The Long Walk Home:Richard Archibeque·Richard Armand Archibeque·Mary Elizabeth Quigley

Mary Elizabeth Quigley was seventeen and a senior at Santa Clara High School in California. On the night of September 9, 1977, she went to a keg party thrown for the new school year at a house near Monroe and Market streets. She left alone around 11:45 p.m. to walk to a friend’s house a few blocks away.

The next day a groundskeeper found her body in the park nearby, about three hundred yards from the party, hanging from a chain-link fence by her own jacket sash. She had been raped and strangled. The case sat unsolved for nearly thirty years, but the evidence was preserved. In 2005 Santa Clara Detective Sergeant Wahid Kazem sent it out for modern testing, and on December 27, 2006, the profile matched Richard Armand Archibeque, a classmate who had been at the same party.

His DNA was in the database because of a 1979 rape conviction involving a sixteen-year-old girl. Archibeque was arrested the day of the match. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder on March 2, 2009, though it rejected a rape special circumstance, and he was sentenced under the law in force in 1977 to seven years to life. The California Court of Appeal affirmed on October 12, 2010.