Using DNA technology that did not exist a quarter-century ago, police officers in Carbondale, Ill., have arrested a suspect in the 1982 strangling death of a Southern Illinois University student.
The student, Deborah Sheppard, 23, was found naked in her apartment with the door open and the telephone line cut, according to KFVS, a CBS affiliate in nearby Cape Girardeau, Mo. An autopsy done at her family’s insistence concluded that she had been beaten on the head and strangled.
But no one was arrested until a piece of evidence collected from the scene was sent recently for DNA testing. The state’s crime database indicated that the DNA matched that of Timothy Krajcir, a 62-year-old inmate of an Illinois prison who is classified as sexually dangerous. According to The Southern Illinoisan, a Carbondale newspaper, Mr. Krajcir was a suspect at the time of the murder. —Lawrence Biemiller
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