Suzanne Bombardier

Case background and investigation

Suzanne Arlene Bombardier was a 14-year-old junior high school student in Antioch, California. On the night of June 21, 1980, she was babysitting her young nieces at the home of her older sister, Stephanie Mullen, in Antioch. According to Wikipedia's summary of local reporting, her sister came home at about 4 a.m. and found that Suzanne was gone. ABC7 News reported that the home was on Hudson Court.

Several days later a fisherman found her body in the San Joaquin River east of the Antioch Bridge. Wikipedia gives the date as June 27, 1980. According to the Contra Costa County District Attorney's Office, she had been sexually assaulted and had died from a single stab wound to the chest. The case was investigated by the Antioch Police Department and became the city's oldest open homicide.

No one was charged for 37 years. According to Newsweek, the investigation was reopened in 2015 at the urging of two retired detectives, and biological evidence was sent to a forensic laboratory so that a DNA profile could be developed. In early 2017 the FBI's Combined DNA Index System produced a tentative match, which further testing confirmed. On December 11, 2017, Antioch police arrested Mitchell Lynn Bacom, then 63, an Antioch resident who had been acquainted with the Bombardier family.

The District Attorney's Office has said that Bacom had been a suspect early in the original investigation, because he had earlier convictions for rape and other felonies and was on parole when Suzanne was killed. Newsweek reported that he was also convicted of further offences in the early 1980s and, in 2002, of failing to register as a sex offender.

Bacom stood trial in Contra Costa County. On March 15, 2022, a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, and found true the special circumstances that the killing took place during a burglary, a kidnapping and a rape. That verdict carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, which, according to Oxygen, was imposed on June 27, 2022, with Suzanne's sister addressing the court. No later appeal ruling was found in the sources consulted.