Detectives say a karate teacher had a gruesome secret. It took 42 years to make their case

Rachel Zendejas was 20 and the single mother of two toddlers when she was killed.

(Photo courtesy of Roy Rodriguez.)

She and Roy Rodriguez had gone out for the evening on Jan. 17, 1981, to see their brother Mark’s band. Then Rodriguez went home while Zendejas continued on to a club called Huntington’s, he said.

“She came home slightly after me and the babysitters were there. And I could hear them talking, and I heard her yell, ‘I’m taking the babysitters home,’ ” Rodriguez said. “I woke up in the morning, she wasn’t home, and I was thinking, ‘Where’s Rachel?’ ”

He had no idea there was a crime scene across the street from his apartment complex. A woman’s nude body was sprawled next to a pole on Mobil Avenue. Police found a shirt and nylon leggings on a nearby patio. Car keys were uncovered in grass near the scene.

Zendejas had been sexually assaulted, strangled, dragged across the street and abandoned. Police said she had been attacked after dropping off the babysitters and parking her car back home. Her body was discovered by a pair of newspaper delivery boys.

Ventura County Dist. Atty. Investigator Steven Rhods points out an area in Camarillo where Rachel Zendejas was sexually assaulted and strangled to death in the early morning hours of Jan. 18, 1981.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

But investigators had no leads, and as the years went by, the case grew cold.

“Year 3 came, and 4 and 5,” said Rodriguez. “I would call these TV shows, ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ and all that, but nobody would take the story.

“She was cheated out of life.”

Lisa Gondek, 21, was a transplant to Oxnard. She’d taken a bus from East Hartford, Conn., in May 1981, her parents told newspapers at the time.

The high school dropout worked as a hair stylist at salons in Connecticut, her parents said. After moving to California, she sold clothes in two local shops.

Like Zendejas, Gondek had gone out clubbing the night she was killed, police told news outlets. In fact, Gondek visited the dance club Huntington’s before catching a ride home with friends.

She was last seen talking to a male acquaintance outside her apartment complex around 1:50 a.m on Dec. 12. 1981.

Lisa Gondek was killed in 1981, the same year she moved from Connecticut to Oxnard.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Police and firefighters were called to her apartment about an hour later when an upstairs neighbor smelled smoke. The apartment had been set on fire, but the blaze hadn’t done much damage.

Gondek’s body was found in the bathtub with a bite mark on her cheek, according to police.

Like Zendejas’ case, authorities had little to go on. As the years went by, Gondek’s slaying became another unsolved homicide in Ventura County.

But nearly a quarter-century after the women were killed, a single piece of biological evidence linked their cold cases. After DNA profiling exploded in forensic investigations in the 1990s and 2000s, detectives discovered the same man had left DNA on each of the victims’ bodies.

The 2004 breakthrough helped lead to an arrest 19 years later — and helped clear another man long suspected in one of the slayings.

Two years after Gondek’s death, Oxnard police were confident they knew who had killed her.

They believed they had enough evidence to present the case to prosecutors, who would decide whether to bring murder charges against the suspect: the acquaintance last seen chatting with Gondek outside her apartment. The two had been dropped off by friends at her carport, where his motorcycle was parked. He said he watched Gondek walk inside.

Police believed the bite mark on Gondek’s cheek would identify her killer.

Her acquaintance, whom The Times is not identifying because he was never charged, voluntarily provided a dental impression, and forensic odontologist Dr. Raymond Rawson determined his teeth matched the mark on Gondek’s face. Two other odontologists were less sure, according to a 1983 report in the Hartford Courant, but police still believed they had enough evidence for an arrest.

But much to their chagrin and the frustration of Gondek’s parents, no arrest was made. Prosecutors with the Ventura County district attorney’s office declined to charge the suspect, saying there was not enough evidence.

A woman and her son navigate a puddle at an Oxnard apartment complex in March. In 1981, Lisa Gondek was killed in her apartment in the complex.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

“I personally went over it with [the deputy district attorneys], reviewed it and just concluded that it’s not a case that we should try or file,” said Michael Bradbury, the former Ventura County district attorney. “We thought [the suspect] probably didn’t do it.”

In 1983, bite mark evidence — interpreted by forensic odontologists — was a growing field considered by many to be the cutting edge of crime scene science. Media outlets wrote about odontologists like Rawson who “take a bite out of crime.”

But not everyone bought into it.

“We were pretty cautious about it. … I had guys scratching their heads saying, ‘This is a little far out, boss,’ ” Bradbury said about forensic odontology.

The prosecutor said he was open to using bite mark evidence at the time but would not use it as the sole physical evidence connecting a suspect to a crime — as in the Gondek case.

Rawson did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In 2009, the National Academy of Sciences found that bite mark evidence was unreliable and suffered from “inherent weaknesses” because the arrangement of people’s teeth — or dentition — has not been proved to be unique. It also isn’t clear whether teeth marks retain any specific characteristics when transferred to human skin or other objects, the group reported.

More than 30 convictions based on faulty bite mark evidence have been vacated, according to the Innocence Project, including the case of Ray Krone in Arizona. Krone spent more than a decade in prison on a murder conviction after Rawson testified at his trial that Krone’s dentition matched bite marks on a homicide victim. DNA evidence cleared Krone.

“Bite marks really are just total junk science,” said Chris Fabricant, the director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project. “Forensic genealogy, on the other hand, is based on DNA evidence, which remains the gold standard.”

In 2004, Gondek’s acquaintance voluntarily provided DNA to be tested against the suspect DNA found at the scenes of the 1981 killings. It was not a match. After more than 20 years, he was eliminated as a suspect.

Still, it would be more than a decade before investigators found the method to unravel the mystery of the two women’s homicides.

Joseph James DeAngelo — the Golden State Killer — was caught using investigative genetic genealogy, a process by which researchers build family trees using DNA databases as well as traditional methods like newspapers and obituaries. DeAngelo’s arrest led law enforcement agencies across the country to turn to genetic genealogy to try to solve cold cases where DNA evidence existed.

Steven Rhods was among those working the Golden State Killer case. When he was an ambulance driver in 1980, Rhods responded to a double homicide in Ventura that was the work of DeAngelo, who eventually admitted to 13 murders and more than 200 uncharged crimes of rape, assault and burglary in the 1970s and ’80s in California.

Steven Rhods learned how DNA databases could be leveraged to solve old cases as an investigator with the Ventura County District Attorney’s office.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Later, as an investigator with the Ventura County district attorney, he interviewed DeAngelo in Sacramento and provided DNA samples from the 1980 scene, though he didn’t take part in the investigative genetic genealogy work that resulted in DeAngelo’s arrest.

But he learned how DNA databases could be leveraged to solve old cases.

After DeAngelo’s arrest in 2018, Rhods considered his own unsolved cases. He thought about Zendejas and Gondek, whose deaths were connected by matching DNA. In Zendejas’ case, the DNA was in semen collected in a rape kit. In Gondek’s, it was discovered under her fingernails.

“I thought this was one we could use it on,” Rhods said.

He and his colleagues got to work in December 2019. They had the suspect DNA in both cases sequenced and uploaded to GEDmatch, a public database where people can use their DNA to find relatives.

Although the suspect was not in the database, investigators discovered people listed as fourth cousins and began to build a family tree by searching for common ancestors between the suspect and his cousins.

“We went back to the 1800s and built forward,” Rhods said. “We went down a lot of rabbit holes.”

As part of the investigation, detectives visited people potentially related to the suspect and collected more than 20 DNA samples to help determine whether they were on the right path, Rhods said.

One person who provided DNA proved to be a close family member of the suspect, Rhods said.

Finally, after consulting with FBI genealogists, investigators focused on a man named Jose Encarcion Garcia, who was born in 1856. The suspect in the slayings of Zendejas and Gondek was believed to be his descendant, Rhods said.

Detectives had certain parameters to help narrow their search. They believed the killer was a man who in 1981 was 17 to 41 years old. They also believed he or a relative lived in Ventura County and likely had a military connection. (There were two military bases in the area at the time, and Gondek had visited the Port Hueneme naval base the day of her killing.)

Investigators discovered Casmiro Garcia, a man from Roswell, N.M., who had seven children, five of them boys. One had joined the Navy — and was assigned to Point Mugu in Oxnard in 1981.

His name was Tony Garcia.

Based on Garcia’s background and his military station in Ventura County at the time of the killings, Rhods was “97% sure” he’d found his suspect.

The karate studio where Garcia worked was less than a mile from where Gondek was slain. To get to work from his home in Oxnard, he would likely drive past the scene.

But without Garcia’s DNA, detectives couldn’t determine whether he matched the suspect’s genetic profile.

Investigators set up a surveillance team and followed Garcia, hoping he would toss a smoked cigarette or some other evidence they could easily swab for DNA. He didn’t.

“It appears all he did was go back and forth between home and work,” Rhods said.

A woman walks with her child in the Oxnard neighborhood where Tony Garcia lives. He is charged in connection with two 1981 murders. Garcia’s attorney says his client “maintains his innocence.”

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Eventually, a search warrant to test Garcia’s car door was issued. While he was in the karate studio, investigators swabbed the handle of Garcia’s 2006 Honda, Rhods said.

The DNA from the car door came back as a mixture of two males, both of which matched the suspect, Rhods said. Though the double match was initially concerning, authorities said it was likely because Garcia’s son had also touched the vehicle.

“That was enough to get a warrant for confirmatory DNA,” Rhods said.

The investigator and an arrest team headed to Flores Bros. Kenpo Karate Studio around 9 a.m. Feb. 9.

Rhods said he and his partner approached Garcia and asked whether he knew Gondek or Zendejas. Garcia said no, according to the detective.

“I walked away, and the arrest team went in,” Rhods said.

Garcia has pleaded not guilty to both murder charges and is being held without bail at Todd Road Jail in Santa Paula.

Sua, Garcia’s attorney, said his client “maintains his innocence,” though he did not provide a defense argument or alibi. Garcia’s wife, who declined to comment to The Times, and his son are standing by him, Sua said.

The attorney noted that prosecutors turned over evidence showing there were “multiple” other suspects who had been investigated.

At a recent bail hearing, Sua said Garcia has “extremely tight ties to the Ventura area” and is not a flight risk. He added that Garcia was not a danger to the community but a “skinny” and “frail” grandfather.

Prosecutors fired back.

“Today he’s a grandpa, but he’s the most dangerous grandpa there is,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Simon said.

In a three-hour interview with Rhods after his arrest, Garcia did not admit knowing the victims. He could not explain why his DNA was at the two crime scenes.

For the D.A. investigator, the most satisfying part of his job is informing the families of homicide victims that a suspect has been captured. Rhods was there when detectives told Rodriguez that Garcia had been arrested in his sister’s case.

But he is not resting on his laurels. In Ventura County, there are 25 unsolved slayings with suspect DNA from crime scenes. The county also has more than 3,000 untested rape kits.

Rodriguez intends to see the case to its close. He attends each court hearing and visits his sister’s grave in Camarillo frequently to lay flowers or just sit and spend time near her.

“I want justice for my sister,” he said. “And I want him to pay for it — for destroying our family and taking my nieces’ mom away.”

Roy Rodriguez, brother of Rachel Zendejas, kneels next to her grave.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)