It was a grisly find in 1990, when someone found a woman’s body on a Scripps Ranch hillside, a yellow nylon rope tied around her neck. San Diego police said it appeared she had been dumped there.
At the time, law enforcement had created a special task force to investigate murders of several women believed to be sex workers or connected to the streets. They considered the possibility it was the work of a serial killer.
Margaret Orosco Jackson became the 43rd name on the victim list.
But even with the efforts of the task force, the investigation into the slaying of Jackson, 47, grew cold. Last year San Diego police reopened the case to review it with fresh eyes and new technology.
Last week, homicide detectives arrested a suspect in connection with Jackson’s death: Randell Eugene Oyler, 62. Homicide Lt. Steven Shebloski did not say what new information led them to suspect Oyler, a San Diego resident.
He was already in custody at San Diego Central Jail for a probation violation when detectives re-arrested him to add the murder charge. Jail records indicate he is jailed without bail and is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday.
Jackson’s body was found July 11, 1990, on a steep embankment in a eucalyptus grove near what is now Scripps Ranch High School, which opened in 1993.
She apparently had been strangled and beaten to death, authorities said at the time.
The location of her body and similarities to other killings led investigators to send her case to the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, which was investigating a series of slayings involving suspected sex workers or drug users.
The victims had been picked up, killed and dumped along highways, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported at the time.
Two of Jackson’s sisters acknowledged in 1990 that Jackson had been arrested two months before her death on suspicion of prostitution, but disputed the police characterization of her as a sex worker.
The sisters told the newspaper that Jackson was a widowed mother of three — her husband, a shipbuilder, had died three years earlier — and that she worked as a waitress when she could.
They could not be located for comment Monday regarding the arrest.
In 2002, former District Attorney Ed Miller told the Union-Tribune that 26 of the 46 murders under investigation had been considered solved, with several men arrested and convicted. Some cases were closed without an arrest, because investigators believed some of those convicted were responsible for more than one slaying.
The task force created to investigate the killings was formed in 1988 at a time when homicides in the region were rising.
San Diego’s homicide numbers were at their highest in the early 1990s. The year Jackson died, the city had 135 homicides. Last year, San Diego had 55.
