An 80-year-old man was sentenced to life in prison – with parole eligibility in seven years – for murdering a teenage girl who was visiting the city in 1978, prosecutors said Wednesday.
The sentencing of Mark Personette, of Denver, brings a more than 50-year-old case to a close. In November, Personette was convicted of first-degree murder in the killing of Marissa Harvey, a 15-year-old who disappeared in San Francisco while visiting from New York.
According to evidence presented at trial, Harvey – who was visiting her sister in San Francisco – went to Golden Gate Park but never came home. The following day, surfers discovered her body in the underbrush of Sutro Heights Park, officials said.
At the scene, investigators found her earring and a leaf stained with her blood. She had been badly beaten and strangled with a ligature. An autopsy revealed she had been violently attacked and sexually assaulted. But with little technology to properly examine the DNA, the investigation soon went cold.
In the early 2000s, DNA testing uncovered a male DNA profile on Harvey’s clothing, as well as on a piece of dried gun that was stuck to her back. But it would take another 20 years to identify Personette as a potential suspect through investigative genetic genealogy, officials said.
In 2021, FBI investigators observed Personette discarding trash at a Walmart parking lot more than 15 miles away from his home. After they obtained what he had thrown out, they discovered it included only personal hygiene items with his DNA, prosecutors said.
Authorities later discovered he had been separating his personal hygiene items from his other trash, prosecutors said. They also recovered 1970s maps of San Francisco, along with a set of California license plates with a 1979 registration sticker. Though he denied being in San Francisco in that time period, forensic testing showed his DNA profile matched the DNA on Harvey’s clothing and the piece of gum, prosecutors said.
He was arrested in December 2021.
At the trial, another woman testified that Personette had raped her in a wooded aera of New Jersey when she was 16 years old in 1979, about a year and a half after Harvey’s killing.
It was not immediately clear if there were additional victims.
“This sentence reflects the extraordinary cruelty of Mark Personette’s conduct and the harm he caused,” said Assistant District Attorney Heather Trevisan. “He will spend the rest of his life facing the consequence of taking hers.”
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This article originally published at Denver man gets life sentence in 1978 killing of teen visiting San Francisco.