After a lawyer for a now-dead inmate who admitted to the 1979 rape and murder of a woman in her Fountain Valley home came forward earlier this year to argue he had been wrongly convicted, a DNA test performed on evidence from the crime scene confirmed the convicted killer was the man responsible for the grisly crimes, authorities announced Friday.
Family members and an attorney for William Lee Evins, who died in prison in 2013, said in July that they believed he was not guilty of the May, 1979, murder of Joan Anderson, 28. They said they believed the prolific Golden State Killer serial killer suspect was the true killer.
The Orange County District Attorney’s Office partnered with the Camille Hill Innocence Review Panel to revisit the case, the District Attorney’s Office said in a written statement. And officials say DNA evidence confirmed that Evins was, in fact, guilty.
“A DNA profile obtained from the evidence was uploaded to the state DNA database,” according to the statement. “On Dec. 4, 2018, law enforcement was notified by the California Department of Justice that the profile matched that of William Evins, the convicted offender.”
Evins was 25 years old at the time of the crime.
He pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree murder in 1985 and received a sentence of 15 years to life in state prison, authorities said. Prosecutors alleged he broke into Anderson’s home, raped her and beat her to death with a hammer.
Evins knew Anderson because he had been doing work at her family’s home home, officials said. She was a wife and mother.