40-year-old California teen murder finally solved

The 1983 killing of a 14-year-old girl in Red Bluff, California, has finally been solved — thanks in part to a single strand of hair found on the victim.

Rashell Ward was abducted while taking her usual five-block walk to school on the morning of March 3, 1983. Her body was found later that day by a rancher on Pine Creek Road, a few miles west of the city, on Interstate 5 in Tehama County. Ward had been bound with tape, sexually assaulted and shot in the back of the head. 

Ward was one of only two girls in eighth grade at the Seventh Day Adventist school in Red Bluff at the time. The story drew significant media coverage and led to an “overwhelming number of tips” and a “myriad of suspects,” Tehama County Sheriff Dave Kain told reporters Wednesday. The case even drew a confession from Henry Lee Lucas, the murderer who became known as the “Confession Killer” due to the many homicides he falsely claimed responsibility for. Lucas was eventually cleared of Ward’s killing due to inconsistencies in his story, but his confession wasted significant time and resources, authorities said.

Ward’s killer was revealed this week to be Johnny Lee Coy, who lived in Red Bluff at the time of her death, the Tehama County Sheriff’s Office announced Wednesday. Coy was convicted of kidnapping a mother and daughter in Red Bluff in 1989, forcing them to drive out of the city at gunpoint, before sexually assaulting the 21-year-old daughter and stealing the vehicle. Coy died in prison in June 2019 while serving two life sentences for that crime. He was never previously a suspect in Ward’s case. 

As with the closing of many recent cold cases, a combination of DNA analysis and forensic genealogy brought justice to Ward and her family. 

“Detectives had the forethought to take items and samples of evidence that were not of use at the time but played a crucial role later on in solving this case,” Kain said of the initial 1983 investigation. When detectives found Ward by Pine Creek Road that Thursday morning, they bagged up a single rootless strand of hair found on her body. 

The DNA drawn from that sample by a private lab in 2022 was then used by the FBI to connect family trees and distant relatives, who consented to give DNA samples. This ultimately identified Coy as Ward’s killer on Oct. 3. If Coy were alive today, detectives believe they would have enough evidence to convict him.

“The Tehama County Sheriff’s Office is pleased to offer the family of Rashell Ward closure,” Kain said. 

Another man long rumored to be linked to the case was Ron Koenig, the Tehama County sheriff at the time of Ward’s killing. Kain said the department was also happy to finally clear his name Wednesday.