A previous karate teacher has been accused in association of the assaults and murders of two ladies in California.
Tony Garcia, 68, was accused of two counts of first-degree murder with unique conditions Thursday in the 1981 passings of 20-year-old Rachel Zendejas and 21-year-old Lisa Gondek.
“The truth of the matter is, this suspect has been remaining unnoticed without really having to try for north of 40 years,” Ventura District Sheriff Jim Fryhoff said at a public interview Thursday.
The two ladies were choked to death and physically attacked. The suspect was recognized through the analytical device of hereditary ancestry. Two paper young men, ages 9 and 14, found the group of Zendejas, an Oxnard Junior college understudy and single parent of two little girls, inside a parking space across the road from her Camarillo home around 6:30 a.m. on Jan. 18, 1981.
“She had headed out to have a great time and employed several sitters to sit with her girls,” said Fryhoff. “Subsequent to getting back from a night out Rachel drove the sitters home and in view of the proof left at the scene specialists accept Rachel was confronted as she escaped her vehicle in the wake of getting back from dropping off the sitters.”
The case went cold and in 2002 the Ventura District sheriff’s lab got criminological proof from the Zendejas crime location, however no match to a suspect in CODIS, the databank of criminals.
Hiding in Plain Sight: DNA Allegedly Links Calif. Karate Instructor to 1981 Rapes, Murders of 2 Women
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In 2004, the sheriff’s office discovered that the already obscure suspect in the homicide of Zendejas was connected through DNA proof to the Dec. 12, 1981, killing of Gondek, a retail worker who lived in Oxnard. Gondek was out for the night with companions at a nearby disco before her body was tracked down in the bath of her condo.
Fryhoff said Garcia was connected to the killings after the virus case specialists started involving hereditary lineage in 2019.
Garcia was in the Naval force and functioned as a karate educator at the hour of the slayings. “This is a continuous examination,” said Fryhoff.
“We will be searching for any extra observers, casualties or any individual who knows anything more that could prompt extra charges against Mr. Garcia.”
Garcia’s next court appearance is booked for Feb. 23. It’s indistinct on the off chance that he has entered a request or held a lawyer.
