Nearly 36 years after a La Mesa widow returned from a Hawaiian vacation to find her 42-year-old son dead, with his throat slashed inside the home they shared, authorities have arrested and charged a suspect based on new DNA evidence developed this year, officials said Monday.

James Mitchell Boget, 64, is accused of killing William Rocco Mambro on Christmas Eve 1983 inside Mambro’s home on Loren Drive, just off Amaya and Severin drives in the Fletcher Hills area, according to police and prosecutors.

Boget, who was 28 years old at the time of the slaying, was arrested Nov. 17 in Texas and extradited to San Diego last Wednesday. He was arraigned Thursday in an El Cajon courthouse and pleaded not guilty to one count of first-degree murder. He was ordered held in lieu of $2 million bail.

Mambro’s mother found her son dead Dec. 28, 1983, upon returning home from a week-long vacation, according to a story from the time in the San Diego Evening Tribune. According to police at the time, the victim was strangled, his throat was slashed and he’d been stabbed several times with kitchen knives that were found at the scene.


The doors of the home were bolted shut from the inside, and the house was ransacked, according to the Tribune’s account. The victim’s 1973 Cadillac was also missing.

La Mesa police ended their active investigation of Mambro’s slaying in 1984, Lt. Greg Runge said in a statement Monday.

A promising lead in 1987 turned out to be an apparent dead end, according to a story from that year in the Tribune.

“In 2017, the case was re-opened and a full review of the evidence was conducted,” Runge said in the statement. “In March 2019, new DNA evidence was developed.”


San Diego County Deputy District Attorney Brian Erickson said Monday that the case was solved using “straight DNA off of evidence we had collected at the scene.”

Erickson said it was not a case aided by the use of forensic genealogy, also called genetic genealogy — the crime-solving tool that helped catch the alleged Golden State Killer and helped solve a 2006 slaying in La Mesa — by which authorities use DNA collected from the crime-scene and upload it into a public repository to look for possible family connections.

Runge and Erickson declined to elaborate Monday on the type of DNA evidence that led to Boget’s arrest.

Online court records from Bexar County, Texas, where San Antonio is located, show at least nine court cases for Boget dating back to at least 1991, mostly for minor drug charges and unlawful weapons possession.


Authorities would not elaborate Monday on the suspected connection between Boget and Mambro. According to a pair of Tribune stories from the time, Mambro was last seen alive on Christmas Eve at a bar on El Cajon’s Main Street, near where he had previously worked as a bartender at Mama’s Mink, a bar owned by his father.

Mambro’s father died in 1982, about a year and a half before the slaying. Records show the victim’s mother, Marian, died in 1995.

According to accounts of the case from the time, Mambro was supposed to pick up his mother from the airport on Dec. 28, but when he didn’t show, she phoned her daughter and son-in-law. The trio found her home’s doors bolted shut from inside. When they forced their way in, Marian Mambro found her son dead on a bedroom floor.

Investigators found at least two “kitchen-type” knives inside the home that were used in the slaying, and an autopsy revealed Mambro was strangled, as well as slashed and stabbed, according to stories in the Tribune.

In 1987, an El Cajon man apparently confessed to several killings in central Florida, and based on his East County connection, La Mesa police sought his fingerprints to compare them to evidence in the Mambro killing, according to a Jan. 24, 1987, story in the Tribune. It is unclear, based on media reports available from that time, whether investigators were able to compare the man’s fingerprints to evidence found at the scene.