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San Mateo County
District Attorney Stephen Wagstaffe said the charges against
John Joseph Scott were dropped on Thursday and he was released
from custody.
"We have now concluded that the evidence does not support that
he is the killer of this young woman," Wagstaffe said.
The San Mateo County Sheriff's Office said in a statement after
Scott's Nov. 16 arrest in Topock, Arizona, that the case was
reopened earlier in 2015 and DNA evidence from the scene matched
Scott's.
Scott had long been suspected of murdering 19-year-old Sharon
Ray, the statement said. Her partially buried body was
discovered by sightseers at Pescadero State Beach, some 45 miles
south of San Francisco, on Oct. 30, 1983.
The sheriff's office said Ray had been sexually assaulted and
strangled. The statement said Scott, who was 35 at the time, was
initially arrested for the murder, but prosecutors dropped the
case due to insufficient evidence.
Scott's attorney Brian Getz said he was cleared after undergoing
DNA testing. "He feels terrible that an innocent woman, Sharon
Ray, was murdered and they haven’t found who did it yet," Getz
said.
(Reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco; Editing by Tom
Brown)
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