With the help of DNA technology, John Jeffrey Sipos, 75, was arrested in Pennsylvania last weekend in the 1969 murder of Mary Scott, a 23-year-old California woman
In a photo courtesy Rosalie Sanz, Marry Scott. With the help of DNA technology, John Jeffrey Sipos, 75, was arrested in Pennsylvania last weekend in the 1969 murder of Scott, a 23-year-old California woman. (Courtesy Rosalie Sanz via The New York Times)
Rosalie Sanz was a teenager in 1969 when she looked out the window of her family’s San Diego home on a dark November night and saw two men in suits. She remembers her mother listening quietly to the detectives telling her that her 23-year-old daughter, Mary Scott, had been murdered.
“It was very brief,” Sanz said. “They closed the door, and my mom came and told me that my sister had been killed.”
The case went cold for half a century.
But on Tuesday, the San Diego Police Department announced that with the help of forensic genealogy, a suspect had been identified. On Oct. 24, John Jeffrey Sipos, 75, was arrested in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, in the murder of Scott, the police said. Sipos is being held in the Lehigh County Detention Center awaiting extradition to San Diego, they said.
Charges will be filed this week in the “cold case murder,” Tanya Sierra, a spokeswoman for the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, said in an email.
©2019 New York Times News Service