Well, Sacramento County’s oldest cold case has finally been solved 52 years later after a county court reporter was murdered. Authorities say they know who the suspected killer is. Imagine you’re exactly where you want to be in life. You have the career, you have the man, you have the apartment, you have a wedding date circled on your calendar just weeks away.
Now imagine going to sleep tonight and never waking up. Not because of an accident, not because of an illness, because someone you don’t even know is watching your building, watching your balcony, watching the small gap in your sliding glass door, the one you left open just a crack for your cat.
That gap was 4 in wide, 4 in. That’s all it took. Nancy Benallack was a 28-year-old woman in Sacramento, California who had done everything right. And on the night of October 25th, 1970 everything wrong found her anyway. This is her story and her killer was never caught in his lifetime. Her case went cold for over 50 years and the answer, when it finally came, would shake everyone who had ever lived near her, worked with her, or loved her because it turned out the man who did this wasn’t a
stranger from some faraway place. He was right next door. Sacramento in 1970 was a city in motion. The state capital humming with government workers, court staff, public servants, people who believed in order, in process, in the slow grind of justice. Nancy Benallack belonged to that world.
She worked as a court reporter for Sacramento County. The person in the room who captured every word spoken in a courtroom. Every testimony, every verdict. Every moment that mattered she recorded. She was precise. She was disciplined. She was trusted. Colleagues described her as warm, responsible, the kind of person who showed up early and stayed late.
Not because she had to, but because she cared. Outside of work, Nancy had a full life. She had her apartment, she had her routines, and she had Ferris. Ferris N. Salame was the Chief Public Defender of Sacramento County, a serious, accomplished man whose job was to make sure the justice system treated people fairly.
He and Nancy were engaged. The wedding was planned for November 1970, weeks away. Weeks. They were two people who had found each other inside the same world of law and courts and Sacramento County. And they were building something together. There was just one small detail about Nancy’s apartment that nobody thought twice about.
She had a cat. And every night she left the sliding glass door to her second-floor balcony open just a crack, just enough for the cat to come and go, just a crack. It seemed harmless. It seemed like nothing. It was the kind of thing millions of people do every night without a second thought.
But in a building full of strangers, nothing is ever truly invisible. October 25th, 1970, a Sunday evening. Nancy spent it with Ferris. Nothing unusual, just a couple winding down the weekend together, probably talking about the wedding, about their future, about the ordinary, beautiful machinery of a life being built in real time.
Around 11:30 p.m., Ferris kissed her goodnight. He would later tell investigators that Nancy was already drifting towards sleep when he left. She was tired. She was safe. She was home. Ferris walked out the door. Nancy was alive. Somewhere in that same apartment building, just floors or walls away, someone else was watching.
What happened inside Nancy Benallack’s apartment on the night of October 25th and the early hours of October 26th, 1970 was violent beyond measure. She was attacked in her bedroom. She was stabbed more than 30 times. 30 times. The crime scene investigators who arrived the next morning would describe the attack as frenzied.
The kind of violence that speaks not to cold calculation, but to something uncontrolled and devastating. There were signs of a struggle. Nancy had fought. She had not gone quietly. At some point during that struggle, the attacker was cut. The attacker’s blood fell onto the floor of her apartment. A trail of drops left behind in the home of the woman murdered in cold blood.
In that moment, in those drops, a killer made a mistake he couldn’t take back. He didn’t know it yet. It would take 50 years for anyone to understand what those drops meant. But they were there. Patient. Waiting. The sliding glass door was still open when the sun came up. Nancy Benalack did not show up for work on the morning of October 26th.
For a woman described as reliable, as responsible, as someone her colleagues could set their watches by, that absence was immediately felt. Someone made a call. Then another call. No answer. By that morning, the apartment manager and a co-worker’s son went to check on her. What they found inside that apartment changed them forever.
Nancy was gone. Not missing, gone. The kind of gone that no one comes back from. Sacramento County law enforcement arrived quickly. Homicide investigators took over the scene, and almost immediately, something caught their attention. The blood. Not just Nancy’s. There was more than Nancy’s blood in that room. A trail of drops.
Small, deliberate, a path leading from inside the apartment, across the balcony, and down to the outside. The killer had bled his way out. And in a single victim homicide with no witnesses and no security cameras, this was the thread investigators were going to pull on for decades. The investigation moved fast in those early weeks.
Detectives focused where they always focus first, the people closest to the victim, her fiance, her colleagues, anyone who knew her routines, her address, her schedule. Ferris Salame, the man who had last seen Nancy alive, was not a suspect in any meaningful sense. He had left at 11:30 p.m. and his account was consistent.
He had no reason to harm her. He was, by all accounts, devastated. But investigators also turned their attention to the apartment complex itself, a building full of people, some who knew each other, some who were strangers, all sharing the same walls, the same stairwells, the same community laundry room. Who had noticed her? Who had seen her come and go? Two theories emerged early.
Either this was a burglary that went catastrophically wrong, an intruder who had panicked, or it was personal, someone who had targeted Nancy specifically. The violence of the attack pointed toward the latter. You don’t stab someone more than 30 times because you’re surprised they were home. But the motive? Nobody could see it clearly.
And then the investigation hit a wall. The 1970s had no DNA profiling, no genetic databases, no digital footprints. What investigators had was blood evidence, carefully collected and stored, and a case that began to cool. Nancy’s murder went cold. Ferris Salame lost the woman he was going to marry.
The courthouse where Nancy had spent her days went on without her. And in the apartment complex in Sacramento, her killer continued to live his life. He would die in 1997, 27 years after the night he climbed that balcony. He died without ever being questioned, without ever being charged, without ever having to answer for what he did. Or so he thought.
Cold cases have a particular kind of pain. They don’t just hurt the family in the immediate aftermath. They stretch. They pull. Every year that passes without answers is another year the family has to hold a loss that the world has already moved on from. For the people who loved Nancy Benallack, those years became decades.
But the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office never formally closed the file. The evidence, including the blood drops left by the attacker, was preserved. And investigators, when time allowed, came back to it. In 2004, something changed. Forensic technology had advanced to the point where investigators could now extract a DNA profile from very old biological evidence.
They went back to Nancy’s case. They went back to those blood drops, and they got a profile, a male DNA profile extracted from blood that had been sitting in an evidence storage room for 34 years. This was enormous. This was everything. Investigators now had what amounted to a biological fingerprint of the killer.
They ran it through CODIS, the national DNA database. But there was no match. Whoever had killed Nancy Benallack had never submitted DNA to any law enforcement system. He was in the database as no one. The case went cold again, but the profile existed now, and investigators knew that one day, maybe, the science would catch up.
In 2018, a case on the other side of California shook the entire country. The Golden State Killer, a serial murderer and rapist who had terrorized California for decades, was finally identified. His name was Joseph James DeAngelo, and he was caught not through traditional investigative methods, but through a new technique called forensic genetic genealogy.
Investigators took DNA from one of the crime scenes, uploaded it to a consumer database, and found partial matches. Not the suspect himself, but his relatives, cousins, second cousins, people who share a portion of his DNA because they share a bloodline. From those partial matches, genealogists can build a family tree.
They follow the branches, they map the generations, and eventually, they narrow the tree down to a specific individual who could be the source of the crime scene DNA. It’s painstaking. It requires expertise, privacy protocols, and time, but it works. After the Golden State Killer case, investigators across the country began revisiting their cold cases, cases with preserved DNA evidence and no matches in traditional databases.
Nancy Benallack’s case was one of them. In 2019, her case was submitted for forensic genetic genealogy analysis. What they found would rewrite the last 50 years. The genealogy process is not quick. It requires building a partial family tree from fragmentary DNA matches, people who share small percentages of genetic material with the suspect.
From there, investigators must identify common ancestors, trace descendants, and narrow the field. It can take months. In Nancy Benallack’s case, the DNA from those blood drops, preserved since 1970, was run against a genealogy database. There were matches, not to the killer himself, but to his family.
Genealogists began building a tree, tracing relatives, identifying candidates, running down leads, and the tree kept pointing toward a single branch, a man who had lived in Sacramento in 1970. A man who had lived in the same apartment complex as Nancy Benallack, a man named Richard John Davis. But there was a problem.
Richard John Davis had died in 1997. He couldn’t be brought in for questioning. He couldn’t be arrested. He couldn’t face a jury. He would never sit in a courtroom and hear a verdict. Before investigators could make any announcement, they needed to be certain, absolutely certain.
DNA had built the case, but DNA would need to confirm it. In 2022, Sacramento County investigators, working alongside the District Attorney’s Office, obtained a DNA sample connected to Richard John Davis through other means. The specifics of how that sample was acquired, through family members, through records, through other evidence, were not fully disclosed publicly.
But when that sample was compared to the male DNA profile extracted from the blood drops at Nancy Benallack’s apartment in 1970, it matched. After 52 years, 3 months, and counting, Nancy Benallack’s killer had a name. Richard John Davis, age 27 at the time of the murder, her neighbor, her killer, a man who had lived within the same building, shared the same parking lot, breathed the same air, and who had gone to his grave never having been held accountable for what he did on the night of October 25th, 1970. The
Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office announced the identification publicly in 2022. 52 years after Nancy Benallack’s murder, the world finally knew who had done it. Investigators believe he climbed the second-floor balcony, entered through the partially open sliding glass door, the one Nancy left open for her cat, and attacked her in her bedroom.
The motive remains officially unknown. There is no confession. There is no trial record. There is only the DNA evidence and the family tree it traced. What we know is this: He lived nearby. He likely saw her. He knew the building. He knew she was there.
And at some point on that October night, he made a decision that destroyed two lives. Hers immediately, and his in ways he may never have understood because the blood he left behind didn’t decay. It didn’t disappear. It waited. It waited 34 years to become a DNA profile. It waited another 18 years to find a family tree.
And it waited 52 years in total to finally say, “This is the man.” Nancy Benallack would have been in her 80s today. She never made it to her wedding day. She never got to become Ferris Salehmizadeh’s wife. She never got to grow old in the city she served, in the courthouse she loved. She never got to see what Sacramento would become, or what her own life might have looked like had she simply not left that door open.
The people who knew her, who remembered her from the courthouse hallways, from the apartment complex, from the years when she was young and full of plans, many of them are gone now, too. Time does not wait for answers. But the identification of Richard John Davis gave something back to anyone still carrying the weight of that loss.
Not justice, exactly. There will be no trial. There will be no prison sentence. There will be no moment in a courtroom when someone is made to account for what they did. But there is truth. After 52 years, Nancy Benallack’s case is no longer open. Her killer is no longer unknown. His name is on record.
The evidence is on record. History now knows what happened inside that apartment on that October night. And Nancy, who spent her career in courtrooms documenting the truth, finally has her own truth documented. The case of Nancy Benallack stands today as one of Sacramento County’s landmark successes in forensic genetic genealogy.
It is part of a growing body of work proving that cold cases are not closed cases, that DNA preserved in an evidence room is not dead evidence, that the science of genealogy, originally built to help people find their families, is now also helping victims find justice, even from the grave, even across half a century.
Somewhere in Sacramento, a sliding glass door opened for a cat, and 52 years later, the truth finally walked through.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
