announced they arrested 81-year-old Patrick Galvani<\/a> without incident.<\/p>\nThe San Mateo district attorney\u2019s office charged him with murder Tuesday. He is in custody in the Maguire Correctional Facility in Redwood City and is due back in court on Friday. <\/p>\n
Galvani\u2019s attorney, Douglas Horngrad, issued a statement, saying his client \u201cis innocent.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis murder charge was filed against him years ago and the case was dismissed for lack of evidence,\u201d Horngrad wrote in an email. \u201cAs I understand it, the evidence is the same, and we believe the outcome will be the same. Mr. Galvani will be exonerated again.\u201d<\/p>\n
San Mateo County Dist. Atty. Stephen Wagstaffe said new evidence would be presented, but didn\u2019t elaborate on what that would be, only noting that it \u201cisn\u2019t DNA evidence.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe think we have enough to convict and we have an ambitious prosecutor who can accomplish that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Wagstaffe added that he \u201cloved\u201d Horngrad, but balked at the defense attorney\u2019s claim that there was no new evidence in the case.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow would he even know? We just filed,\u201d Wagstaffe said.<\/p>\n
The Foster City Police Department also did not divulge what circumstances may have changed that prompted Patrick Galvani\u2019s arrest and did not comment when reached by a Times reporter.<\/p>\n
Alison Galvani, who lives in Connecticut and is the founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, initially declined to comment to media outlets. However, on Wednesday morning she thanked the San Mateo County district attorney\u2019s office and the Foster City Police Department, \u201cwho have been committed to pursuing justice for my mom.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWith an extraordinary combination of compassion and resolve, they are working tirelessly to ensure that light is shone upon even the darkest of cases,\u201d she wrote in a text message.<\/p>\n
Fisherman found Nancy Galvani\u2019s body floating near the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge in August 1982.<\/p>\n
She was wearing only underpants, bound by her ankles and stuffed into a sleeping bag weighted with a cinder block. Authorities later announced she had been strangled.<\/p>\n
Nancy had filed for divorce from her husband as well as a restraining order in the summer of 1982. She moved out of the family\u2019s Victorian home in wealthy Pacific Heights into a residential hotel in San Francisco\u2019s crime-ridden Tenderloin District.<\/p>\n
The two had been sharing custody of Alison, then 5, when Patrick called his estranged wife on Aug. 8 to pick up their daughter a day earlier than they had agreed upon.<\/p>\n
Nancy left the hotel that evening and was never seen again. Her yellow Buick, however, was found in the garage where Patrick lived.<\/p>\n
Patrick was initially arrested and charged by Keith Sorenson, the then-San Mateo County district attorney, who is now deceased. <\/p>\n
Eventually, prosecutors dropped the charges due to a lack of witnesses and evidence. Sorenson told the San Francisco Examiner in 1982 that prosecutors concluded they had less than a 50% chance of conviction, though he added, \u201cI am not saying for a minute that he is innocent or didn\u2019t do it.\u201d <\/p>\n
Wagstaffe said he is the only remaining member of a five-person team from the district attorney\u2019s office that attempted to prosecute Patrick Galvani the first time around. He said he agreed that members of the team felt then that they lacked strong enough evidence to convict.<\/p>\n
One retired detective who worked the case told The Times in 2014 that some physical evidence had been accidentally destroyed.<\/p>\n
That year, Patrick Galvani\u2019s then-attorney said his client had passed a lie-detector test. In court documents, Patrick said his wife had been suffering from \u201cmental illness.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alison Galvani told The Times in 2014 that she struggled with the possibility that she may have played a role in her mother\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father used me as bait to lure my mother to her death,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Alison was eventually sent to an English boarding school when she was 11.<\/p>\n
A close friend first suggested to a teenaged Alison that her father killed her mother. While Alison rejected the claim and almost severed the friendship, she never dismissed the suspicion.<\/p>\n
She later told The Times that she asked her father to walk in front of her during her wedding because she didn\u2019t want \u201cto have to touch him,\u201d though she didn\u2019t quite understand the sentiment.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until he visited her, then a new mother living in Connecticut with her husband in 2008, that she blurted out \u201cyou killed my mother.\u201d<\/p>\n
His denial to that accusation, she said, was, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t my fault.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For years, renowned epidemiologist Alison Galvani suspected that she spent part of her childhood raised by a killer.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79750,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[41484,6577,1436,8901,45765,4744,6314,48,52,51,47,50,49,6316,41486,346,41487,101,45764,45763,72],"class_list":["post-79749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-alison-galvani","tag-authority","tag-case","tag-custody","tag-douglas-horngrad","tag-evidence","tag-father","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mother","tag-nancy-galvani","tag-office","tag-patrick-galvani","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-mateo-district-attorney","tag-times-reporter","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}