DNA evidence has linked a convicted serial killer to a decades-old cold case murder in South Pasadena.
In February 1986, 19-year-old Cathy Small was found strangled and stabbed to death in the middle of Bank St., wearing only a nightgown. Her roommate told detectives that the night before, Small had left their Lake Elsinore home to meet a man named Bill, who was going to drive her to Los Angeles, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Lt. Patricia Thomas.
Small was a mother of two. In a letter to detectives, her younger sister said Small was battling drug addiction, but was sober and on the right track when she was killed.
Detectives pursued multiple leads, but the case went cold for decades until October 2019, when investigators responded to the natural death of a 63-year-old man at his home on Bank St., directly across the street from where Small’s body had been found 33 years earlier.
“The coroner investigator observed several disturbing items in the house: numerous photos of women who appeared drugged and assaulted and held against their will,” Thomas said.
There was also a newspaper clipping about Small’s murder.
Homicide detectives recovered all the evidence that had been collected since 1986 regarding Small’s killing and transported it to the sheriff’s crime lab in Los Angeles, where they discovered that none of the evidence – including Small’s clothing and the sexual assault kit – had ever been tested for DNA.
There were two sets of DNA found on Small’s clothing. In a twist, neither sample matched the man who had recently died on Bank St. – but one was a match for William Lester Suff, a convicted serial killer known as the Riverside Prostitute Killer.
Suff was convicted in 1995 for the murders of 12 women between 1989 and 1991, and was serving out his sentence at San Quentin Prison. When detectives interviewed him, he “confessed and discussed in detail” Small’s murder, Thomas said.
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According to Thomas, Suff said he was working at a Lake Elsinore computer repair shop in 1986. On the day of her murder, Small went into the repair shop and gave Suff her phone number. Later in the day, Suff called Small and asked her to go with him to pick up his boss in Pasadena.
At approximately 10 p.m., Stuff picked up Small and they drove to South Pasadena. When they arrived at the cul de sac on Bank Street, they got into an argument, and Small knocked the glasses off of Suff’s face, enraging him.
“He retrieved a knife he kept in the vehicle and stabbed her multiple times,” Thomas said. “He pushed her out of the car and onto the street and drove away.”
Thomas said investigators showed Suff crime scene photos from the day Small was found, and he indicated that the scene was the way he left it.
L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger called Small’s murder “horrifying” and promised that “justice will be served for Cathy and her family.”
City News Service contributed to this report.
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