Cases solved by dna evidence
Direct DNA matching — comparing crime-scene DNA to a suspect's known sample (taken by warrant or lifted from a discarded item), or re-testing aged evidence with modern methods — closed these cases.
10 documented cases.
Amber Lynn Jenkins Garcia
Amber Lynn Jenkins Garcia, a 20-year-old woman described by police as a daughter and a mother, was found dead on October 8, 1998, in a wooded area behind Youngs Park on Youngs Road in Morgan City, Louisiana. Her killing went cold despite an initial investigation. At the beginning of 2024, Morgan City Police Department detectives resubmitted evidence collected from the scene to the Acadiana Criminalistics Lab, where advances in DNA analysis linked the evidence to John Willis Pittman Jr. Pittman was already incarcerated at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, serving a 40-year sentence after pleading guilty to manslaughter in the December 25, 1998 death of a second Morgan City woman, Jennifer Vedol. On October 30, 2024, investigators obtained an arrest warrant and Pittman was booked on November 6, 2024 on a charge of second-degree murder in Garcia's death, more than 26 years after the homicide. The case remains pending in the 16th Judicial District Court.
Angela Brosso
Angela Brosso, a 22-year-old woman, vanished during an evening bicycle ride along the Arizona Canal in Phoenix on November 8, 1992, the eve of her 22nd birthday. Her decapitated body was found the next day near the canal path, and her head was recovered from the canal eleven days later. DNA tied the killing to the September 1993 murder of 17-year-old Melanie Bernas along the same canal, and in 2014 forensic genetic genealogy narrowed the unknown attacker to the surname Miller. An undercover DNA sting led to the January 2015 arrest of Bryan Patrick Miller, a local figure known as the Zombie Hunter, who was convicted of both murders in 2023 and sentenced to death.
Debra Lee Miller
Debra Lee Miller, an 18-year-old high school senior who worked at a Mansfield coffee shop, was beaten to death in her first-floor apartment at 151 W. Third Street in Mansfield, Richland County, Ohio, on April 29, 1981. She was bludgeoned with cookware, including a burner grate from a gas stove, in a crime scene investigators called one of the most gruesome they had encountered. The 1981 investigation, which predated the use of DNA in criminal cases and became mired in allegations of police misconduct, never charged anyone, and Miller's upstairs neighbor, James Vanest, was questioned and released without becoming a suspect. The case was reopened by the Mansfield Division of Police in 2021 after a retired lieutenant urged Detective Terry Butler to revisit it. DNA analyst Dawn Fryback performed more than 80 analyses on the preserved evidence and developed a firm DNA profile, mixed with Miller's own, on items tied directly to the homicide; it matched Vanest. Re-interviewed in 2021, Vanest offered an account that appeared to explain away his DNA; he refused a second interview in 2024 and fled to West Virginia. As prosecutors prepared to take the case to a grand jury, Vanest was federally indicted on gun charges, and on November 18, 2024, he was fatally shot after he opened fire on U.S. Marshals and SWAT officers serving the indictment at a North Canton motel. Mansfield police announced the case solved at a December 30, 2024 news conference, declaring that the evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt that Vanest killed Miller.
Elizabeth Wasson
Elizabeth Wasson, an 82-year-old widow known around her Hillsboro, Oregon neighborhood as the Avon Lady, was strangled inside her own home, where she was found dead on September 23, 1992. Serial killer Cesar Barone was suspected at the time because the killing fit his pattern of attacking elderly women living alone, but detectives could not directly link him to the case. In 2023 a Hillsboro detective resubmitted preserved crime-scene evidence for modern DNA testing; male DNA recovered from it forensically tied Barone to the murder. Barone had already been convicted of four other Portland-area murders and sentenced to death in 1995, and he died in prison in 2009. The Washington County District Attorney announced the link on February 10, 2026.
Janet Brochu
Janet Brochu, a 20-year-old woman who lived with her parents in Winslow, Maine, vanished after a night out in Waterville on December 23, 1987. Her unclothed body was pulled from the Sebasticook River in Pittsfield on March 19, 1988, identified through dental records and jewelry. The case remained cold for more than three decades until the Maine State Police Unsolved Homicide Unit reexamined the evidence; advances in forensic DNA testing revealed a genetic link to Gerald Goodale, a man who was already serving 75 years for the 1988 murder of another central Maine woman, Geraldine Finn. A Somerset County grand jury indicted Goodale for Brochu's murder on May 13, 2021, and on March 2, 2023 he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 32 and a half years, to run concurrent with his existing term.
Kathy Halle
Kathy Halle, a 19-year-old woman from North Aurora, Illinois, in Kane County, vanished on March 29, 1979, after leaving her apartment to pick up her sister at the Northgate Shopping Center in Aurora. Her car was found in her apartment complex parking lot with blood behind the driver's seat, and about three weeks later her body was recovered from the Fox River. The case went unsolved for more than four decades. Bruce Lindahl, a Chicago-area man already suspected in roughly a dozen killings of young women in the late 1970s and early 1980s, had died in April 1981 after accidentally severing his own femoral artery while fatally stabbing an 18-year-old man in Naperville. Lindahl's DNA profile was on file from his 2019 exhumation in a separate case, and he was a known suspect because evidence showed he frequented the shopping center where Halle was headed. The break came not from genealogy but from re-testing the original physical evidence: North Aurora Detective Ryan Peat learned of the M-Vac wet-vacuum DNA collection system at a 2022 conference, a grant from the nonprofit Seasons of Justice funded the roughly 10,000 dollar test, and in June 2023 Halle's preserved clothing was sent to DNA Labs International in Florida. In August 2024 the lab reported that DNA recovered from her clothing was approximately 9.4 trillion times more likely to have originated from Bruce Lindahl than from an unrelated person. On October 23, 2024, Kane County authorities announced that the 45-year-old case was solved and that, had Lindahl lived, charges would have been authorized.
Krystal Beslanowitch
Krystal Lynn Beslanowitch, a 17-year-old runaway from Spokane, Washington, was found bludgeoned to death with a granite rock along the banks of the Provo River near Midway in Wasatch County, Utah, in December 1995. The case went cold for nearly 18 years until investigators used a new wet-vacuum forensic tool, the M-Vac, to recover touch DNA from the rough surface of the rock weapon. The profile matched Joseph Michael Simpson, a paroled killer, who was arrested in Florida in 2013 and convicted of aggravated murder in 2016.
Mary Robin Walter
Mary Robin Walter, a 23-year-old wife, mother and nursing student, was shot to death in her mobile home at the Nelson Trailer Park west of Great Bend, Kansas, on the evening of January 24, 1980. Her husband, Douglas Walter, found her body when he returned home around 6:40 p.m. A neighbor, Steven Lawrence Hanks, was suspected early on but never charged for lack of evidence, and the case went cold for more than four decades. In April 2022 a Barton County Sheriff's detective reopened the investigation; new DNA recovered from the victim using M-Vac technology, combined with re-interviews in which Hanks admitted his role, led to his arrest in December 2022. Hanks pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in August 2024 and was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison, in what authorities called the oldest Kansas cold case ever solved and resulting in a conviction.
Robert Reed
Robert Reed was found beaten to death on May 22, 2002, inside his home in the 600 block of South Third Street in Elkhart, Indiana, after a neighbor noticed his front door standing open and went to check on him. An autopsy ruled the death a homicide, the result of multiple injuries to his head and neck. Investigators recovered blood at several points in the home, but for nearly two decades the case went unsolved. The break came not from a genealogy database but from the marriage of old physical evidence and new witness information: blood collected from the kitchen floor, the bathroom floor, and the inside deadbolt of the front door was found to match the DNA profile of an acquaintance of Reed named Marcus J. Love, and in 2021 a witness told police that Love had admitted beating Reed to death shortly after the killing. In 2021 an Elkhart investigator, Sgt. Greg Harder, re-examined the file and noticed a bloodstain on the back of Reed's shirt that had been overlooked; 2022 testing produced a partial DNA profile that was a mixture of Reed and Love. Love, who was already serving time at the Westville Correctional Facility on unrelated matters, was charged with murder in August 2022. On November 14, 2024, he pleaded guilty to robbery resulting in serious bodily injury, a Class A felony, and was sentenced to 35 years in the Indiana Department of Correction plus five years of probation; the murder count was dismissed as part of the plea agreement.
Sherri Rasmussen
Sherri Rae Rasmussen, a 29-year-old registered nurse and director of nursing at Glendale Adventist Medical Center, was beaten and shot three times in the chest inside the Van Nuys condominium she shared with her new husband, John Ruetten, on February 24, 1986, just months after their wedding. The Los Angeles Police Department treated the killing as a botched burglary and the case went cold for more than two decades, even though Sherri's father, Nels Rasmussen, repeatedly told detectives that an LAPD officer named Stephanie Lazarus, a former girlfriend of Ruetten, had threatened and confronted his daughter. The case turned on a saliva swab taken from a bite mark on Sherri's arm and preserved since 1986. When that swab was tested years later it revealed female DNA, contradicting the male-burglar theory. In 2009 cold-case detectives covertly collected DNA from a cup and straw Lazarus discarded at a Costco in Simi Valley; it matched the bite-mark saliva. Lazarus, by then a veteran LAPD detective, was arrested on June 5, 2009, convicted of first-degree murder on March 8, 2012, and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison.