Sometimes all it takes is a simple cup of coffee to crack a decades-old cold
case. These investigations were finally solved in 2022 thanks to persistence,
ingenious discoveries, and good old-fashioned luck.
Tamika Reyes was only nine years old in 1988 when her mother, 26-year-old Anna Kane,
was found strangled and left in the woods outside of Reading, Pennsylvania. Police were
unable to pick up any leads, despite the local newspaper running a front-page story seeking
information from the public. That remained the case, until 15 months later, when a mysterious
letter from a concerned citizen appeared on the editor's desk. The letter happened to contain
information that only the killer would be privy to, and saliva on the envelope was matched to
that found on Kane's clothing. But the science of the time wasn't enough to pin down their suspect.
Cut ahead to 2022, when DNA information provided to public websites by members of
the killer's family allowed authorities to focus on a man named Scott Grim. He had died in 2018,
but police were able to obtain a sample of his DNA
to match the evidence retrieved from the letter. Tamika Reyes then told CNN,
The 1980 murder of 8-year-old Asenath Dukat understandably shook the Upper Arlington,
Ohio community. She was grabbed by a stranger and killed with a 20-pound rock in a shallow
stream on her walk home from school. Police theorized that it may have been part of a
pattern of attempted child abductions that were occurring at the time. In the following years,
they investigated a slew of potential suspects,
even resorting to hypnotizing some suspects in their attempts to elicit a confession.
The eventual identification of the killer hinged on one thing:
the collection of DNA evidence at the scene of the murder, and its careful preservation. In 2008,
police were alerted to a potential match with the recently-obtained DNA profile of Brent Strutner,
a local man who was among the original suspects in the case before his death by suicide in 1984.
Over the next 14 years, authorities diligently ruled out the presence of any DNA not matching
Strutner's, and finally, in 2022, he was officially named as Dukat's murderer.
"We're confident that the case is closed as far as we're concerned."
In April 2009, 17-year-old Brittanee Drexel took off for spring break without her parents Dawn and
Chad's permission to Myrtle Beach, Florida. Then she never came home. The man who would
eventually be named as her killer, Raymond Moody, had been a person of interest in her disappearance
as far back as 2012. But it took a while for anything solid to connect him to the crime.
Using data from Brittanee's cell phone, authorities were finally able to pinpoint
the location of her disappearance more effectively than in previous
attempts. This led to the discovery of a surveillance video implicating Moody in
the crime. He confessed and led investigators to Brittanee's remains. Then in October 2022,
he was sentenced to life in prison plus two consecutive 30-year stretches.
"Today, my daughter, Brittanee, is here with me, with all of us."
One March day in 1983, 33-year-old Santa Cruz, California restaurant owner Joette
Smith turned down a stranger's request for a date. Shortly afterwards, her body was pulled
from a nearby river, shocking what was at the time a cozy, tight-knit community. Her killer,
Eric Drummond, was a customer at her restaurant, and it's likely due to the lack of an obvious
connection with Smith that it took police five years to even identify him as a suspect.
The DNA evidence taken from Smith's body was insufficient to pin the crime on Drummond
in the 80s. Although there was significant circumstantial evidence of his involvement,
he walked free for nearly four decades.
When improved DNA technology allowed police to develop a sturdy profile of Smith's killer,
they zeroed in on Drummond in earnest. In September 2022, he killed himself as
the police were closing in. In a statement announcing the closure of the investigation,
the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office stated,
In 1988, 19-year-old Michigan resident Stacey Chahorski's body was found alongside a highway
near Georgia's border with Alabama. The available DNA evidence was too weak to
pinpoint a suspect, and at the time, the victim herself was also unidentified.
The case is believed to be the first time that both a murder victim and perpetrator
were identified using DNA technology in the same case. Decades after the fact,
family members of Hank Wise, a trucker with an extensive criminal history spanning three states,
came forward to provide DNA that would be matched to evidence found at the scene.
Chahorski was also identified through the DNA of living relatives, finally putting a lid on
a case that had stumped investigators for 34 years. Wise died in a car crash in 1999. In
September 2022, Keri Farley, special agent in charge of the investigation, announced,
"And let this serve as a warning to every murderer, rapist, and violent offender out there."
The most stubborn cold case in the history of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania was finally
cracked in 2022 thanks to an ingenious piece of investigative work. In 1975, 19-year-old Lindy Sue
Biechler was brutally stabbed to death inside her home. The investigation went nowhere for decades,
until the resolution of a cold case in a nearby county prompted authorities
to use blood evidence from the scene to attempt to whittle down their suspect list.
Using genealogy techniques, detectives discovered that the killer had ancestral origins in the small
Italian town of Gasperina, and that only a couple thousand people with such ties lived in the area
at the time of the crime. Investigators then determined that one of those people,
68-year-old David Sinopoli, lived in the same apartment complex as Biechler in
1975. Before he boarded a flight at Philadelphia International Airport,
detectives collected a discarded coffee cup that provided the DNA sample they needed to
nail him. He was then held without bail to await trail for Biechler's murder.
When 53-year-old city maintenance worker John Stagner was beaten to death in his bed in Orlando,
Florida in 1992, police honed in on a suspect almost immediately: Ronald Cates,
a friend of Stagner's who happened to be a drug addict. Cates had developed a habit of borrowing
and pawning power tools from Stagner in order to support this habit. Alas, police were never
able to gather enough evidence to support a probable cause warrant for his arrest.
But that changed in 2022 when Cates' family members came forward for a fresh round of
interviews with police. Around this same time, Cates was in the hospital in North Carolina,
and as Florida detectives were shoring up their case, Cates blurted out to a nurse
that he'd killed someone in Florida decades prior. The nurse told a security guard,
who relayed the information to Orlando police, who paid a visit to Cates in the hospital,
where they were able to obtain a confession on an officer's body cam.
"The Cates family went above and beyond to be able to assist us."
There are cold cases, and then there's the murder of James Tappen Hall, a Montgomery County,
Maryland sheriff's deputy who was moonlighting as a security guard at a local country club when
he was shot in the club's parking lot in October 1971. He died in the hospital three days later.
The case lay dormant for years until 2021, when investigators decided to take a fresh
look. Going over the old case files, they zeroed in on Larry David Smith,
who'd been interviewed back in 1973 but was never seriously considered a suspect.
But investigators discovered that soon after that interview, Smith moved to Little Falls,
New York and changed his surname to Becker, a circumstance that prompted them to bring him
in for a new round of interviews. When they did, he broke down and confessed to the crime. Hall's
daughter Caroline then offered this message to those facing the unsolved murder of a loved one:
When the 17-year-old known as "Princess Doe" was found beaten to death in a New Jersey
cemetery in July 1982, the small community of Blairstown responded with an outpouring
of sympathy. They raised funds for her burial and kept the case in the public eye. The story
then gained national attention and served as the basis of an HBO special in 1983.
The case was partially resolved in 2005 when Arthur Kinlaw, who was serving a 20
years-to-life sentence for the murder of another woman, confessed in writing to Princess Doe's
murder. But it wasn't until 2022 that advances in DNA technology finally allowed authorities to use
an imperfect DNA profile to identify the victim as Dawn Olanick. It's believed that Kinlaw murdered
her when she resisted his attempt to coerce her into prostitution. Despite his confession,
Kinlaw couldn't be charged with the murder until positive identification of his victim was made.
"To everybody who worked on this case, across decades, thank you."
In 1998, Lina Reyes Geddes was found shot, bound,
and wrapped in a sleeping bag near a spring in the vicinity of Lake Powell, Utah. The
main problem with positively identifying her was the fact that her fingertips had been cut off,
and entreaties to the public for help yielded nothing. Nothing, that is, until 2018, when an
amateur cold case enthusiast came forward with one tiny detail after police reopened the case.
That detail was a small mole on the victim's right ear, which was enough for police to
make a tenuous connection to Geddes. Acting on the suspicions of her family in Mexico,
authorities examined trace DNA from the ropes used to bind her, comparing it with DNA given
by the family of Edward Geddes, Lina's husband, who had died by suicide in 2001. A match was made,
confirming Edward as the killer and giving a modicum of closure to the family of Lina,
who for 20 years had been known to Utah law enforcement only as the "Maidenwater victim."
In the summer of 1960, the body of a young girl was found near a highway in Yavapai County,
Arizona. Due to decomposition, it was tough to determine the girl's age,
let alone her identity. At the time, authorities believed her to be about 7 years old. As there was
a dearth of reported missing persons cases involving children of that age, police hit
a dead end in the case of the girl who would become known to locals as "Little Miss Nobody."
That heartbreaking nickname was retired forever in 2022,
thanks to DNA retrieved from the little girl's remains in 2015. Using DNA from living relatives,
she was finally identified as Sharon Lee Gallegos, a 4-year-old who was abducted from
her grandmother's home in Alamogordo, New Mexico, 500 miles from where her body had been discovered.
Unfortunately, though, this decades-long mystery has only been partially solved. The police are
still on the lookout for Gallegos' abductor, although it seems a safe bet that if they're still
alive, the extremely long, doggedly determined arm of the law will catch up to them eventually. As
for the moniker of "Little Miss Nobody," Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes had this to say:
"The sheriff's department is still asking
for any information that could help lead them to the killer."
In December 1996 at a cemetery in Annandale, Virginia, the body of a middle-aged woman was
found. In her pockets were two notes and some cash. One note clarified to police
that the death had been a suicide, and the other directed them to use the money for
funeral expenses. Both were signed "Jane Doe," and despite their best efforts,
they were unable to identify the woman who would become known as the "Christmas tree lady."
In May 2022, genome sequencing technology became available to the Fairfax police department,
enabling investigators to reach out to potential family members. After more than 25 years,
the woman was finally identified as Joyce Meyer, who had drifted apart from her family
after moving to Virginia in the mid-80s. In a statement, the Fairfax County Sheriff's
Department thanked the company that supplied the genome sequencing technology and expressed
its conviction that it would help them to resolve many more unsolved cases in the future.