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Los Angeles Police Solve 1996 Murder: Suspect Appears in Court
The killer of 17-year-old Gladys Arellano is finally facing justice.
A man has appeared in court to plead guilty to the killing of a California teenager back in 1996, finally resolving a case that had long been cold.
Gladys Arellano, 17, was last seen at her Boyle Heights home in Malibu on January 27th 1996. Her family reported her missing the following day, but her whereabouts were confirmed in the worst possible way on January 30th.
Police were called to Topanga Canyon, where the teenager’s partially clad body lay discarded down a desolate ravine. She had been brutally beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled to death.
As Gladys’s heartbroken family grieved their loss, investigators collected DNA from her body in the hope of getting a match using the burgeoning new technology.
However, there was no hit in either state or federal databases. Slowly, the case went cold and the years — and then the decades — slipped by.
But in 2019, there was a breakthrough. A man named Jose Luis Garcia was arrested in Los Angeles on a domestic violence charge. When he had his genetic material collected as per standard procedures, an alert rang out to police that he was a match to the…
