According to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, a sought suspect in a homicide that occurred in 1992 on the Peninsula has been located dead, bringing an end to a cold case that has lasted for the past 30 years. As stated in a press release issued by the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, the investigation into the death of Juliette Rivera was officially closed with the revelation that the only suspect in her killing had passed away.
The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday announced the closing of a 30-year-old murder case after investigators determined the lone suspect they were seeking had died elsewhere in the state earlier this year. https://t.co/LKfa8Guidh
— San Mateo Daily Journal (@smdailyjournal) August 3, 2022
Juliette Rivera, who was 25 years old when she died, was discovered dead in San Mateo County, California, in July 1992, by a farmworker who was working in the area of an irrigation pond. Even though she had been registered missing just ten days before she was discovered, her skull had been smashed in on the left side with a blunt instrument, and her body was already in an advanced decomposition stage.
The police immediately identified Gregory Marc Riviera as a person of interest. Law & Crime claimed that he was 50 years old at the time of Juliette’s murder and that he was a friend of hers. In Riviera’s testimony, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office (SMCSO) discovered a number of discrepancies, and as a result, they decided to issue a warrant for his arrest.
Riviera, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen, and his vacated flat in Alameda, California, was a complete mess. After thirty years had passed without Riviera being apprehended by law enforcement, on May 12, 2022, the Merced County coroner called the Santa Maria County Sheriff’s Office to inform them that Riviera’s fingerprints matched those found on a vagrant who had passed away on January 29, 2022.
Nevertheless, the transient was identified by the name Jon Paul, and the coroner had checked his prints to contact his family so that he could convey the devastating news about his demise to them. However, the fingerprints established beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect was Riviera, bringing closure to the decades-long mystery.
It came out that Riviera used to have a brother called John Paul, and he had been hiding out under that alias for the past three decades to avoid getting caught. The police have spoken to John Paul’s daughter, who revealed that her father and uncle frequently assumed the identities of one another in order to elude capture by law enforcement.
According to a statement sent by the Santa Monica County Sheriff’s Office to Patch, this case has been resolved since the identity of the suspect, Abraham Rivera, also known as Gregory Marc Riviera and Jon Paul, was eventually found, and he has since passed away.
In the same release, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office (SMCSO) thanked the Alameda Police Dept, the Merced Sheriff’s Office and Coroner Bureau, and the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Department for their support in the investigation.
This story syndicated with permission from For the Love of News
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