DNA from Wingstop cup solves 1980 Fontana cold case murder

A Wingstop cup gave investigators the DNA match that finally put a name on Michelle “Missy” Jones’s killer, four decades after the 18-year-old was found dead in a South Fontana grapefruit grove. San Bernardino County says the case became the county’s oldest cold case ever successfully prosecuted.

Fontana cold-case detective Kathryn Clark reopened the file in early 2020 and chased an old lead that had never been fully developed. Leonard Nash had once dated Jones’s older sister, Phyllis Jones, but he was never questioned in the original investigation. Meanwhile, the last person Jones had been seen with in 1980 was arrested and later released after being ruled out. Clark and her partners then interviewed Nash, obtained DNA from a Wingstop cup he had used, and compared it with genetic material preserved from Jones’s original autopsy.

That comparison broke the case open. NBC Los Angeles reported that the autopsy evidence, which had sat unusable for decades, was finally processed in 2020 at the Riverside/San Bernardino CAL-DNA Laboratory and matched against Nash’s discarded DNA. Clark said the result made it 26 septillion times more likely to be Nash than an unknown person. Prosecutors charged Nash on September 14, 2020, with murder under California Penal Code section 187(a), alleging the killing was willful, deliberate and premeditated.

Jones disappeared on July 5, 1980, a day after celebrating Independence Day with her family in Rancho Cucamonga. Later that same day, her body was found near Live Oak and Santa Ana avenues in South Fontana, and investigators said she had been sexually assaulted. Nash, now in his 70s, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced in January 2026 to 15 years to life in prison. He officially began serving that sentence on February 3, 2026, at California Institution for Men in Chino.

For Jones’s family, the case turned a long, unhealed mystery into a verdict. Kymberly Jones said Nash lived 54 years while Missy lived only 18, and the family still celebrates Missy’s birthday every year. Clark is also slated to be formally recognized at an upcoming Fontana City Council meeting. What started with a body in a grove and a cup in the trash ended with the kind of answer cold-case families wait decades to hear.