Late Friday afternoon, January 15th, 2010, a jury composed of six women and six men returned verdicts of guilty on murder, rape and sodomy for the 25 year old “Cold Hit” Visalia homicide of 43-year-old Dixie Lee Ricks by Steven Walter Gomez. In addition to the three charges the jury also found to be true three special circumstances for robbery, rape and sodomy which require the defendant to be sentenced to Life without the Possibility of Parole when sentenced, currently scheduled for February 24, 2010.

Dixie Lee Ricks was last seen by her husband Frank Ricks on January 28, 1985, when he dropped her off at Shannon’s Bar located at 115 N. Locust Street in Visalia. Her body was discovered the following afternoon with obvious signs of sexual assault. Investigators for the Visalia police department were left with no leads after several months of investigation. With the application of DNA evidence in California criminal cases, investigators requested the Department of Justice to analyze the evidence to develop a possible suspect DNA profile. In 2001 the Department of Justice DNA laboratory in Fresno was able to obtain a DNA profile from sperm located during the collection of evidence. That profile was sent to a national data base which is kept on unsolved cases. In March 2007, detectives from the Visalia Police Department were notified that a match to the DNA profile of Steven Walter Gomez had been made in this case.

The defendant Steven Walter Gomez, a 65-year-old Visalia resident had been required to provide DNA when registering for his 1963 assault with intent to commit rape conviction out of Lindsey, California. Follow up investigation revealed a second conviction out of the city of Tulare for a robbery in 1976 that also had sexual overtones. The defendant was sentenced to the California Youth Authority on the 1963 case, later receiving a life sentence for the 1976 robbery from which he had been paroled at the time he murdered Dixie Ricks. The Defendant was arrested by Sgt. Cory Sumpter of the Visalia Police Department at his residence in north Visalia in March of 2007.

Contact Person: Shani Jenkins, Assistant District Attorney (559) 733-6411.