An El Monte man allegedly linked by DNA to the rape and killing of a 67-year-old woman at an assisted living facility in Covina more than two decades ago pleaded not guilty Thursday to a grand jury indictment charging him with murder.
David Adolph Bernal, now 49, allegedly strangled Mary Lindgren at an assisted living facility in the 800 block of West San Bernardino Road on Jan. 19, 1996.
The murder charge includes the special circumstance allegations of murder during the commission of a rape, sodomy and burglary.
The woman — who lived alone in a first-floor room at the Covina Villa Retirement Home — was also raped and severely beaten, authorities said.
Investigators conducted extensive interviews with the facility’s staff members, residents and their families, outside vendors, contractors, delivery personnel and neighbors living near the center — all of whom were excluded as potential suspects, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Several items of evidence, including DNA, were also collected and held for forensic analysis. The suspect’s DNA profile was developed, but it did not match any profiles within the state or federal criminal justice DNA databases, according to the sheriff’s department.
Homicide investigators assigned to the sheriff’s Unsolved Unit subsequently collaborated with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in 2019 to submit the unidentified DNA profile to the California Department of Justice, which notified investigators of their results.
Homicide investigators, along with sheriff’s crime lab personnel, subsequently identified Bernal, whose “DNA was a match collected (with DNA) collected from the body of Mary Lindgren,” according to the sheriff’s department.
Bernal was arrested in August 2020 and charged the following day with Lindgren’s killing.
He had been awaiting a hearing to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to allow the case against him to proceed to trial, but that case was dismissed as a result of the superseding indictment.
Bernal — who is due back in a downtown Los Angeles courthouse April 6 for a pretrial hearing — remains jailed without bail.
