San Francisco Bay gave up its secrets in the summer of 1982 — a sleeping bag drifting under the San Mateo Bridge, a young mother inside, bound to a cinder block and strangled. But the truth behind Nancy Rischeill Galvani’s death has always lived somewhere else entirely: with her daughter, Alison, who never stopped fighting for her mother’s name.
Nancy was just 36, a terrified woman trying to break free from an estranged husband and a collapsing marriage. She’d moved into a Tenderloin hotel, filed a restraining order, and confided to friends that she feared what might happen if she won custody of her five-year-old daughter. The fear wasn’t paranoia — it was prophecy.
On August 9, fishermen spotted the sleeping bag. By that evening, Alison’s life had been rewritten forever.
At the time, prosecutors balked. Evidence felt “too circumstantial,” a DA declared. The charges against Nancy’s estranged husband, Patrick Galvani, were dropped. The case froze in place, and a little girl grew up in the shadow of a murder everyone seemed willing to forget.
But Alison refused to let her mother’s story be swallowed by the Bay.
As a teenager, she started digging. Later, she chased down relatives, met with detectives, hired her own private investigator, and used social media to drag attention back to Nancy’s case. She even took her father to court in a wrongful-death lawsuit, only to watch it fail because too much time had passed. Still, she refused to disappear like her mother’s case had.
In 2010, she confronted him. The recorded call chilled investigators: he denied killing Nancy, but allegedly added that her death was “the best thing” and that he “would have done it himself.” The words clung to the case like fog over the Golden Gate.
Now, more than 40 years after Nancy was found in the Bay, police say the evidence finally caught up.
On Monday, Foster City Police arrested 81-year-old Patrick Galvani for the 1982 murder — a seismic break in a case many assumed would go to the grave unresolved. Prosecutors say new witnesses, missing for decades, have stepped forward. Their accounts allegedly fill in the gaps: motive, timing, opportunity, even where Nancy may have been kept before her body was dumped.
For Alison, the call came this week. Relief, gratitude — and the weight of four decades of silence finally cracking open.
“She feared people weren’t listening,” San Mateo County DA Steve Wagstaffe said. “But they heard her.”
Galvani’s attorney insists he is innocent and predicts another dismissal. Prosecutors say this time is different.
The investigation is active. The questions are old. The women at the heart of the case — one murdered, one relentless — are finally being centered.
Nancy wanted safety. Alison wanted truth. And after forty-three years, the Bay’s coldest secret is heading back to court.
