A cold case that has lingered on for over 40 years, in part because it was in the hands of a tiny police department in Foster City that was likely ill equipped to investigate it, may finally be nearing justice for the victim.

Police in Foster City, on the San Francisco Peninsula, arrested an 81-year-old man on Monday in connection with a murder that happened 43 years ago. Patrick Galvani, who has long been suspected of the murder of his wife, 36-year-old Nancy Galvani, is now facing a murder charge that he evaded for over four decades, thanks to new information or evidence that has not been disclosed by police.

The San Mateo County District Attorney's Office, which previously charged Patrick Galvani shortly after the 1982 murder but later dropped the charge, cites "recent developments" in the case, which may have finally come due to a decade and a half of advocacy by the Galvanis'  daughter, Alison.

"The daughter has, for all these years, tried to push for justice for the murder of her mother, and kept on pressing [the Foster City PD] to do it, and they would make those efforts," said San Mateo County DA Steve Wagstaffe, in a statement to the San Mateo Daily Journal. "This time around, I have confidence the evidence is enough."

Nancy Galvani had separated from her husband in the summer of 1982 as the couple was going through a divorce, and she was seeking custody of their daughter. She had taken Alison to live with her in a residence hotel in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, and had filed a restraining order against her husband, who she claimed had threatened her life and once put a pillow over face during a fight.

The daughter, then five years old, was staying with her father for the weekend and Nancy Galvani was planning to pick her up on Monday. But Patrick Galvani allegedly called on Sunday, August 8, 1982, to ask her to pick Alison up early, so she left a dinner party at the residence hotel to do that.

According to a neighbor who spoke to the LA Times in 2014, Nancy was annoyed at her husband, and said as she left the building lobby, "I will be right back. I am going to pick up Alison from her father."

Nancy Galvani was never seen alive again, and was then found by fishermen the next day, floating in the Bay near the San Mateo Bridge, her body stripped down to underwear and stuffed in a sleeping bag and weighted down by a rope attached to a cinder block. The cause of death was asphyxiation by strangulation.

Alison Galvani, now a professor in epidemiology at Yale University and the founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, did not suspect her father during her childhood — though she recalls a childhood friend bringing up her mother's murder, and the rumor of her father's role in it.

Patrick Galvani avoided going to trial for the murder because, as the San Mateo County DA at the time, Keith Sorenson, told the SF Examiner, the case was too circumstantial, and prosecutors would have less than a 50% chance of winning a conviction. He added, "I am not saying for a minute that he is innocent or didn't do it."

As circumstantial cases go, though, this one seems beyond the pale. Nancy Galvani's Buick, which she left the Tenderloin in the night before she was found, was found in the garage of the Pacific Heights home where Patrick Galvani was living. There were all her statements to friends and family members about her husband threatening her, and her statements to police about him punching her and smothering her with a pillow, leading to the restraining order she obtained in June 1982. She had also reportedly told friends she believed Patrick would kill her if she succeeded in getting primary custody of their daughter.

Still, there were no witnesses who saw her with Patrick the night she disappeared. And, seemingly, there was little physical evidence linking him to the crime.

Patrick, according to court records obtained by the LA Times, told investigators that Nancy was "paranoid," and that his wife's statements about him could be explained by her mental illness — she was being treated with lithium for bipolar disorder.

He would later tell his daughter Alison, in private, that it "wasn't his fault" that her mother died — a statement she found odd. And in a recorded phone call by Foster City police in 2010, Alison again asked him about the death and he denied responsibility, but reportedly said, as Alison told the LA Times, that it was the "best thing" that could have happened to her mother. And, he said, he would have killed her mother for her sake, but someone beat him to it.

Still, this was not enough to warrant his arrest 15 years ago. And a court tossed out a wrongful death case brought by Alison Galvani, because the statute of limitations had run out — she had waited too long to bring the case, more than two years, after first suspecting her father's guilt, the court said.

As Alison Galvani told the LA Times in that 2014 interview, she feels immense guilt for her mother's murder, because, "My father used me as bait to lure my mother to her death."

She reportedly had not spoken to her father since that 2010 phone call, at least in 2014, but one has to wonder if he has privately confessed since then — especially given that he sounded so close to doing so back in 2010.

Patrick Galvani was set to make his first court appearance after this latest arrest today, November 25, and we await more information about the new evidence that led to the arrest.