Exactly 37 years after Barbara Ballman was found shot to death in Glendale, her killer was brought to justice.

On the morning of Friday, Sept. 21, 1979, children walking to school found the 23-year-old woman’s body, lying naked across the front seat of her Volkswagen Beetle, which was parked across the street from Thomas Edison Elementary School.

She’d been raped and shot once in her abdomen.

Detectives at the time collected the killer’s DNA evidence from her body, but didn’t have the tools to analyze it and otherwise had no leads.

Ballman — who worked as a Penny Lane counselor and mentor for at-risk girls — spent her last night alive with her older sister, said Deputy District Atty. Jonathan Chung. With a six-year age difference, they were best friends who lived a mile apart. That night, they spoke about having sweet rolls and watching Donna Summer perform.

Ballman was attacked on her way home.

For decades, the case went unsolved. The evidence, untested.

That’s until 2004, when law enforcement agencies obtained grant funds to test DNA in cold cases, Chung said.

Thirty-seven years after Barbara Ballman was found shot to death in Glendale, Darrell Gurule was found guilty of her murder. (Courtesy of Linda Benjamin)

When Glendale detectives submitted the evidence to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department crime lab, it came back with a hit.

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FOR THE RECORD

5:03 p.m.: A previous version of this story stated that DNA was initially submitted to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department crime lab in 2009. It was first submitted in 2004.

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The DNA was traced to a man named Darrell Gurule, who was 19 years old at the time of Ballman’s death.

Two years earlier, in 1977, Los Angeles police caught him after he forced a woman, while armed with a shotgun, to perform oral sex. He was released from a correctional facility five months before Ballman was murdered.

By the time he was identified as a suspect in Ballman’s death, Gurule had been serving a life sentence since 1987 for the kidnapping and murder of a man in what police believe was a drug deal gone wrong.

In 2009, Glendale homicide detectives visited him in prison, carrying photos of Ballman, along with shots of her crime scene. Gurule denied ever having met her.

“But we knew that wasn’t the case, especially since his DNA was found inside of her,” Chung said, adding that investigators snagged another DNA swab during that visit. Again, it was a match, and the odds were “astronomical.”

“It came back to one in 2.88 quadrillion,” Chung said. “You would need another million earths with the same population on it and you would expect to see that DNA once.”

After a four-day trial this month followed by three days of deliberations, a jury on Wednesday found Gurule guilty of Ballman’s murder.

Gurule, who is eligible for the death penalty, is awaiting a new sentence.

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Alene Tchekmedyian, alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @atchek