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OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — A West Oakland church leader had a sinister, secret past, authorities say.
For years, the gruesome deaths of two women — Latrelle Lindsay in Union City and Winifred Douglas in Vallejo — remained unsolved. They were killed 16 years apart and nearly 50 miles away from each other, but the deaths had at least one thing in common: the killer’s DNA, investigators say.
It took decades for detectives to piece together their case. When a break finally came in 2022, it led investigators to a quaint, steepled church painted white on Market Street in West Oakland, according to court records.
Their suspect was none other than the church’s deacon — James Ray Gary, who was then serving as the head of the Olive Branch Missionary Baptist Church, which he helped his father build in the late 1960s. Police sat Gary down in 2022 and let him know his DNA was found at two murder scenes, court records show.
Now Gary is 79, sitting inside Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, awaiting a murder trial. Court filings over the past three years have detailed the decades-long saga behind both investigations, describing how police were stifled repeatedly and left with nowhere to turn, until one woman living on the streets of Fairfield came forward with a tip that changed everything.
Even after linking both killings through DNA, police still had no idea whose DNA it was. The genetic genealogy technique — popularized after the arrest of the Golden State Killer in 2018 — also failed to narrow down a suspect. So detectives did what they’d been doing for decades — waited and hoped for an improbable break in the case.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/09/27/ ... olice-say/