A man with a long history of violent crimes and thefts was sentenced to more time in prison for the cold case murder of a New Jersey woman who was only identified after her family realized she had been accidentally dropped from a national missing person’s database.
Herman Lee Hobbs, 76, who was already incarcerated for the rape and murder of a 13-year-old neighbor nearly 50 years ago, was sentenced to 15 more years in prison last week for the 1980 killing of Holly Ann Campiglia, 21, the Jane Doe who was found raped and fatally shot in a cornfield in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“Holly’s family has suffered tremendously over the past four decades,” the Solano County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. “They turned their grief into action and never gave up in their search for justice.”
“We know that today’s sentencing will not bring Holly back, but it is our hope that it gives them some peace,” the office added.
Investigators said Campiglia’s body turned up in a Dixon cornfield in August 1980, with police finding her with gunshot wounds on her head and neck.
A DNA test of the victim at the time had yielded no results, leading to Campiglia’s initial designation as the Dixon Jane Doe.
Detectives, however, had no idea that the victim had been mistakenly removed from the national missing person’s database, officials only learning her identity when the error was discovered by her family in 1992.
Despite learning Campiglia’s identity, the case remained cold for nearly three decades until her family requested investigators conduct a modern DNA analysis in 2021.
The new test led investigators to find DNA at the crime scene belonging to Hobbes, who was already in jail for another rape and murder cold case.
Hobbs, who was arrested for more than a dozen armed robberies in the Sacramento area in 1969, was previously convicted in the 1975 murder of a neighbor, 13-year-old Terri Pata.
Prosecutors said Hobbs abducted Pata on her way home from junior high, her body later found stuffed in a drainpipe with evidence she had been raped and stabbed to death, SF Gate reports.
Investigators connected Hobbs to Pata’s case following his conviction in 2000 for the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Yuba County, with his own daughter and niece telling officials that he was likely responsible for killing “numerous children.”
Hobbs was also charged with the murder of Brenda Ann Tucker, 29, a woman he knew in the 1990s, but the charges were ultimately dismissed in 2002 due to lack of evidence.