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A DNA match helped authorities determine that a former Martinez man sexually assaulted and strangled Berkeley resident Maria Weidhofer in Tilden Regional Park in 1990.
Officials last week announced they solved the 34-year-old cold case murder by matching the killer’s DNA with that of Jon Lipari, who died by suicide in November at his Oregon home.
Lipari lived in Martinez with family when he sexually assaulted and strangled Weidhofer on Nov. 15, 1990 on a trail near Inspiration Point.
The day after the murder, police spotted her 1982 blue Toyota truck with a white camper shell parked at Inspiration Point. Her body was found near a redwood grove about a mile northwest of Inspiration Point.
Authorities at a morning press conference at East Bay Regional Park District headquarters in Oakland on Feb. 19 said investigators found no previous connection between Weidhofer and Lipari and no motive for the crime.
Police also said Lipari didn’t have a history of violent crime as far as they knew and there were no other violent incidents in the area around the time of Weidhofer’s murder.
“‘Thirty-five years ago, our family was irreparably harmed by the loss of Maria,” said East Bay Parks police Detective Christopher Rudy, reading a statement from Weidhofer’s family. “‘In ensuing years, our parents … struggled mightily with psychological repercussions, including the frustration of knowing the perpetrator was likely still free. Maria, the family, and the world. have been carelessly cheated and deprived of her future.”
The family said they were grateful investigators didn’t give up.
“‘We shall remember Maria as a gentle soul pursuing her dreams as an artist and baker in the Bay Area community she loved. Our wish is that she will be remembered for the person she was and not for what happened to her,” they wrote.
In 1997, biological evidence found on Weidhofer was sent to a Contra Costa County crime lab for DNA analysis. No matches were found at the time.
Rudy said in 2020, park district police began working with the FBI and its advanced DNA techniques. “Through this investigation, Jon Lipari was determined to be a potential suspect and later became our primary suspect in 2024,” Rudy said. “Through this investigation, we determined that the party was living in Gold Beach, Oregon.”
Rudy said there was no evidence that Lipari knew he was a suspect when he killed himself.
Weidhofer was 32 and a native of Claremont in Los Angeles County. She graduated from University of California at Davis with honors in studio art and worked for a macrobiotic bakery in Emeryville.
She regularly jogged on the Nimitz Way trail, adjacent to the Inspiration Way parking lot. Investigators said at the time the suspect had lain in wait on a bench near the trail’s entrance.
— Story by Tony Hicks, Bay City News Service
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