Volume 19 · Chapter 12
The Long Walk Home
Richard Armand Archibeque
Victim: Mary Elizabeth Quigley
Case at a glance
- When
- September 9, 1977
- Where
- War Memorial Park, Santa Clara, California
- Perpetrator
- Richard Armand Archibeque
- Victim
- Mary Elizabeth Quigley
- Outcome
- Convicted of first-degree murder in March 2009 and sentenced to seven years to life; the conviction was affirmed on appeal in October 2010
The case
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.
Read the full story
This case is told in full in True Crime Case Histories, Volume 19 by Jason Neal.
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Where it happened
Why this case
“Mary walked home. That is the whole of what she did wrong, by the standards people applied to girls in 1977. The man who followed her sat in the same classrooms she did, and he was still in the area when the DNA finally gave him a name.”
— Jason Neal, author of True Crime Case Histories
