On February 24, 2010, the Honorable Judge Gerald Sevier sentenced Steven Walter Gomez to Life without the Possibility of Parole for the 1985 murder and sexual assault of Dixie Lee Ricks. The defendant was convicted by a jury of the murder, rape, and sodomy of Mrs. Ricks on January 15th, 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.

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 Lindsay, 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 D. Jenkins, Assistant District Attorney (559) 733-6411.