A court on Wednesday convicted a man of raping and killing a woman in her Sacramento apartment, 40 years after her death. Phillip Lee Wilson, 73, was found guilty of murder on the special occasion of rape.
Sacramento County Sheriff
The Sacramento County Court reversed the verdict a day after the initial stalemate in the charges.
Wilson was accused of killing Robin Brooks, 20, in her Rosemont apartment on April 24, 1980. A friend who noticed she did not show up for work on April 24, 1980, found Brooks’s body inside her apartment, CBS Sacramento reported.
Investigators said genetic genealogy using DNA from blood and semen at the crime scene was used to identify Wilson as a suspect.
Exactly forty years later, on April 24, 2020, investigators in the case announced the arrest of Wilson, who was being held at his home in North Sacramento.
His lawyer claimed that Wilson had consensual sex with Brooks, but was killed by her sister’s friend, who has since died.
Brooks’s sister, Maria Arik, wept over the jury’s decision.
“I just never gave up hope, I just knew it,” she told the Sacramento Bee, referring to the investigation.
Wilson’s sentence came on his birthday.
“There is justice in the world and he will spend all his birthday now in prison. I wish we had found him sooner, but finally justice has been done,” Micki Links, a Sheriff’s Office detective, told KXTV-TV.
Wilson is scheduled to be sentenced on April 22.
- In:
- cold case
- California
- murder
Add Comment