Solved cold cases in Montana
3 documented cases.
Linda Bernhardt
Linda Bernhardt, a 24-year-old woman, and her husband Clifford Bernhardt, also 24, were killed in their home in the Billings Heights area of Billings, Montana, on the night of November 6, 1973. Linda was bound and sexually assaulted, and both were strangled and beaten. The double murder went unsolved for 45 years despite an investigation that grew to tens of thousands of pages and roughly 80 DNA comparisons. In 2015 the Yellowstone County Sheriff's Office cold case unit engaged Parabon NanoLabs, whose genetic genealogist CeCe Moore built a family tree from the killer's crime-scene DNA and traced it to Cecil Stan Caldwell, a former co-worker of Linda's who had died in 2003. The match was announced at a March 2019 news conference; because Caldwell was long dead, he was never charged.
Miranda Fenner
Miranda Fenner, an 18-year-old clerk, was stabbed and had her throat slashed during a robbery of The Movie Store, a video rental shop in Laurel, Montana, on November 15, 1998. A passing motorist found her crawling from the doorway; she died within hours at a Billings hospital. Despite more than 700 interviews, the case went cold for nearly two decades. It was broken not by physical evidence at the scene but by the killer himself: Zachary David O'Neill voluntarily walked into the Yellowstone County Sheriff's Office in 2017 and confessed. He pleaded guilty in 2019 and was sentenced to three concurrent life terms.
Susan Jaeger
Susan Marie Jaeger was 7 years old when she was abducted in the early hours of June 25, 1973, from the family tent at a campground near the Missouri Headwaters by Three Forks, in Gallatin County, Montana, the intruder cutting through the tent fabric while the family slept. The kidnapper made taunting phone calls demanding ransom, and the case stalled for a year despite a wide search. The break came not from forensic science but from a confession that was set up by a remarkable piece of human persistence: on the one-year anniversary of the abduction, the killer called Susan's mother, Marietta Jaeger, and Marietta, instead of breaking down, kept him on the line for about an hour and answered his cruelty with compassion until he wept. The FBI recorded the call, and audiophonoscopic voice analysis tied the caller to a local 23-year-old contractor, David Meirhofer, whom FBI profilers had already flagged. Confronted with the evidence, Meirhofer confessed on September 29, 1974, to four murders, three of them children, committed in Gallatin County between 1967 and 1974: 13-year-old Bernard Poelman, 12-year-old Michael Raney, Susan Jaeger, and 19-year-old Sandra Dykman Smallegan. About four hours after confessing, Meirhofer hanged himself in his jail cell with a towel, so he was never tried. The investigation is widely cited as the first serial-murder case cracked with the FBI's emerging behavioral-profiling technique.