A man who fatally strangled a 15-year-old girl at a San Francisco park in 1978 but eluded the authorities for 43 years was sentenced to life in prison, the authorities said Wednesday.
Mark Personette, 80, was sentenced in San Francisco Superior Court on Sept. 18, according to court records. He will be eligible for parole after seven years. A jury found him guilty in November of first-degree murder for killing Marissa Harvey of Queens.
“It’s just really a relief to have this man finally caught,” said Heather Trevisan, an assistant district attorney with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office who tried the case. “He had an extra 48 years that Marissa never got.”
Ms. Harvey was visiting her half sister in San Francisco over the Easter holiday in March 1978, prosecutors said. Her half sister’s friend drove Ms. Harvey to Golden Gate Park one day to ride horses.
But the stables were closed, and a groundskeeper spotted her heading toward the beach, Ms. Trevisan said. The groundskeeper was the last person to see her alive, Ms. Trevisan said.
On March 28, 1978, surfers found Ms. Harvey’s body in Sutro Heights Park along the Pacific Ocean, the police said. She had injuries indicating she had been raped, Ms. Trevisan said.
The police collected an earring that belonged to Ms. Harvey and a leaf with her blood on it. She died of strangulation by ligature, and a murder weapon was never found, Ms. Trevisan said.
The initial investigation lasted about a year, with the police interviewing more than 100 people and examining sex offenders in the area, Ms. Trevisan said.
“They were just out of luck,” she said.
As the case went cold, Ms. Harvey’s family was rattled by the lack of answers around her death, Jean Tarsy, Ms. Harvey’s aunt, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
“Everything fell apart,” Ms. Tarsy said of how her niece’s death had affected the family.
The San Francisco Police Department reopened the case in October 2020. Investigators had tested Ms. Harvey’s sweater, jeans and a dried piece of gum for DNA, and the tests revealed a male DNA profile, prosecutors said.
In 2021, investigators identified Mr. Personette as a potential suspect. Investigators with the F.B.I. tailed him for seven months in Denver and attempted to collect his personal hygiene items to examine his DNA, Ms. Trevisan said.
But they were unsuccessful because Mr. Personette did not have a trash service at his home, she said. They caught a break when Mr. Personette discarded some grocery bags and a jug of urine in trash cans in a nearby Walmart, she said.
During an interview with the authorities, Mr. Personette denied having been in San Francisco. But prosecutors said he had a map of San Francisco from the 1970s and California license plates with a 1979 registration sticker in his possession.
A test showed that Mr. Personette’s DNA matched the samples collected from Ms. Harvey’s sweater and jeans and the gum near her body, prosecutors said.
Ms. Trevisan said the authorities had not determined Mr. Personette’s motive.
Sam O’Keefe, Mr. Personette’s defense lawyer, said his client maintains his innocence.
“We recognize the profound loss suffered by Marissa Harvey’s family and the pain they have endured for nearly five decades,” he said. Mr. O’Keefe said that “significant legal and evidentiary issues” had affected Mr. Personette’s right to a fair trial. He raised issues with the DNA testing and “old hearsay reports” in a motion for a new trial, but the judge overseeing the case denied it.
Ms. Tarsy, the victim’s aunt, said she thinks about Ms. Harvey all the time. When Ms. Harvey’s father died, she said, his daughter was among his final thoughts.
“‘Now, I will be with Marissa,’” Ms. Tarsy recalled him as saying.
Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes contributed reporting.
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