Sex offender charged in Calif. boy's 1981 cold case murder
ANAHEIM, Calif. -- An Idaho man has been arrested in the strangling death of a Southern California boy 33 years ago after DNA testing linked him the killing, police said Saturday.
Kenneth Rasmuson, 53, was arrested Friday and taken to the Bonner County Jail in Sandpoint, Idaho. He will be extradited to California to face murder charges in the 1981 killing of 6-year-old Jeffrey Vargo, police in Pomona, Calif. said in a statement.
The first-grader was last seen on July 2, 1981 bicycling to the fireworks stand near his Anaheim Hills home, about 40 miles southeast of Los Angeles, at the start of the fourth of July celebration. His strangled body was found the next day at a construction site about 25 miles away in Pomona.
Rasmuson was convicted twice of sexually assaulting children in California.
Just months after Jeffrey's slaying, he sexually assaulted an 11-year-old boy in Santa Barbara County and was sent to prison in December 1981, then was committed to a mental hospital, the Orange County Register reported .
He was released in 1985, then sent back to prison and the mental hospital for kidnapping and molesting a 3-year-old boy in Los Angeles in 1987.
He relocated to Idaho in 2010, where he was classified as a violent sexual predator in that state's sex offender registry, and has no criminal history there.
The boy's parents told CBS LA that while the arrest won't bring back their son, they're comforted knowing that Rasmuson can't hurt another child.
"This guy robbed us of so much time in our lives. He took away our son and my other son's little brother. He never got to grow up and fall in love or get married and have children, or any of those things," Connie Vargo said.
Her husband told the station that he slept through the night for the first time in "a long time" after hearing of the arrest.
"I hope that he is convicted and put away for life," Connie Vargo told the station.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Pomona Police Department at (909) 620-2085.