Wingstop cup DNA solves 40-year-old San Bernardino County murder case

Michelle “Missy” Jones was 18 when she was killed in Fontana, and for 40 years the case sat among San Bernardino County’s hardest unsolved murders. Then a discarded Styrofoam Wingstop cup gave investigators the DNA break they needed to connect Leonard Nash to the killing and finally push the case over the finish line.

Jones was found in 1980 near Live Oak and Santa Ana avenues in Fontana. Police said she had been sexually assaulted, and prosecutors later charged Nash in the murder on or about July 5, 1980. At the time of the filing in September 2020, Nash was described as a 66-year-old Las Vegas resident, and police said he was arrested on Sept. 8, 2020, while awaiting extradition to San Bernardino County.

The new life in the case came when Fontana detective Kathryn Clark revisited old leads in June 2020 and followed up on an unreported thread from 1980. One report said Nash had reportedly dated one of Jones’ sisters, but was never questioned back then. Clark then tracked Nash to Las Vegas, where he discarded a Wingstop cup during a police contact, and investigators collected DNA from that ordinary piece of trash.

That sample became the forensic bridge between a 1980 homicide and a modern prosecution. For true-crime readers, the case is a sharp reminder of how abandoned DNA can transform cold-case work: once a suspect leaves biological material behind in public, detectives can use it to confirm what older evidence could only suggest. Here, that modern technique paired with a reopened file gave investigators a way to tie Nash directly to Jones’s death.

The case also carried a heavy family toll. One report said Jones was a Pomona resident and had died the day after a family Fourth of July barbecue, a detail that underscores how suddenly the killing cut across an ordinary holiday weekend. Decades later, the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s Office said the prosecution became the oldest cold case ever successfully prosecuted in the county.

That final chapter arrived in February 2026, when Nash, then 71, was sentenced to 15 years to life after a conviction for second-degree murder. What began with a body found in a Fontana orchard ended with a cup tossed aside in Las Vegas, and the long gap between those two moments is what made the breakthrough so striking.