A 40-year-old wife and mom goes jogging one November afternoon before she’s supposed to pick her 10-year-old son up from school. The woman, Armida Wiltsey, picks a popular spot for jogging: the 2.7-mile trail around Lafayette Reservoir, a recreation spot in the hills above Lafayette, a suburb east of San Francisco. She never shows to pick her son up from school. A police dog later finds Wiltsey’s body in a wooded area about 40 feet off a paved trail. That was 1978.
Decades pass before investigators in 2003, using new DNA technology, are able to identify a suspect: Darryl Kemp, who was serving time in a Texas prison for a 1983 rape. A local newspaper reports that Kemp, now 72, now faces trial in Wiltsey’s killing after being extradicted to California. Four months before Wiltsey was killed, the then 42-year-old Kemp had been released from San Quentin after serving time for the 1957 rape and murder of a woman in Los Angeles.