Solved cold cases in Nevada
2 documented cases.
Carol Bishop
Carol Bishop, a 50-year-old convenience-store worker who lived alone in Las Vegas, Nevada, was found beaten and stabbed to death in her home at 980 Westminster Avenue on November 15, 1991, after she failed to show up for work. Investigators lifted fingerprints from a bottle of peppermint schnapps and a shot glass left in her kitchen, but in 1991 the prints matched no one, and the case went cold for more than two decades. In 2012, as part of a grant-funded cold-case initiative, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police detectives re-submitted the old latent prints to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). The database returned a name that had never come up in the original investigation: Dale Bryant, who by then was already serving a life sentence in Arkansas for stabbing another woman to death in 1992. It was the fingerprint hit, not DNA, that named the killer. Bryant later admitted to the killing, pleaded guilty, and in August 2017, 26 years after the crime, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Stephanie Isaacson
Stephanie Isaacson, a 14-year-old Las Vegas girl, was sexually assaulted and strangled on the morning of June 1, 1989, while walking a shortcut to Eldorado High School in eastern Clark County, Nevada. Her body was found the same day in a desert lot near her path. The case went unsolved for 32 years. In 2021, after a private donation funded the work, the Texas forensic lab Othram used Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing to build a genealogical DNA profile from only about 120 picograms of preserved evidence, roughly the equivalent of 15 human cells, then the smallest amount of DNA ever used to identify a suspect. Investigative genetic genealogy led detectives to Darren Roy Marchand, who had died by suicide in 1995 and whose preserved DNA from a 1986 murder case confirmed the match.