A jury has convicted 80-year-old Mark Personette of first-degree murder in the 1978 killing of a 15-year-old girl who vanished after going to Golden Gate Park to ride a horse, and he has now been sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility in seven years. The victim never returned to her sister's San Francisco house that day, and her body was found the following morning.
According to the SF District Attorney
, the case centers on the 1978 disappearance and death of 15-year-old Marissa Rolf Harvey, a Queens, New York resident who was visiting her sister in San Francisco for Easter when she went missing on March 27 of that year, as reported by
SFGATE
. Harvey had traveled across the country to see her family for the holiday. Surfers discovered her body the next day in the underbrush of Sutro Heights Park, the scenic overlook above Ocean Beach near Golden Gate Park, according to the
San Francisco District Attorney's Office
. Investigators at the scene recovered an earring and a blood-stained leaf, and found evidence that she had been sexually assaulted and strangled with a cordlike device.
Decades-Old DNA Finally Points to a Suspect
For years the case went cold, but crime scene technology eventually caught up to the evidence. In the early 2000s, forensic technicians extracted a male DNA profile from Harvey's sweater and jeans, as well as from a piece of dried chewing gum stuck to her back, Newsweek notes. That profile sat unmatched until the San Francisco Police Department reopened the cold case in October 2020 and, in 2021, used genetic investigative genealogy — comparing crime scene DNA to commercial family tree databases — to identify Mark Personette as a suspect, per the same SFGATE account.
Once investigators had a name, they needed confirmation without tipping off their suspect. FBI surveillance teams in Denver tracked Personette in 2021 and obtained a confirmatory DNA sample after collecting discarded personal hygiene items he had thrown away in a Walmart parking lot 15 miles from his residence, according to the district attorney's office. Investigators confirmed the genetic match before seeking an arrest warrant.
Maps and License Plates Undercut His Denials
A search warrant executed at Personette's Colorado home turned up 1970s San Francisco street maps and a set of California license plates bearing a 1979 registration sticker — physical evidence that directly contradicted his statements to investigators that he had never been in the city, Newsweek reported. Personette had denied ever visiting San Francisco during police questioning.
During trial testimony, prosecutors presented a witness who stated that Personette had sexually assaulted her in 1979 when she was 16 years old, SFGATE reported. The court permitted that prior-act testimony to help corroborate the state's case, illustrating what prosecutors described as a pattern of violent conduct against teenage girls.
Arrest Came After Years of Covert Tracking
Personette was taken into custody on December 16, 2021, in Jefferson County, Colorado, during a joint operation involving the SFPD, the FBI, and local sheriff's deputies, according to CBS News. He was 76 years old at the time of his arrest. Following that arrest, the SFPD and the FBI asked law enforcement agencies across the country to review unsolved sexual assault-related homicides of young women from the late 1970s for potential ties to Personette, per The Guardian, which noted Personette had previous arrests in New Jersey dating back to 1979.
Defense attorney Adam Gasner said following the verdict that the defense maintained there was reasonable doubt given the complexity of the forensic evidence, while acknowledging the jury's decision, Newsweek reported. The trial had leaned heavily on DNA retrieved from decades-old physical items recovered from the crime scene.
Hoodline previously covered his November conviction, and the case has now moved to sentencing, with Personette receiving life imprisonment and parole eligibility in seven years, as announced by District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.
