Holy Smokes! Thumbprint on Carton of Cigarettes SOLVES 1977 Murder

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan

CrimeOnline and iHeartPodcasts

True Crime

4.8 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Just before midnight on January 31, 1977, Jeanette Ralston leaves the Lion's Den bar in San Jose, California. She never arrives home and the next morning her body is found wedged in the back seat of her VW Beetle in a carport of an apartment complex not far from the bar. She had been strangled and possibly sexually assaulted. Investigators found evidence and a sketch of a possible suspect was done, but the case went unsolved and ran cold. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the murder of this single mom and how investigators eventually located a possible suspect in 2024 using a thumbprint found on a carton of cigarettes at the scene of the crime in 1977.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to an I-Heart podcast.
0:06.3	Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Moore.
0:10.8	I'm sure that everyone has heard the term.
0:16.5	The new car smell.
0:19.2	You know what I'm talking about?
0:31.1	It doesn't just apply to cars, but it applies to homes, newly built homes, where you can still smell that lumber that you've paid thousands of dollars to.
0:32.9	Or the fixtures that are in the house.
0:39.3	Or if you've ever been in a new camper, for instance, it's out on a lot. You walk through it, it has a particular smell.
0:42.3	It hasn't been lived in yet.
0:44.3	But cars in particular carry an odor, I guess.
0:49.3	Odor implies something bad.
0:50.3	It's not necessarily bad, other than you think it's emblematic of the fact that
0:57.0	it's going to depreciate when you drive it off a lot and you've dumped thousands of dollars into it.
1:02.0	But there's one car in particular, that for me personally, I can't speak for anybody else.
1:07.0	There's one car in particular that I've had contact with throughout my life,
1:11.7	ever since I was a weed little guy up until this point,
1:14.9	that always had a very distinctive smell to it.
1:18.4	It's a particular brand.
1:21.0	It was designed and manufactured originally in Germany.
1:26.4	And it has, I don't know, it has connections to the Nazi party.
1:33.1	What I'm talking about is the Volkswagen Beetle.
1:38.1	The Beetle has a particular smell to it when you get into it.
	...

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