The details of a cold case remind us of the many unsolved murders in Monterey County.

It’s Saturday, a rainy day, and for many people a day off that you can spend doing whatever you want. For many of us it is reading or watching something, often a crime story— humanity's favorite genre—where the blood spills and a detective puts himself in a hazardous ordeal, while we are warm and cozy under a blanket. There is little more satisfying than being a couch detective, solving murders and making brilliant discoveries with a mouthful of potato chips.

Aga Popęda here, and I was thinking about the pleasure of solving mysteries and bringing justice to the community while reading a news story in the April 9 edition of the Weekly that is much less abstract and far more real. Staff Writer Aric Sleeper looks at a 42-year-old unsolved murder case.

In 1984, Francis DeAlvis was stabbed to death in his Monterey apartment. He was a 58-year-old elementary school teacher. To this day, nobody knows what happened, and his family is still grieving.

The honor and the hard task of solving the case belongs to retired Monterey Assistant Chief of Police Bill Clark, “who says he continues to do cold cases because it helps families get closure,” Sleeper says.

Clark’s investigation is all about forensics and DNA analysis, and is funded thanks in part to the nonprofit Cold Case Project of Monterey County. It formed in 2025 and has brought some real results to the families of homicide victims in Monterey County—a fact more thrilling and more satisfying than any crime show.