Solved cold cases in New Hampshire
3 documented cases.
Charlene Ranstrom and Brenda Warner
Charlene Ranstrom, 48, and Brenda Warner, 32, a couple, were found dead on the morning of October 3, 1988 in their second-floor apartment at 7 Mason Street in Nashua, New Hampshire. The medical examiner ruled both deaths homicides caused by multiple stab wounds. Police arrested a neighbor from the apartment below, Anthony Barnaby, 21, within days. He confessed after a roughly 20-hour interrogation and later recanted. Between 1989 and 1990 three juries failed to reach a verdict, and prosecutors chose not to try him a fourth time. David Caplin, 25, who was staying in Barnaby's apartment, was charged in 1990, but in 1991 the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld rulings that excluded the hair evidence and his earlier testimony, and the charges were dropped. Both men returned to Canada. In 2010 a Nashua detective reopened the case with the state's Cold Case Unit. Retested evidence and new and old witnesses led to new murder charges in April 2011. After a four-year extradition fight both men were returned to New Hampshire in May 2015. Caplin pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder on February 14, 2018. Barnaby entered an Alford plea to two counts on August 22, 2018, maintaining his innocence.
Everett Delano
On the morning of September 1, 1966, Everett Delano, a 49-year-old retired Navy veteran who worked part time at Sanborn's Garage on Route 4 in Andover, New Hampshire, was found shot in the garage office. He died the next day at Mary Hitchcock Hospital. Money was missing from the cash drawer, and a bathroom sink faucet had been left running. Investigators lifted fingerprints from the sink and sent photographs of them to the FBI, but the case stalled and no one was charged. The prints were never entered into the FBI's Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which was not fully operational in 1966. New Hampshire's Cold Case Unit, formed in 2009, reopened the case in 2013 after Delano's daughter contacted it. When the prints were finally run, they matched Thomas Cass, then 67, of Orleans, Vermont, who had been 20 at the time of the killing. Investigators visited Cass in the fall of 2013, when he denied knowing anything about the case, and again in February 2014, when they told him that forensic evidence linked him to it. Four days later, on February 24, 2014, he died by suicide. On February 20, 2019, the attorney general announced that the evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt that Cass shot Delano during a robbery. Because Cass was dead, no charges were brought, and no court ever heard the case.
Laura Kempton
Laura Kempton, a 23-year-old Portsmouth Beauty School student, was found beaten to death in her ground-floor apartment at 20 Chapel Street in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on the morning of September 28, 1981 by a police officer who had come to serve a parking summons. She had been bound with cords and sexually assaulted, and she died of massive trauma to the left side of her head. Investigators recovered a male DNA profile from evidence at the scene but pursued hundreds of leads over four decades without identifying her killer. In 2021 and 2022 the Portsmouth Police, the New Hampshire and Maine forensic laboratories, the Attorney General's Cold Case Unit and the genetic-genealogy firm Identifinders International used forensic genetic genealogy to trace the crime-scene DNA to Ronney James Lee, a security officer who had been 21 at the time. Lee had died of acute cocaine intoxication in 2005, so no arrest or prosecution was possible. On July 20, 2023 the New Hampshire Attorney General and Portsmouth Police announced the case resolved and closed, naming Lee as the man responsible.