Monterey County’s Cold Case Task Force cracks two years-old mysteries thanks to DNA testing.

A coordinated effort by Monterey County law enforcement agencies to resolve long-dormant cold cases has resulted in a pair of breakthroughs – one solving a 1991 Seaside murder, another bringing more clarity to 2014’s eerie “Mom-in-the-Box” case in Monterey.

On Thursday, July 31, the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office and the Seaside Police Department announced that they had identified the killer of Vicki Johnson, a 34-year-old woman who was found dead in Seaside’s Sabado Park in January 1991. Testing of DNA beneath Johnson’s fingernails matched with Frank Lewis McClure of Seaside, who died in 2021 at age 77.

Johnson was the mother of three children, including Orlando Johnson, now a professional basketball player. The violent nature of her death – she was found strangled and asphyxiated – led investigators to revisit possible evidence collected on her nails during a struggle with the killer, according to Bill Clark, a detective on the county’s Cold Case Task Force.

Also on July 31, the Monterey Police Department revealed that DNA testing and forensic genealogy work had revealed the true identities of Francesca Linda Jacobs, who was found dead of starvation in her Monterey apartment in 2014, as well as her mother, whose decomposed remains were discovered in a box underneath Jacobs’ kitchen table.

Those efforts identified the starved woman as Linda Rae Jacobs and confirmed the woman in the box as her mother, Ida Florence Jacobs. Linda Jacobs, whose California driver’s license indicated she was 58 years old when she died, was actually 12 years older than that. No foul play is suspected, but cannot be ruled out, in the death of her mother. Clark says he spoke with family members who remembered the two women as having an “extremely close” relationship.

The resolutions to both the Johnson and Jacobs cases are the work of the county’s Cold Case Task Force, which launched in 2020 as a partnership between the DA’s office, the Sheriff’s Office and local police departments. Building on previous initiatives like the Monterey Peninsula Cold Case Project and aided by a $535,000 U.S. Justice Department grant, the task force has looked to use DNA testing technology to re-investigate unsolved homicides, missing persons cases and unidentified human remains.

Clark – who retired from Monterey PD in 2020 after a 31-year career, but continues to work as a reserve officer on cold cases – has led much of that work, alongside Deputy District Attorney Matt L’Heureux. Their efforts have resolved cases including the 1981 murder of Sonia Herok-Stone of Carmel, whose killer was sentenced to life in prison in June.

“We have over 600 unsolved homicides in this county,” Clark notes. “I think it’s important for people in our communities to understand law enforcement is working on these cold cases. We have not forgotten.”

The Johnson case was one that seemed forgotten before being reopened by the task force: The DNA testing technology that incriminated McClure, though not readily available in 1991, is not particularly new. Clark says he picked up the Johnson case in October 2021 – the same month that McClure died. It took nearly two years to receive the DNA test results from the state Justice Department’s backlogged lab.