Solved cold cases in Nebraska
4 documented cases.
Carroll Bonnet
Carroll Bonnet, a 61-year-old hospital worker who lived alone in Omaha, Nebraska, was found stabbed to death in his apartment in October 1978. His killer cut the phone cord, took his wallet and his car, and left behind a taunting note. Latent fingerprints and palm prints were lifted from the scene, but in 1978 there was no way to match them to anyone, and the case went cold for three decades. When the Omaha Police cold-case unit re-examined those same prints in 2008 and ran them through the FBI's national fingerprint database, the system returned a name that had never surfaced in the original investigation: Jerry Watson, a career burglar then in an Illinois prison. The fingerprint hit, not DNA, was the break that finally put a name to the killer; physical evidence later confirmed it. Watson was convicted of first-degree murder in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison.
Kamal Matthews
Seven-year-old Kamal Matthews and his 26-year-old mother, Deroshia Matthews, were found strangled in their north Omaha, Nebraska home on April 24, 1979, after relatives reported they had not been heard from. Decades later DNA preserved from the scene was matched through the national CODIS database to Abdulmalik Husain, formerly known as Louis Walker, whose genetic profile entered the database after a 2004 arrest in Colorado. After an earlier prosecution collapsed in 2005 over an evidence-handling error, investigators retested the evidence with newer technology in 2021 and re-arrested Husain on February 12, 2025, charging him with two counts of murder.
Lawrence Smoyer and William Wathen
On the morning of Thursday, June 17, 1937, Boone County, Nebraska, Sheriff Lawrence Smoyer, 41, and Constable William Wathen, 53, drove into a cattle pasture about 25 miles northwest of Albion to check on a suspicious car and trespassing complaint that a rancher had reported several days in a row. They were shot by two well-dressed men in a stolen black 1937 Ford Coupe with Colorado plates. Smoyer died instantly. Wathen, shot in the hips, lived 108 days and died on October 3, 1937, after leaving a detailed written account of the men, the car and its plate. Investigators identified Charles Orville Doody and Marion Armstrong Cooley, two career criminals from Colorado, within three days, and about a year later had enough evidence for a first-degree murder warrant for Cooley. But Cooley was in a Colorado prison, nobody knew where Doody was, and by the time Cooley was paroled in 1948 the original investigators had retired, died or been scattered by the war. Nobody was ever tried. The case stayed open until late December 2014, when a man who said he was Doody’s son phoned a Nebraska sheriff and said he was convinced his father was involved. After a three-year effort that included tracking down decades-old case files, the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office announced on October 3, 2017, eighty years to the day after Wathen’s death, that the two men, both long dead, were responsible.
Mary Kay Heese
Mary Kay Heese was a 17-year-old high school junior in Wahoo, the seat of Saunders County, Nebraska. On March 25, 1969, she failed to return home, and the following morning her body was found along a rural country road outside town; she had been stabbed at least a dozen times and showed signs of having fought back, and footprints at the scene suggested she had been chased after getting out of a vehicle. A witness reported seeing Mary Kay around 5 p.m. that afternoon getting into a car carrying two men. The case went unsolved for more than fifty years. From the beginning, two young men kept recurring in the old files: Joseph Ambroz, then 22, a slaughterhouse worker who was on parole for forgery and for escaping custody, and Wayne Greaser, who died by suicide in 1977 and was later named as Ambroz's co-conspirator. The break, when it finally came, did not come from forensic science; DNA testing in fact did not connect Ambroz to the evidence. Instead, a Saunders County investigator named Ted Green reopened the case in the mid-2010s, gathered scattered reports that different agencies had never shared with one another, and located cooperating witnesses from Ambroz's own circle. In November 2024 a Saunders County grand jury indicted Ambroz, by then 77 and living in Oklahoma, for first-degree murder; the indictment followed testimony from a key witness who said a third party had told them they were with Ambroz at the killing, and prosecutors said Ambroz's ex-wife testified under immunity that she had been with him during Heese's murder. Ambroz was arrested in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and extradited to Nebraska. On July 31, 2025, he pleaded no contest to conspiracy to commit first-degree murder; under the 1969 statute that applied to the crime, the maximum penalty was two years. He was sentenced on August 27, 2025, and released from prison on November 15, 2025, having maintained his innocence throughout.