SAN JOSE — Cold-case investigators used a fingerprint from a 1977 pack of cigarettes and a subsequent DNA match to implicate an Ohio man in the strangling of a Peninsula woman near a San Jose bar nearly five decades ago, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office announced Tuesday.

Willie Eugene Sims, 69, is expected to be extradited from Ashtabula County — located about 60 miles east of Cleveland — to the Bay Area to face charges in the Feb. 1, 1977 killing of 24-year-old San Mateo resident Jeanette Ralston. He was arrested and arraigned Tuesday in Ohio on a Santa Clara County murder charge.

If convicted, Sims faces up to 25 years to life in prison.

“Every day, forensic science grows better, and every day criminals are closer to being caught,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement. “Cases may grow old and be forgotten by the public. We don’t forget and we don’t give up.”

Ralston was last seen alive about 11:30 p.m. on Jan. 31, 1977, leaving with an unidentified man from the Lion’s Den Bar on Almaden Road, where she had gone with some friends. A few hours later, after the friends had not heard from Ralston despite her assurances that she would return within 10 minutes, they discovered that her Volkswagen Beetle was no longer parked in front of the bar.

The next day, her body was found wedged in in the back seat of her car, which was parked in the carport of a nearby apartment complex on Graham Avenue. San Jose police investigators at the time also documented burn marks inside the car that suggested someone had unsuccessfully tried to set fire to the car.

An autopsy determined that Ralston had been strangled with a long-sleeved dress shirt, and that there were signs that she had been sexually assaulted.

Authorities eventually ran out of leads, but the investigation was revisited by the DA’s cold case unit and the SJPD homicide unit several times over the past decade, including in 2014 when the county Crime Lab, operated by the DA’s office, created a yet-to-be-identified DNA profile from genetic material taken from Ralston’s fingernails.

Investigators say the big break in the case came in 2024, when San Jose police matched a thumbprint — taken from an Eve brand pack of cigarettes recovered from the floor of Ralston’s Volkswagen — to Sims, who was in a criminal database because of a 1978 conviction of assault to commit murder in Monterey County, where he been stationed at Ford Ord as an Army private.

But his DNA was not in any criminal database because he left the state before it could be collected, and he had no criminal history in the intervening years. After the thumbprint match, the DA’s office and San Jose police contacted authorities in Ashtabula County, who clandestinely obtained a DNA sample from Sims, who was living in the small town of Jefferson.

DNA analysis conducted this past March matched Sims to DNA collected from Ralston’s fingernails and the shirt used to strangle her, according to a probable cause affidavit authored by SJPD Detective Hans Jorgensen.

Rob Baker, supervisor of the DA’s cold case unit, said every prosecutor who has served in the unit since it was formed in 2011 had worked on Ralston’s case in some way.

“The Crime Lab’s focus over the last year has been to develop DNA from the murder weapon — the long sleeve shirt used to strangle her,” Baker said. “This case could not have been solved without the support of the Ashtabula County Sheriff and Prosecutor who got us Mr. Sims’ DNA so it could be compared to the crime scene evidence.”

Anyone with information about the cold case can contact the DA’s office at 408-792-2466 or by email at coldcasetips@dao.sccgov.org.