The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Cold Case Unit has announced the identification of the remains of Vivian Moss, a 54-year-old woman whose dismembered body was discovered in San Jose almost a half-century ago.

According to prosecutors, the body of Vivian Moss was found on July 11, 1981, in an empty field at the present-day location of the VTA Berryessa Transit Center and BART Station parking structure.

While she had no identification on her, investigators located two religious pendants near her body.

The cause of death was persistent to be a homicide resulting from multiple stab wounds to the chest, along with dismemberment.

As of now, prosecutors have not publicly named a suspect in her killing.

Authorities indicated that Moss was a follower of Mt. Zion Spiritual Church.

Family members informed the DA’s Office that she had a close relationship with the church’s leader, Louis H.Narcisse,who passed away in 1989.

it is believed that she may have been employed at an elementary school in Oakland prior to her death.

The Investigation

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen stated in a press release, “One day soon, I hope we will know the depraved person who took her life and left her in a field, hoping she would be forgotten.”

“One day soon,I hope we will know the depraved person who took her life and left her in a field,hoping she would be forgotten.”

In 2023, the DA’s office partnered with forensic genealogists at Parabon NanoLabs to help identify the remains.

Researchers at Parabon theorized that the victim was likely Moss, who was born in Arkansas in 1927.

DNA and Family Connection

In 2024, DA investigators located and interviewed Moss’s granddaughter, who recounted that in the early 1980s, Moss was scheduled to pick her up and have her stay overnight.Moss never arrived, and the granddaughter never saw her again.

Based on Parabon’s genealogical comparison between the remains and Moss’s granddaughter, investigators from the DA’s office concluded that the victim was indeed Vivian Moss.

CeCe Moore,chief genetic genealogist at Parabon,explained that the process involves using DNA from the remains to create a detailed profile,which is then compared against samples in genealogy databases like GedMatch and Family Tree DNA.

Moore noted that this case presented a unique challenge due to the limited number of submissions from African Americans in publicly available databases.

Moore said, “It’s especially challenging with the African American population group because we have far less representation in the databases that we’re allowed to use…limited to the two smallest databases…can be extremely difficult. In this case we got pretty lucky, got some pretty good matches that I was able to work with, build those family trees between different sets of matches.”