#7 - Thomas Darnell
At about 3 am on March the 17th of 1983, a deputy of the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office in Texas
noticed a fire burning in a wooded area while he was out on patrol. The officer approached the
flames, whereupon he discovered that a young woman’s naked body had been set ablaze. An
autopsy determined that the victim, who was still unidentified at the time, had been abused by her
killer before being fatally strangled. The FBI was later able to identify the corpse as belonging to
Laura Purchase, a missing woman from Houston. Only months after her body had been discovered,
self-proclaimed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas submitted an unprompted confession to her
murder. Lucas was ultimately convicted of the crime in 1986, but following his incarceration,
he rose to infamy after it emerged that he’d falsely confessed to upwards of 600 other murders,
causing many unsolved cases to be closed and inaccurately attributed to him. The
man ultimately died of congestive heart failure in 2001, but prior to his death,
he’d recanted most of his confessions, with the exception of his mother’s slaying in 1960.
Twenty-four years after Purchase’s murder, the Montgomery County Cold Case Squad resubmitted
the still-unidentified perpetrator’s DNA to the FBI, officially eliminating Lucas
as a potential suspect. Then, in October of 2019, the DNA was sent for genealogy testing,
leading investigators to 75-year-old Kansas man Thomas Darnell. The latter’s DNA was positively
matched to the suspect’s, resulting in his arrest on a charge of capital murder in May of 2021.
#6 - David Swift Wife and mother of four Karen
Johnson Swift disappeared on October the 29th of 2011 after she’d attended a Halloween Party at the
Dyersburg Country Club in northwest Tennessee. She was officially reported missing the following day,
and local authorities subsequently set an extensive search effort into motion. During
the course of their investigation, Dyersburg police learned that the missing woman’s husband,
David Swift, had been the last person to see her prior to her abrupt disappearance. That
information, coupled with the fact that Karen had filed for divorce from David just 3 weeks earlier,
immediately made him a person of interest in the case. Then, on December the 10th,
roughly 6 weeks after Karen had initially gone missing, her body was found, buried in a cemetery
about 2 miles from her house. The Dyer County Sheriff’s Office thus re-classified the case
as a homicide investigation, and they worked tirelessly over the course of the next 10 years
to identify the perpetrator of Karen’s killing. Although all circumstantial evidence pointed to
David as the likely suspect, there simply wasn’t enough to charge him. That all changed in October
of 2019 when Dyersburg police officially concluded their investigation and turned all evidence over
to the office of the District Attorney General, who reviewed the information before presenting the
case to a grand jury in the summer of 2022. More than a decade after Karen’s slaying,
the Dyer County Sheriff’s Office announced that her husband had been indicted by the grand jury
and was charged with pre-meditated first-degree murder. On August the 8th of 2022, David, who,
by that time, had remarried and moved to Alabama, was taken into custody by members of the DCSO
with assistance from members of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office in his new home state.
#5 - Jade Benning
California police were called to an apartment in Santa Ana in the early hours of January the
4th of 1996 after receiving reports of a fatal home invasion. Upon their arrival, officers were
told that an African American man had broken into the house at about 3 am and proceeded to
stab 22-year-old resident Christopher Hervey to death. The victim’s girlfriend, Jade Benning,
who was reported as having lived in the apartment with him, recounted how she’d witnessed a physical
struggle between him and the alleged suspect. She further claimed that the assailant,
after murdering Hervey, had slashed her right hand before fleeing out the back door. In the wake of
the incident, the Santa Ana Police Department was unable to identify any suspects that fit
Benning’s description of the intruder. In 2001, Benning reportedly moved to Las Vegas, Nevada,
and the case ultimately went cold. Nearly 25 years later, the police decided to revive their dormant
investigation into Hervey’s death after receiving an anonymous letter that implicated Benning in
the crime. The woman had been interviewed by detectives during the preliminary stage of
the investigation, as neighbors had claimed to have heard a contentious argument from inside
her apartment on the night of the supposed home invasion. She wasn’t initially charged,
but that all changed in May of 2022. After consulting with forensic experts,
Santa Ana police were able to collect enough evidence to obtain a criminal complaint,
and a $1 million warrant was then issued for Benning's arrest. The 48-year-old woman was
taken into custody at her new residence in Austin, Texas. As of the case’s latest updates, Benning
was still awaiting extradition back to California, where she’d likely stand trial for murder.
#4 - Shelley Susan Thompson-Lemoine
On April the 14th of 2005, Texas woman Carolina Tejeda went to her elderly parents’ home in
Cleveland, located about 45 miles northwest of Houston, to make them lunch. Upon her arrival,
Tejeda knocked on the front door, but neither of her parents answered, so she assumed they were
still asleep. She then went inside, at which point she stumbled upon a horrifying scene. Her father,
80-year-old World War II veteran Antonio Rodriguez, was lying lifelessly on the floor,
while her mother, 77-year-old Luz Rodriguez, was found dead in the master bedroom. It was later
determined that both victims had been beaten and strangled to death. Police dogs tracked the scent
of the suspect to a nearby apartment complex, but that failed to generate any actionable
leads. Blood that was believed to have belonged to the couple’s attacker was also found on a rug
inside the home. The authorities uploaded the DNA to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System,
known as CODIS, but the sample wasn’t matched to anyone in the database,
and the case consequently went cold for several years. The investigation broke new ground in March
of 2021, when CODIS finally found a match for the suspect’s blood collected at the crime scene. The
police revealed that the DNA had been linked to 41-year-old Shelley Susan Thompson-Lemoine,
who, at the time, was incarcerated in a Texas state prison for an unrelated drug offense.
Although Thompson-Lemoine denied having any involvement in the Rodriguez couple’s murder,
she was arrested outside her parole office in July of 2022,
after having recently been released from prison. As of recent updates, investigators were still
trying to determine Thompson-Lemoine’s motive for the grisly double homicide.
#3 - Kristopher and Candace Valadez
Kansas college student German Clerici was officially reported missing to local authorities
in February of 2010 after his mother hadn’t heard from him for several days. Less than a week later,
the 19-year-old’s body was discovered in a mud-caked culvert east of Augusta,
and it was subsequently determined that he’d been fatally shot. The victim’s missing
vehicle was eventually found in North Wichita about 5 months later. Clerici’s
murder case experienced little progress over the course of the next decade, but,
in 2021, the police uncovered information that prompted them to renew their efforts in the
investigation. While officials didn’t publicly reveal the nature of the newfound information,
it was reported that newly discovered evidence led them to identify Kristopher and Candace Valadez as
the case’s prime suspects. The couple, who resided in Simpsonville, South Carolina, had reportedly
been in their early 20s and living in Wichita at the time of Clerici’s death. In August of 2022,
Kristopher and Candace were booked into a South Carolina jail pending their extradition back to
Kansas to face charges of murder. Although the police didn’t indicate what they believed to have
been the couple’s motive for the killing, rumors had surfaced back in 2019 that Clerici had gotten
involved in illegal activity after mixing with the “wrong crowd” at Cowley County Community College.
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#2 - James Watkins
37-year-old Christine Munro was accosted while jogging on the south side of the Sacramento River
Trail in California on June the 24th of 1995. According to subsequent reports on the matter,
the assailant proceeded to assault and murder the mother of 4. Two years later, a convicted felon
allegedly admitted to the crime, but there was no evidence to support his confession,
and the case ultimately went cold for the next 24 years. In late 2019, however, a Redding
Police Department detective began reviewing Munro’s case again, and the following January,
he re-submitted the woman’s fingernail scrapings to the FBI. Through analysis performed with DNA
technology that hadn’t existed at the time of the initial investigation, the scrapings hit a
potential match in June of 2020. The sample was reportedly linked to Texas man James Watkins,
who was in the midst of a 14-year prison sentence for robbery. At the time of Munro’s murder,
then 17-year-old Watkins had been living with his aunt and uncle, and had several run-ins with
Redding police for relatively minor crimes. By the time he moved to Texas 2 years later, he’d already
compiled a rap sheet that included assault, burglary, and bank robbery. On October the 21st
of 2020, Watkins was flown to Redding, where he faced assault, kidnapping, and murder charges. If
convicted, he reportedly faced the likelihood of a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
#1 - George Siever, Brian Gray, and Candice Carter
California teen Edgar Martinez was sleeping in his bed in the late evening hours of March the
27th of 2005 when he was suddenly struck by multiple gunshots fired on the street
outside his Antioch residence. It was reported that Martinez passed away as a result of the
critical injuries he’d sustained. In the incident’s aftermath, investigators worked
to ascertain what had precipitated the young man’s untimely demise. However, they had very
little information to go on and so the case went cold for the next 15 years. Then, in early 2020,
the Antioch Police Department announced that they’d identified and arrested 3 individuals
believed to have been responsible for the shooting that claimed Martinez’s life. The first suspect,
39-year-old Candice Carter, was served a high-risk arrest warrant in the city of Pittsburg and taken
into custody on January the 30th. A few days later, on February the 3rd, 35-year-old George
Siever was arrested in connection to the case, followed by Brian Gray, also aged 35,
the next day. As was detailed in the arrest reports, the police had ultimately concluded that,
on the night of the deadly incident, Carter had gotten into an argument with a group of men whom
she believed to be rival gang members. Later that night, the woman, along with Siever and Gray,
returned to the area of the confrontation and fired multiple rounds into Martinez’s apartment.
It was determined, however, that the teen had played no part in the initial dispute and hadn’t
even been the assailants’ intended target. They were actually looking for his cousin,
a member of the rival gang involved. Antioch police credited advancements in technology, as
well as tips from the community, with solving the 15-year-old cold case. Carter accepted a plea deal
with prosecutors and was consequently put away for 13 years. In April of 2021, Siever and Gray
pleaded guilty to reduced charges of manslaughter and were sentenced to 14 years in prison each.
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