Forty-three years ago, San Joaquin County sheriff’s deputies responded to a report of a body floating near Blossom Road and Beaver Slough in the town of Thornton.
The body was badly decomposed, found wearing only white swim trunks with red and blue stripes and a tattoo on his left arm reading, “Black is Beautiful.” He had been shot in the shoulder.
Detectives didn’t have much to go on.
But the Sheriff’s Office reported this week it had cracked the case and now knows the man’s identity: Edward Donald Raymond, who would have been 78 today.
It is an example of how modern technology is allowing police agencies to tackle the approximately 600 cold cases in the county — cases relegated to a file drawer because there’s no new information to solve the crimes.
The Sheriff’s Office already had a cold case task force, but it sought to enhance the efforts of that team by making resources available to other police departments in the county. To accomplish that, the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors last week voted to create a Countywide Cold Case Task Force and awarded it a $500,000 grant.
The goal is to help departments that would like to tackle more of their cold cases, but lack resources. The cost of DNA testing can run $8,000, the district attorney’s office said.
“This task force is about hope and justice for families who’ve waited far too long,” Board of Supervisors Chair Paul Canepa said in a statement. The board unanimously approved the new effort last week.
The initiative was a key recommendation of the 2018-19 San Joaquin County Grand Jury report, which called for enhanced efforts to reduce the county’s backlog of unsolved cases.
The grand jury said it found insufficient staffing to tackle the growing backlog of cold cases.
“Cold case homicide investigations in San Joaquin County rarely result in case closure,
arrest or prosecution. This is a contributing factor to the increasing number of cold case
homicides in San Joaquin County,” the grand jury said in its report.
The report also noted there is no clear definition of what constitutes a cold case, although it suggested they generally involve the most serious of crimes — homicides, missing persons, sexual assaults and the like — for which all leads have been exhausted. How much time needs to pass before a case is considered “cold”? That also was not specified.
The new multiagency task force is being led by District Attorney Ron Freitas and Sheriff Patrick Withrow, who said despite the number of years that pass, his agency never gives up on its cold cases.
“We’re very excited about this board committed to bring justice to these very tough cases,” Freitas said in a statement. “This allows us to do even more going forward.”
And Withrow said that more vigorous pursuit of cold cases will help comfort survivors of the victims.
As for Raymond, whose body was found floating in the slough, the Sheriff’s Office said he had never been reported missing. But because of the recent identification of his remains, a lot more details about him are emerging.
A man fitting his description had been seen driving a Cadillac a few days before his body was found. He also had an alias, Edward Wilson, and had given an Oakland address when he had been arrested in San Francisco in 1976. The charge for which he was arrested was not disclosed.
At the very least, his relatives — if he had any — can now know he simply hadn’t disappeared.
“Every unsolved case is a promise we made to a victim and their loved ones — a promise that we will never stop seeking the truth,” Withrow said. “No matter how much time has passed, we owe it to our community to bring answers, closure, and accountability.”