Solved cold cases in Kentucky
4 documented cases.
Carol Sue Klaber
Carol Sue Klaber, 16, a junior at Dixie Heights High School in northern Kentucky, was last seen on June 4, 1976 after getting into a car near Devou Park; her body was found the next day in a roadside ditch on Chambers Road in Walton, Boone County. She had died of blunt force trauma with evidence of strangulation and sexual assault. The case stayed cold for nearly 47 years until the Boone County Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit, working with the Houston-area forensic lab Othram and funding from Season of Justice, used forensic-grade genome sequencing and genetic genealogy to identify the killer as Thomas W. Dunaway, who was 19 at the time and lived about a mile and a half from Klaber's home. Dunaway died in 1990 at age 33, so he was never charged, but on March 8, 2023 authorities announced the case solved and the Commonwealth's Attorney said the evidence would have been sufficient to convict him.
Crystal Rogers
Crystal Rogers, a 35-year-old mother of five from Bardstown, Kentucky, was last seen on the evening of July 3, 2015, at the farm owned by the family of her boyfriend, Brooks Houck, where the couple had gone with their two-year-old son. Houck said she was home playing on her phone when he went to bed and gone when he woke; he did not report her missing. Her mother did, on July 5, the day her maroon Chevrolet Impala was found on the Bluegrass Parkway with a flat tire, the keys in the ignition and her purse and phone inside. The Nelson County sheriff named Houck a suspect that October and said he believed Rogers was dead; Houck's brother, a Bardstown police officer, was fired the same day for interfering. In November 2016 her father, Tommy Ballard, was shot dead while hunting; that killing is unsolved. The FBI took over in 2020, searched the farm and a subdivision Houck had built. A 13-second call to Houck at 12:07 a.m. on July 4, 2015, from an employee, Steve Lawson, and cell data placing Lawson near where the Impala was found became the spine of a circumstantial case. Houck was indicted and arrested in September 2023 with Lawson's son Joseph; Steve Lawson was charged that December. All three were convicted in Bowling Green in 2025. Houck was found guilty of murder as principal or accomplice on July 8, 2025, and sentenced to life on September 17, 2025. Rogers' body has never been found.
Linda Sue Boards
Linda Sue Boards was 23 when she was last seen leaving the Peacemaker's club on 3rd Street in Bowling Green, Kentucky, in May 1981. On May 15, 1981 her body was found on a farm off Hydro-Pondsville Road, about a mile and a half southeast of Smiths Grove in Warren County. Kentucky State Police said she had been raped and strangled. The case went cold for thirty-seven years. In September 2018 the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program sent the state police a lead: a Texas inmate named Samuel Little, convicted in 2014 of killing three women in Los Angeles County, had begun confessing to a Texas Ranger to some ninety killings across the country, and the method in his California cases matched the way Boards had died. Kentucky investigators went to Texas in October 2018 and interviewed him. On December 12, 2018 a Warren County grand jury indicted Little, then 78, for her murder, the day before he pleaded guilty in Odessa, Texas to the 1994 strangling of another woman. Little eventually confessed to 93 murders committed between 1970 and 2005, and the FBI confirmed about sixty of them. He was never brought to Kentucky to stand trial. He died in a hospital in Los Angeles County on December 30, 2020, aged 80, with the Warren County indictment still pending.
Marlene Oakes (Marlene Major)
Marlene Major, 25, of Verona in Boone County, Kentucky, disappeared on October 11, 1980. That day she had told her sister that she planned to divorce her husband, William Major, and that she had proof against him hidden away. Her diaries, which she had given to a friend, recorded that she had seen him sexually abusing their son. Major told people she had left, sold his property, and moved the children to Rhode Island. A skull found on a nearby farm in November 1981 could not be identified. Major was later imprisoned in Rhode Island for about ten years for abusing his children. In 1996, held in Boone County on a Kentucky detainer, he telephoned his father and said he had killed Marlene. Detectives learned of the call in early 2001 and had the father tape a second call. A 2001 mitochondrial DNA test showed the skull belonged to a maternal relative of her daughter. Major was charged in July 2001, arrested in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and told Kentucky detectives that he shot her during an argument in her car. A jury convicted him of murder and tampering with physical evidence in August 2003. The Kentucky Supreme Court reversed in 2005. After a second trial he was convicted again, and the verdict was affirmed in 2009. He died in October 2017.