What happened to Judith? Nancy Bennallack, a 28-year-old court reporter, was found brutally murdered in her Sacramento apartment on October 26, 1970. Bennallack had been engaged to Chief Public Defender Farris Salamy, and the two had spent the evening together before Salamy left her apartment around 11:30 p.m. That night, an intruder entered her second-story apartment by climbing up the balcony and stabbing her over 30 times, nearly decapitating her.
Investigators discovered a trail of blood that indicated the attacker had cut himself during the assault.
Despite intensive investigations at the time, including interviews with hundreds of individuals, no suspect was identified, and the case eventually went cold. However, in 2004, DNA evidence from blood at the scene was analyzed, leading to the development of a forensic DNA profile, but no matches were found in criminal databases.
In 2019, Sacramento authorities used genetic genealogy to track down relatives of the person whose DNA was found at the scene. This led them to Richard John Davis, a man who had lived in the same apartment complex as Bennallack at the time of the murder. Davis had passed away in 1997, but his connection to the crime was confirmed through DNA analysis. While Davis is now deceased and cannot face trial, his identification brought some closure to one of Sacramento's oldest unsolved cases.
