DNA technology leads to arrest in 1980 murder of Antioch girl, 14

When the body of 14-year-old Suzanne Bombardier was pulled from the San Joaquin River five days after her disappearance, it shook her hometown to the core.

Antioch was much smaller back in 1980, less than half the population it is today. The girl's killing was one of the biggest and most shocking cases the city had ever experienced.

Very early on, Mitchell Lynn Bacom was a prime suspect. But it took the persistence of a few cops, the establishment of a cold-case investigator at the county District Attorney's Office and the advent of DNA testing to finally arrest him this week, 37 years later.

The case provides Exhibit A for the argument that every police department should have access to cold-case investigators. With technological advances, cases that lacked sufficient evidence just a few years ago can now be brought to trial.

County prosecutors say Bacom, 63, a registered sex offender and two-time felon, was charged Wednesday with murder. Police suspect he might be linked to other crimes.

Contra Costans who were around nearly four decades ago, especially those who lived in Antioch, will remember the picture of Suzanne that appeared repeatedly on TV and in newspapers, and the story of how she mysteriously vanished while babysitting her two nieces.

The case haunted Greg Glod, the original investigator of the Bombardier case who had been a cop just 2 1/2 years when she was killed. Glod had grown up in Antioch and had gone to Antioch Junior High School about 13 years before Suzanne.

He went on to the Concord Police Department, 27 years at U.S. Secret Service and six years at the Pentagon. But the unsolved Antioch case kept bringing him and Ron Rackley, who was just six months out of the police academy when he took the original missing person report, back to the Bay Area to press police to keep the investigation going and not forget the case.

In 2015, they drummed up media coverage for the 35th anniversary of the killing. That same year, Paul Holes, a forensics expert who had followed the Bombardier case for two decades, was hired by the district attorney to investigate cold cases.

Antioch Police still had the biological samples swabbed from the girl's body after she'd been in the river five days. Police and Holes sent it to the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office Forensic Laboratory for DNA testing.

As Holes tells it, even in 2015 the DNA technology wasn't advanced enough. Only with advances available within the last year were they able to develop a DNA profile, which matched to Bacom in the FBI's database.

If only. About eight months after Bombardier's body was found in June 1980, Bacom was arrested in a separate case, for which he was convicted of first degree burglary, robbery, rape and sodomy.

The bad news is we didn't have DNA technology then. The good news is we do today.