Nancy Bennallack Case Became Sacramento’s Oldest Murder Ever Solved

Nancy Bennallack Case Became Sacramento’s Oldest Murder Ever Solved

 He climbed up to a second-floor balcony on Bell Avenue and slipped through a sliding glass door that had been cracked open for a cat. Inside, he stabbed the 28-year-old court reporter, who lived there more than 30 times and almost took her head off. He had sealed his prints so completely that detectives couldn’t lift a single one from inside the apartment.

 But during the attack, he had cut himself and his blood ran from the apartment, over the balcony railing, down to the sidewalk, and out through the complex. In 1970, there was no science that could match a drop of blood to a specific person. It took 52 years to finally put a name to the killer.

 Her name was Nancy Marie Benallack. Nancy was 28 years old. She worked as a court reporter for Sacramento County, recording testimony and proceedings at the county courthouse. She was engaged to a man named Ferris Salame. Salame was the chief public defender of Sacramento County. Their wedding date was 5 weeks away. The wedding invitations had already been sent.

 On the evening of Sunday, October 25th, 1970, Ferris Salame was at Nancy’s place on Bell Avenue in Sacramento. The two spent the evening together, the way they did most nights. Salame left at around 11:30 p.m. that night, and Nancy stayed behind. Nancy kept a cat, and the cat liked to go outside onto the balcony at night. On warm evenings, Nancy would leave the sliding glass door cracked open a few inches so so cat could go in and out on its own.

 At some point during the night after Salame left, a man climbed up the outside of the building and came in through the sliding glass door. Before climbing up, he had covered every one of his fingertips in masking tape. All 10 of them, wrapped tight so he wouldn’t leave a single print behind. What happened next was fast and violent. The man attacked Nancy with a knife.

 He stabbed her over and over again. The damage was bad, most of it concentrated on her upper body and neck. Nancy had deep cuts on her hands and arms from the struggle. Those cuts told investigators that she  had fought back hard. She fought the man who had come through her door uninvited in the middle of the night.

 Nobody else in the entire building heard a single thing that night. But the injuries on Nancy’s body recorded every moment of the struggle. During the attack, the man cut himself.  Whether he sliced his own hand on the knife or Nancy wounded him during the struggle, the gash on his hand  was deep enough to bleed on its own.

When it was over, he went back out through the same door he had come in. His blood dripped down onto the  concrete landing outside the door, then down onto the sidewalk below, then along the walkway that ran through the apartment complex. Nancy didn’t show up at the courthouse on the morning of Monday,  October 26th.

She had been scheduled to be in the courtroom that morning to take down the day’s proceedings. Nancy had never once missed work  without calling in first. That Monday morning, she just wasn’t there. No call, no message.  When she still didn’t appear by mid-morning and nobody could reach her by phone, the people at the courthouse who knew her  started to worry.

Eventually, one of her co-workers drove over to her place to check on her in person. Nancy was found on the floor of her apartment. She had been dead for hours. The scene inside the apartment told the rest of the story on its own. Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies responded to the scene within the hour.  Deputies taped off the area around the building and the parking lot and started working the scene from the outside in.

The sliding glass door was open. The apartment  itself hadn’t been broken into in the usual sense. Nothing inside the apartment appeared to have been taken or stolen.  The attack had been focused entirely on Nancy. The blood trail turned out to be the single biggest piece of evidence at the entire scene.

 Lab work done on the blood samples showed something important. Not all of the blood found in the trail was Nancy’s. Some of it came from a second person.  Someone who had bled along the same path leading away from the body and out of the  building. The man who attacked her had left his own blood behind.

 In 1970, there was no way to look at a drop of blood and figure out  who it came from. Blood typing could tell investigators what general blood type the  person had, but that was about as far as the science went. It could tell you the person had type O blood,  for example, but that was true of millions of other people, too.

 The blood drops were collected,  sealed in containers, and put into evidence storage at the Sheriff’s office. That was the best  that anyone could do with blood evidence in 1970. The science to do anything more with a blood sample just wasn’t there yet. The masking tape on the attacker’s fingers told  detectives something important about who they were looking for.

 Whoever did this had taken the time to prepare. That wasn’t something a person does on a whim. Combined with the way he came in through  the balcony, all of it pointed to someone who had planned this out well ahead of time. The Sacramento County Sheriff’s office  launched a major investigation. Detectives started by going door-to-door through the apartment complex itself.

 From there, they moved outward to the surrounding neighborhood and the streets beyond  it. Over the days and weeks that followed, detectives talked to close to 500 people in and around the area. Residents of the complex, neighbors on the nearby blocks, co-workers from the courthouse, friends and family.

 Anyone they could find who had any connection to Nancy or who might have been in the area that night. Detectives checked every known violent offender in the Sacramento area along with sex offenders. They ran down every single tip and lead that came in from the public after the case was reported in the Sacramento Bee and on local television stations.

 Farrell Salamy cooperated fully with the investigation. He had been the last person known to see Nancy alive and in any case where a woman is found dead in her own home, the partner gets looked at first. Salamy gave a full account of his evening and his departure from the apartment. He was looked at closely by the lead detectives and cleared early on.

 Investigators moved on and started working their way through all the other possibilities starting  with the people closest to Nancy and moving out from there. The trail of blood ended at the edge of the complex. It didn’t continue on foot into any of the surrounding streets. Detectives took that to mean the attacker had walked to a car somewhere in the lot and driven away from the area.

 That detail pushed the investigation towards someone from outside the immediate neighborhood. Someone who came to the complex from somewhere else that night, did what he did, and left. All of that work produced hundreds of pages of documentation and not a single arrest. Every lead that came in was followed and exhausted.

 The masking tape was cataloged, bagged, and filed. By the end of 1971, the investigation had run completely out of leads. The file went into the cabinet and it stayed there for a very long time. Nancy’s sister Linda, who lived north of Sacramento in the Grass Valley area, described Nancy as the steady one in the family.

 We called her Ma because we were all crazy and she was the one that kept us in line,” Linda said. Ferris Salame never married. Their wedding had been just 5 weeks away. All of it came to a sudden end on the morning of October 26th, 1970. Salame continued to work as the chief public defender. For the rest of his long career, he walked the same courthouse hallways where the reporters and clerks who had known Nancy still remembered what happened.

 Salame died in 2014, 44 years after the night he walked out of Nancy’s apartment for the last time. After that, the case sat untouched for years, then decades. The sheriff’s office kept the file technically open, but without new leads, there was nothing to work with. As the years passed, new detectives inherited the file as older ones retired, transferred, or moved on.

Each new detective assigned to the case sat down with the hundreds of pages of old material, read through the interview notes, and studied the crime scene photographs. They all ended up asking the same question. Had any new forensic method come along that could do something with the evidence from 1970? Then, in 2004, a full 34 years after the crime, the technology finally caught up to the evidence.

 Scientists at the Sacramento County Crime Lab pulled DNA from the blood drops that had been collected from the trail through the apartment complex back in October of 1970 and stored ever since. The drops that didn’t match Nancy’s own blood gave them a male DNA profile. For the first time since the night of Nancy’s murder, investigators had a biological identity for the man who had been inside Nancy’s apartment.

 The male DNA profile was entered into the FBI’s national database, the system that checks crime scene evidence against the records of convicted offenders across the country. If the man responsible had ever been arrested for something serious enough to get his DNA taken, the system would have flagged him. Nothing came back.

 He simply had never been in enough trouble with the law for his DNA to end up in any database. The DNA gave investigators one important thing. They had the attacker’s blood. But without a name attached to it, a genetic profile was just a number sitting in a computer. The numbers confirmed that a specific man existed somewhere out in the world or had at some point in the past.

 But they didn’t say who he was or where to find him. For 15 years after the DNA was first processed, the profile sat in the database with no match. Then, detectives working in the cold case unit decided to try a completely different approach. In November of 2019, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s cold  case team partnered with the District Attorney’s Office and launched a genealogy investigation into the Ben Alioto case.

The same method had been used just the year before to identify the Golden State Killer, a case that had also gone cold in Sacramento County. That case proved that the approach could work even on evidence that was decades old. Investigators took the DNA profile from the old blood trail and uploaded it to several consumer ancestry databases.

When a distant relative of the unknown man turned up as a partial match, genealogists used the shared DNA to start building a family tree. They worked their way through old public records, census forms, marriage certificates, and death records, tracing family lines forward and backward until the list of possible candidates started to narrow.

 The work took more than 2 years. Every single potential branch of the family tree had to be followed all the way to its end before it could be either confirmed or ruled out. It was slow, painstaking, and extremely careful work to do.  The genealogists traced lines through births, marriages, and deaths recorded in county offices across  the state of California, one record at a time, one generation at a time.

 On July 21st, 2022, after more than 2 years of genealogy work, the investigation had finally narrowed down to a single name. His name was Richard John Davis.  Born on March 22nd, 1943, Davis had been 27 years old on the night Nancy  Benallack was killed. He had exactly one prior arrest on his record, a single DUI charge, nothing violent, nothing that would have  put him on the radar of homicide detectives.

 His name had never once come up  in connection with any kind of violent crime anywhere. Davis stayed in Sacramento after the murder. At some point during the years that followed, Davis left  the city, but he eventually came back to the Sacramento area around 1996. He died on November 2nd,  1997 at the age of 54 from years of drinking.

At the time of his death, he had been living at a place called the El Rancho Trailer Park in Sacramento. His death came a full 27 years after the night he killed Nancy Benallack and a full 25 years before anyone connected his name to Nancy’s murder. Because Davis had been dead since 1997, investigators couldn’t get a DNA sample directly from him.

 Instead, they tracked down a living relative of Davis who shared enough of his DNA to be useful. That person agreed to cooperate with the investigation and provide a sample. The relative’s DNA was compared against the crime scene DNA, and the comparison was run through the lab. When the result finally came back from the lab comparison, it confirmed the match.

 The blood found on the landing, on the sidewalk, and at the edge of the apartment complex all belonged to Richard John Davis. But as it turned out, the DNA was only part of the story. When investigators went back through the original 1970 case file after identifying Davis through the DNA, they started reading through the old paperwork with fresh eyes.

 And what they found there had been sitting in the file untouched since 1970. Richard John Davis, the man the DNA had just identified as the attacker, had lived in the same apartment complex as Nancy Benallack. Nancy had been in apartment 17. Davis had been in apartment 23 on the other side of the central pool. The two apartments faced each other directly across the water.

 Anyone standing at the front window of apartment 23 on any given evening  would have had a clear view of the upstairs balcony where the sliding glass door stood open on warm evenings. Davis had been one of the roughly 500 people interviewed during the original door-to-door canvas of the building back in 1970.

 In the days right after the murder, a pair of homicide detectives had come to his door, sat down with him, asked their standard questions, and written down his answers. Nothing in what he said raised any red flags. Nothing about him stood out. His name went into the file alongside hundreds of others. He was just another name on the list, another resident in a building full of people who had all been asked the same questions.

 And in all the years that followed, nobody ever came back to ask him a single follow-up question. The blood trail that ran from Nancy’s apartment all the way to the parking lot had always been read as evidence that the attacker drove away. That had been the  working theory from the very first day of the investigation.

 But, Davis didn’t drive away. After leaving Nancy’s place that night, he walked a few dozen yards back to his own apartment on the other side of the same pool. The trail of blood ended at the parking lot  because that was simply the path between the two apartments. The blood trail had never been pointing to a getaway car.

 It had been pointing straight to apartment 23, right there in the same complex, the entire time. The answer to who killed Nancy Benallack had been in the building the entire time. The man who climbed up and came through the door with tape on his fingers lived close enough to see Nancy’s second floor landing from his own front window.

 He answered the detective’s questions the very next day, gave them nothing useful to go on, and walked back home across the pool to apartment 23. No one in law enforcement ever came back to look at him again.  On August 10th of that year, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office held  a press conference at their headquarters.

 Officials announced that a man named Richard John Davis  had been identified as the person responsible for the 1970 murder of Nancy Benallack. At  52 years old, the Benallack murder case was the single oldest cold case ever solved in Sacramento County history.  Sacramento County Undersheriff Jim Barnes called the public announcement a historic day.

“When we have crimes like this, we never forget,” Barnes  said. Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert also spoke about  the genealogy work. “Without this tool, we would not be standing here today,” Schubert  said. She noted that the court reporters who still worked in the Sacramento courthouse had been  asking about Nancy’s case for decades.

“Nancy was never forgotten,” Schubert said. “She was always at the top of  the list.” Retired homicide detective Mickey Links spoke directly to the family. “Due to the fact that Richard Davis is deceased, sadly, there will not be any form of legal justice,” Links said. “But Linda and Tom, I hope this brings Nancy and your family some peace.

” Linda Cox, Nancy’s sister, and her husband Tom sat in the room. Linda had spent 52 years without a single answer. For all of those 52 years, Linda had known that her sister went to bed one night and never got up. She had never known who was responsible for what happened to her sister or why. Now, she was sitting in a room full of detectives and attorneys and hearing the name of the man who had lived across the pool from her sister, Ferris Salame, the man who had left Nancy’s apartment at 11:30 on the last night of her life had

been dead for 8 years by then. He had spent the last 44 years of his life quietly carrying the weight of being the last known person to have seen Nancy alive. Salame went to his own grave without ever learning who came through that door after he left or that the man who killed Nancy had been living right there in the same building the whole time.

 A sliding glass door left open a few inches for a cat on an October night in Sacramento. A man on the other side of the pool who wrapped tape around his fingers and climbed the balcony. And his own blood left on the sidewalk for 52 years. And nobody knew whose it was until a family tree pointed back to the very same building where he had already been living.

 If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.