1998 'America's Most Wanted' Rerun Cracks 1997 Cold Case

A New Jersey viewer recognized his neighbor on a rerun of a 1998 'America's Most Wanted' episode, leading to an arrest in the 1997 hit-and-run death of Leslie Ruby.

The Des Moines Police Department announced Tuesday, via a Facebook video, a major breakthrough in the hit-and-run death of Leslie Ruby, a 64-year-old Korean War veteran struck and killed on Sept. 29, 1997, while driving his lawnmower back home after cutting the grass at his daughter's house. The driver never stopped. Police had identified a suspect, Geraldo Garcia-Michel, then 28, but believed he had fled to southern California. The case went cold — until Aug. 4, 2026, when a Crime Stoppers tip arrived from a New Jersey resident who had just watched a rerun of the case's 1998 "America's Most Wanted" episode and recognized Garcia-Michel as his own neighbor. U.S. Marshals arrested the suspect on Aug. 26 after a weeks-long collaboration with New Jersey authorities.

The twist is that television already had its chance. In 1998, "America's Most Wanted" profiled Ruby's case, and Des Moines Sgt. Paul Parizek recalled the optimism of that original airing: "Everybody watched that TV show." Nothing came of it then. Nearly 30 years later, the same episode — watched as a rerun by a stranger half a country away — produced the tip that actually broke the case. The suspect had evaded capture for decades, according to Parizek, by making "minor adjustments to his name and date of birth, and probably some other things, over the years." A case that outlived multiple generations of one family was solved by a rerun.

The announcement was deeply personal for Shonna, Ruby's granddaughter, who appeared alongside Parizek in the police video. "I didn't have my dad in my life, so he was my dad," she said of her grandfather. Ruby's widow, Patricia, died several years after the accident — "I always think it was from a broken heart," Shonna said — and in 2013, Shirley L. Brown, Shonna's mother and the only child of Leslie and Patricia, died at 51. An old photograph of Patricia and Shirley holding a wanted poster bearing the suspect's face appeared in the video. "They both would have wanted to find some kind of justice in this," Shonna said.

Per The Western Journal, Parizek explained that Garcia-Michel had altered identifying details over the years, which is how he stayed ahead of authorities for so long. Parizek told WCCI-TV in Des Moines that when Shonna learned of the arrest, "One of the things she said is that it was nice to know that justice was going to be served... And it was also nice to know that they weren't forgotten about." The case adds to a striking run of decades-old resolutions in the pack's window: The Streamline Feed reports that Mark Stanley Personette, 80, was sentenced to life in prison for the 1978 murder of 15-year-old Marissa Rolf Harvey in San Francisco, a conviction built on DNA from dried chewing gum found stuck to the victim's back and matched through forensic genealogy.

The Streamline Feed reports that after Personette's conviction, law enforcement agencies nationwide were urged to review their own unsolved files for possible links to him, noting his transient past, including a 1979 arrest in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Cold cases, it keeps proving, are rarely as cold as they seem.