SOLANO COUNTY, Calif. (NewsNation) — A California man currently serving life sentences for rape and child murder was arrested on suspicion of killing a woman who was found dead in a California cornfield 42 years ago, authorities said.
Holly Ann Campiglia’s body was dumped in a Solano County cornfield in August 1980. The young woman’s murder went unsolved, but her family held out hope that one day the killer would be found.
DNA evidence linked Herman Lee Hobbs to the 21-year-old Campiglia’s death, the Solano County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement this week.
Campiglia was from New Jersey. Two field workers found her body in a cornfield in unincorporated Dixon, southwest of Sacramento. She had been shot several times in the head and neck, authorities said.
“The victim was initially listed as ‘Jane Doe.’ It was not until 1992, when the Coroner’s Office was contacted by the National Missing Persons Unit, that we learned that the victim was 21-year-old Holly Ann Campiglia,” the Sheriff’s Office wrote.
The case went cold until 2021 when her family requested that the Sheriff’s Office review the case and resubmit evidence for DNA analysis.
A lab reported finding male DNA and that eventually led to Hobbs, who was arrested last Friday in state prison and transferred to the county jail to face a charge of first-degree murder, authorities said.
He was being held without bail and it wasn’t immediately clear whether he had an attorney who could speak on his behalf.
Hobbs, 76, has been serving a sentence of 25 years to life for the 2000 rape of a 15-year-old girl in Yuba County and an additional 25-to-life sentence he received in 2005 for raping and stabbing to death 13-year-old Terri Pata.
Pata vanished on the way home from her school in Rio Linda, a Sacramento suburb, in 1975. Her body was found several days later, stuffed in a drainpipe.
A probation report submitted in that case said Hobbs was a suspect in at least five killings.
Hobbs also had been charged in the death of Brenda Ann Tucker, 29, who went missing in 1994 from her home in Oroville. Loggers found her skull, with a bullet hole in it, in 2001 in Yuba County and DNA identified her. Hobbs, who knew her family, was charged with her slaying in 2001 but a judge dismissed the case the next year for lack of evidence.
Late last week, an arrest warrant was issued by a Solano County Superior Court judge to have Hobbs transferred from a state prison to the Solano County Jail to face new charges for the murder of Campiglia.
“Cold cases are particularly difficult cases to work because, sadly, time goes on which leads to gaps in memory. For example, the original deputy to investigate this case was Deputy Jose Cisneros, who was killed in the line of duty in 1985,” the Solano County Sheriff’s Office wrote Monday.
“We are grateful to the Campiglia family for their patience and assistance, to the labs whose new technology allowed additional testing of older evidence, and to the staff who worked tirelessly to help bring closure to a lifetime of waiting,” the Sheriff’s Office wrote.
The Solano County Sheriff’s Office said detectives are working with other agencies in Northern California to identify other possible victims of Hobbs.
NewsNation affiliate KRON and The Associated Press contributed to this report,