OAKLAND — 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.
Two women linked by murder
On July 26, 1980, then-31-year-old Melzetta Gary was about eight weeks pregnant with her third child, a son. She was excited to finally tell her mother, Latrelle Lindsay, who lived at the Union City home on Medallion Street where Melzetta and her husband of 14 years had previously stayed.
But there was a problem; Lindsay wasn’t picking up her phone, so Melzetta rounded up a friend and went there. She used her key to unlatch the deadbolt — Lindsay hadn’t changed the locks when she moved in — and Melzetta’s friend stepped inside first.
On the witness stand last December, Melzetta described what happened next.
“She came back to me and said, ‘No. You can’t come in here. We have to go back out,’” Melzetta said. She ignored the advice and charged in, only to discover her mom’s partially nude body at the foot of the bed. Lindsay had been bound, raped and choked to death, then covered with blankets, police said.
“We were hysterical. We were emotional, hysterical, drama,” Melzetta said, later adding, “I just touched her fingers, her hand, and I saw that she was real cold.”
Police interviewed Melzetta that day, and she provided a detailed statement. But now detectives say there was one crucial subject that never came up — any mention of her then-husband, James Ray Gary, who also still had a key to Lindsay’s home. Melzetta and Gary divorced years later.
Media reports at the time noted Lindsay’s house had been vandalized before, and she’d been targeted by racist threats. Police also spent time interviewing her ex-boyfriend after learning she’d ended the relationship hours before she was killed. None of that went anywhere, and Lindsay’s ex-boyfriend died in 1993.
Then, in 1996, a seemingly unrelated investigation started with a gruesome discovery. A trash cleanup crew came upon Winifred Douglas’ rotting body near the Laurel Street exit of Interstate 780 in Vallejo. Her dumped corpse was found tied up with twine and a tablecloth, authorities said.
Police learned she’d been living in a garage of an apartment building in Berkeley, where they discovered blood spatter. They also found out that she’d been attempting to make ends meet through prostitution. A medical examiner determined she had died 36-48 hours earlier, and no suspects were ever publicly identified, according to court records and media reports.
In 2003, DNA tests of skin cells found under Douglas’ nails were linked to sperm cells found in the underwear Lindsay had been wearing the night she was killed. That’s where things stayed for nearly 20 years.
A rape report and a DUI stop
In July 2021, almost 41 years to the day after Lindsay’s death, a homeless woman living in Fairfield reported she’d been raped by a stranger while she was fast asleep in a lot on the 1300 block of West Texas Street in Fairfield. She agreed to a medical exam, where a technician collected DNA. The sample yielded a match, but not the kind police were expecting. Whoever sexually assaulted this woman had also been with Lindsay and Douglas right before they died, according to court records.
But police still had no face or name to go with it.
Six months later, the same Fairfield woman reported she’d been sexually assaulted in Dixon. This time, she named her alleged attacker as James Ray Gary, the deacon of a little church in West Oakland.
At age 76, Gary was a retired carpenter and Vietnam War veteran, recently widowed after the death of his second wife. His past addresses included San Ramon, Oakland, Vallejo and Union City, where he spent seven years at the same home where Lindsay had been killed. In 2022, he lived on Utah Street in Fairfield, authorities said.
Police put together an undercover surveillance team on July 8, 2022, following Gary around Fairfield, watching as he stopped his car in the 1300 block of West Texas Street and spoke to the same woman who’d now twice accused him of rape. Then he got back into his Ford Taurus, and unwittingly sealed his fate, allegedly driving so erratically that police pulled him over on suspicion of drunk driving, according to court records.
Gary was not arrested that night, but when he blew into a breathalyzer mouthpiece, his life was forever changed.
Police linked the saliva to both homicides and the 2021 rape test exam. When detectives brought him into custody two weeks later, he denied killing Lindsay, or having an affair with her, and claimed no knowledge of Douglas. He also emphasized his role as a faith leader, noting how he and his father, Pastor Clote H. Gary, built the West Oakland church together in 1969. James Ray Gary took over as deacon in 2008, after his dad died of cardiac arrest at age 96, and the church cycled through three more pastors, records show.
After Gary’s arrest, a self-described prostitute from Stockton came forward to police, informing them she’d been meeting with Gary regularly for years, sometimes on the Market Street church grounds. Detectives decided to pay the church a visit the very next Sunday. They noted a sign outside advertising worship services that began at 11 a.m. each week, according to court records. But no one arrived.
Gary’s trial is tentatively scheduled for early 2026. Without its longtime deacon, the church has remained shuttered. A red “For Sale” sign now hangs from the plastered wall that Gary and his dad constructed 56 years ago.