Livingstone said if the reward money brings someone forward with new information, it will allow detectives to review earlier statements to see if they match up with case evidence. One of these men lives in San Diego County, one lives in Arizona and one is in Tennessee. They have re-interviewed all of the living witnesses, spoken with witnesses in prison and also with three “persons of interest” who were at Wicht’s apartment the night she died.
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Livingstone said that since Coley’s exoneration, a series of Simi Valley Police detectives have worked on the case. Disillusioned, he quit his job and left Simi Valley for good, taking the 16 boxes of case files with him and vowing never to give up. In 1991, he was ordered to stop pushing the case or face termination. Then he went to the city manager, the city attorney, a local congressman and eventually the attorney general, the ACLU and the FBI. And when he went to meet Coley in prison, he knew in his gut, from years of experience with suspects in the Los Angeles and Simi Valley police departments, that Coley was an innocent man.įor many months, Bender pressured his police supervisors to reopen the case, but no one would listen. There were good suspects who were never pursued and hair and fingerprint evidence that wasn’t analyzed properly and then went missing. 11 and thought she had seen Coley’s truck on the street.īut Bender found in the case evidence that Coley had a solid alibi for all but 20 minutes the night of the murders and the crimes would’ve have taken much longer than that to commit. A neighbor told police she heard a fight in the Wicht apartment in the early-morning hours on Nov. 10 when Wicht was partying in her apartment with up to five men. He was shocked by all the “red flags” he saw.Īt the time of the crimes, Coley was a popular Simi Valley restaurant manager who had dated Wicht for a time, but they had broken up months before she was killed.
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11, 1978.īender, 66, was a newly appointed detective in the Simi Valley Police Department in 1989 when a friend recommended he look into the Coley case. So on Friday, Coley announced he is offering a $50,000 reward for any evidence that leads to the conviction of the killer or killers who raped and strangled Wicht and smothered her son in the early-morning hours of Nov. Despite the determined efforts by the Simi Valley Police Department to track down the real killer over the past four years, the case remains unsolved.
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Bender is the former police detective who figured out in the late 1980s that Coley was an innocent man, and spent the next 28 years trying to get his conviction overturned.īut there’s still one thing that keeps Coley and Bender from locking away their memories of the 1978 Simi Valley murders of 24-year-old single mother Rhonda Wicht, and her 4-year-old son, Donnie. It includes a rescued border collie named Sabrina, a church community he enjoys, some fulfilling charity work and a home, just two miles away from that of his best friend Mike Bender. Since his release, the 74-year-old retiree has carved out a quiet and contented life for himself in Carlsbad.
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Jerry Brown and freed from state prison after serving 38 years and 10 months for two murders he did not commit. It’s been nearly four years since Craig Coley was exonerated by California Gov.