Elizabeth Ortega was a 15-year-old Hispanic girl from Fresno, California, who was raped and murdered in 1974. The case went unsolved for decades before investigators reopened it and used DNA testing as the central evidence. In 2008 a Fresno County jury convicted 73-year-old Ray Dell Sims of first-degree murder in Ortega’s death; jurors described Sims’ DNA as strongly linking him to the crime. Sims had been serving a life sentence for the 1977 murder of another teenage girl, Janet Herstein, and had been returned to Fresno in 2001 when the Ortega case was reexamined.

Prosecutors at various times suspected Sims in other 1970s killings in the Fresno area, including the 1976 death of 15-year-old Eva Hernandez Lucio and the 1975 murder of Robin McCuller, but those charges were dropped. A charge tied to the 1974 killing of Kathy Stark was dismissed because no additional punishment could be imposed beyond Sims’ existing life terms. Ortega’s mother, Ramona Sorriano, expressed relief at the guilty verdict.

Does anyone have memories or information about Elizabeth, her last known movements in 1974, or the Fresno neighborhood at that time?