GUILTY CA - Danna Dever, 32, beaten to death, Fairfield, 14 June 1996

[OkieGranny]

From 2013:

http://www.thereporter.com/20130131...to-life-sentence-in-1996-death-of-danna-dever

It took 17 years, but the stepmother a Fairfield woman who was brutally beaten and found dead in a rural Solano County ditch in 1996 finally saw justice handed down to the killer.

Those were the words that Susan Dever spoke to Solano County Superior Court Judge Allan P. Carter on Wednesday, just before Carter sentenced Lonnie J. Kerley to 15 years to life in state prison for the death of his live-in girlfriend, Danna L. Dever...

The cycle of violence escalated in January 1996, when Dever finally mustered the courage to call the police on Kerley for beating her... However, by the time of Kerley's June 19, 1996, court date, Dever was missing... Yet he had not told anyone she was missing at the time and went ahead and pleaded to a misdemeanor battery charge. Abrams argued before the jury that Kerley pled so that authorities wouldn't go looking for her.

 

[TootsieFootsie]

After A Skeleton Is Found, 2 Autopsies And An Exhumation ID A Jane Doe and Lead To Her Killer | Oxygen Official Site

For decades, Danna Dever's family had no idea what actually happened to her after she vanished one spring day in 1996. They were told by her partner that she’d walked out of their Cordelia, California home and he hadn’t seen her since. The family had their suspicions about this story. But concrete answers about Dever’s fate didn’t emerge until unidentified remains were discovered in the desert and an exhumation was later performed — finally revealing what happened and ultimately pointing investigators to her killer.