On the night of October 25, 1970, Nancy Bennallack returned to her Sacramento apartment with her fiancé, Ferris Salameh, after spending time with friends. Salameh, a prominent deputy district attorney, stayed for a while before heading home around 11:30 that night. Nancy, who had been planning to marry him within weeks, was lying in bed when he said goodnight. She always left the sliding glass door to the balcony slightly open, allowing her cat to come and go as it pleased.
That ordinary habit would prove deadly. Nancy Marie Bennallack had grown up in Grass Valley, California, where she attended Hennessy School before transferring to Nevada Union High School. She excelled in athletics, playing baseball and leading school songs and other ceremonies. Bowling was her favorite pastime, which she enjoyed with friends and family.
Despite her slender frame, her sister Linda Cox remembered her having a hearty appetite. After graduating from beauty school, Bennallack worked at a salon on South Auburn Street. A friend persuaded her to accompany her on a trip to Hawaii, where she found work in another salon before returning to California. Back home, she became a court stenographer.
She was twenty-two years old. When she did not show up for work the next day, her colleagues took notice. Linda Cox was among the first to suspect something was wrong. After receiving a call from Nancy’s workplace, Linda quickly contacted friends who lived near her sister’s apartment and asked them to check whether Nancy’s car was still in the parking lot.
It was. Shortly afterward, a coworker called Nancy’s stepson, Jack, asking him to check on her. With the help of the building manager, they entered her apartment and found Nancy dead, with visible stab wounds. When police arrived at the scene, they noticed striking similarities to the murder of Judith Hakari, which had occurred earlier that year.
Both women were close in age and lived less than a mile apart. Both were engaged to be married. Beyond that, investigators could find nothing else connecting the two cases. Following Nancy’s murder, police questioned more than five hundred potential suspects.
Among them were Richard John Davis and his roommate, but both offered strong alibis. Davis, who lived across the apartment complex where the crime occurred, was twenty-seven years old with a history of alcohol addiction, instability, and a tendency toward violence. Yet investigators had no solid reason to suspect him. Evidence suggested the attacker had driven away from the area after killing Bennallack, indicating he was likely a stranger to the neighborhood.
Crime scene investigators worked to determine exactly what had happened that fateful night. They later theorized that during the evening of October 25 or the early hours of October 26, a man entered Nancy’s second-floor apartment by climbing onto the balcony through the open sliding door. He had placed tape on his fingers to hide his fingerprints before breaking in. The feat required agility, leading investigators to conclude the killer must have been young, likely under thirty.
A trail of ominous crimson blood stretched from the balcony, across the sidewalk, and ended in the parking lot. This led detectives to believe the suspect may have left wounded by a knife, with the blood trail suggesting an injury to the hand or arm. Crime scene investigation methods had improved considerably since 1970, but the technical limitations of the era still hindered what investigators could extract from the scene. Analysts could determine a person’s blood type, but little else.
Almost forty years after Nancy’s murder, in 2004, a new glimmer of hope emerged. Investigators managed to extract a genetic profile from samples taken from Nancy’s apartment. For years afterward, law enforcement analyzed the killer’s DNA weekly against state and national databases. All attempts failed.
It seemed the suspect had either abandoned a life of crime after his last offense or had somehow managed to evade detection for decades. Any hope Nancy’s family had began to fade once more. The following year, in 2005, homicide investigator Mickey Lincks began searching for Nancy’s killer. Lincks retired after a few years but continued to follow the case closely.
In 2019, she rejoined the investigation as a volunteer, determined to help Nancy’s family find closure and bring her killer to justice. Then, in November 2019, the Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office launched a forensic genetic genealogy investigation. They uploaded the DNA profile to an open-source genealogy website, hoping to find people who might be related to the suspect and narrow the search until a perfect match emerged. Eventually, a source of DNA was found, although it did not belong to anyone registered in the database.
Police also began collecting DNA samples from all potential suspects or their relatives, hoping to find a match that would finally close Nancy’s case. Among those who provided samples was Davis’s daughter. During the search efforts, Lincks managed to contact Davis’s former roommate. The roommate could not remember how he met Davis or why he had moved in with him.
But he did recall that Davis had separated from his wife at the time and that his ex-wife had given birth to a daughter. Davis made no effort to contact his daughter later and contributed nothing to her upbringing. Investigator Lincks searched for Davis’s daughter, who was in her fifties by then, and eventually met her. Upon hearing about Nancy’s case, Davis’s daughter agreed to help investigators by providing a DNA sample.
On June 13, 2022, which coincided with Nancy’s birthday, her sister Linda received a phone call from Lincks that changed everything. Linda received a DNA sample from the lab matching Richard Davis’s sample. Reviewing the original case file, she found no father’s name, no family name, and no date of birth. She needed more information.
But when she found an old list indicating that Richard Davis had actually been a resident of the same apartment complex where Nancy was killed, the pieces began to fall into place. Comparing the daughter’s DNA sample with the blood samples taken on the night of Nancy’s murder, Linda felt shock and relief simultaneously when she found the match. The truth had finally emerged. The efforts of investigator Mickey Lincks ultimately led to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office announcement that Richard John Davis, twenty-seven at the time, was the man responsible for Nancy Bennallack’s murder.
Davis had not fled the crime scene as police had suspected. He had lived near the place where he committed his heinous crime for years. The revelation came with bittersweet complications. Ferris Salameh, Nancy’s fiancé, had died in 2004, and Richard Davis had died in 1997.
There would be no closure for Ferris, and Davis would never be punished. However, Linda and her husband Tom felt relief in finally knowing the truth. Davis’s death, caused by complications of his alcohol addiction, prevented punishment for his crimes, but it allowed Linda and Tom to begin their recovery together without the worry of a long and exhausting trial that could have lasted years. Davis’s breaking into Nancy’s apartment that night through the partially open glass door, with his fingers covered in tape, indicated that Nancy’s murder was likely premeditated.
His motives remained unclear, but investigators speculated that he may have harbored romantic feelings for Nancy and killed her out of spite or rage upon hearing of her marriage. While investigators questioned Davis along with his roommate afterward, none of them examined his arms for stab wounds. If they had, Davis might have spent the rest of his life behind bars. Despite his reputation for a quick temper, Davis avoided being included in the CODIS database because he had no criminal record other than a minor driving under the influence charge.
In a statement read by Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Lieutenant Rodney Grassmann, Linda expressed her family’s gratitude to the organization LINKS for never giving up on the investigation. She mentioned she had nearly lost hope of solving the case. In a later written statement, Linda spoke of how often she and her husband Tom believed Nancy would have loved their farm with all its animals roaming the vast open spaces.
They spoke of their pain at not being able to share news of their children and grandchildren with Nancy, but they were glad that Nancy’s soul was now at peace.