of all victims awaiting justice for crimes committed in our city, we hope this case sends an unequivocal message that you are never forgotten by the San Francisco Police Department — and that our cold-case investigators continue their tireless work on your loved ones’ behalf,” Chief Scott said.
Following Mr Personette’s arrest, the department asked other agencies to go through their cold case files for murders involving the sexual abuse of young women to see if Mr Personette could be a suspect in other cases.
Mr Personette had previously been booked in Somerville, New Jersey in October in 1979 and in Bernards Township, New Jersey where he was arrested for assault. He was also booked in November 1979 in Hopewell Township, New Jersey.
Newspapers in the state reported at the time that Mr Personette was accused of asking a 16-year-old girl if she wanted to take a ride in his car, then proceeding to assault and rape her. Charged with aggravated sexual assault, he was indicted in 1980, according to SFGATE.
Jail records show that Mr Personette is being held without bail on a charge of being a fugitive of justice. It’s unclear if he has hired a lawyer to speak on his behalf.