A woman walking to work saw a rope on the sidewalk. It led down the hill.
On the morning of July 11, 1990, a woman walking to work in Scripps Ranch, a quiet neighborhood in the northeast corner of San Diego, noticed a length of rope lying on the sidewalk along Scripps Ranch Boulevard. It led down a dry hillside to the body of Margaret Orozco Jackson, 47. Prosecutors would later tell a jury she had been severely beaten and strangled, the rope wound twice around her neck. Today, Scripps Ranch High School stands on that land.
Her case did not go to a single detective. It went to the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, a regional unit then assigned to more than forty killings of women across the county on the theory that a single serial offender might be responsible for many of them. Investigators and researchers have since concluded that most of those murders were separate crimes by separate people. Margaret’s was one of the many that went unsolved. Evidence from the scene was collected, catalogued and put into storage — and the file stopped moving for thirty-two years.
In 2022, the San Diego Police Department’s Homicide Cold Case Unit reopened the case with the District Attorney’s Cold Case Unit. Detectives re-read the reports, re-interviewed witnesses who were still alive, and sent the preserved physical evidence back to the lab. DNA recovered from beneath Margaret’s fingernails and elsewhere on her body produced a profile — and by then there was something to match it against. In 2018, Randall Oyler had been convicted of drug trafficking, and that conviction put his DNA into CODIS. He was 29 in the summer of 1990 and had never been on any investigator’s radar.
On October 26, 2023, San Diego police arrested Oyler for the murder while he was already in the county jail on a probation-violation warrant. Investigators then placed an undercover operative in a cell with him. In recorded conversations later played for the jury, Oyler said of the victim, “She scratched me,” and, asked whether he had left her there, answered that he had “threw her down a hill.”
The trial opened on May 11, 2026 — what would have been Margaret’s 83rd birthday — with Deputy District Attorney Chris Lindberg of the DA’s Cold Case Homicide Unit presenting the DNA and the recordings. Defense attorney Kara Oien argued the original investigation had been inadequate, that DNA cannot say how or when it got there, and that the jailhouse remarks were vague answers to leading questions rather than confessions. On May 19, 2026, the jury convicted Randall Oyler of first-degree murder.
He was sentenced on June 26, 2026. In a sentencing memorandum, Lindberg described an unprovoked and brutal attack and told the court Margaret had been strangled for five to six minutes. Margaret’s niece, Rebecca Cepeda, addressed the court. Oyler did not speak; through his attorney he offered condolences to the family. Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Fraser said there was no doubt Oyler committed the murder and had evaded justice for more than three decades, adding that “justice delayed is justice denied … but it’s not true today.” The sentence: 25 years to life in state prison. Randall Oyler is 65.
District Attorney Summer Stephan said the case was a reminder that justice has no expiration date. The thing that finally got Margaret Jackson’s name back out of a forty-victim file was not a new theory — it was a piece of evidence somebody preserved properly, and somebody else, three decades later, bothered to test again.
Sources
- San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, “Man Sentenced to 25 Years to Life for 1990 Cold Case Murder Solved Through DNA Evidence,” June 26, 2026
- San Diego Police Department, “Arrest Made in Cold Case Homicide from July of 1990,” October 27, 2023
- Times of San Diego, May 11, 2026 and October 28, 2023
- NBC 7 San Diego, May 11, 2026
- The Coast News, “Man sentenced in 1990 Scripps Ranch cold case murder,” June 26, 2026
- Patch / City News Service, May 22, 2026
Photograph of Margaret Orozco Jackson released publicly by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office. Other images are licensed or public-domain illustrative stock (Wikimedia Commons) and do not depict this case. No news-broadcast footage was used.
Related reading
No book has been written about this case specifically. For readers who want to go deeper on how preserved evidence and DNA databases close decades-old homicides: cold case DNA investigation books on Amazon.
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