Cold case in upstate New York solved after 28 years; suspect committed suicide
Police in East Greenbush, N.Y., say they have finally found the culprit in a 28-year-old cold case killing of Wilomeana “Violet” Filkins.
Filkins was 81 when Jeremiah Guyette, then 18, robbed and bludgeoned her to death in her ground-floor apartment, police said Thursday. They also revealed that Guyette, who would be 46 today, killed himself in 2019 as cops sought him for questioning.
While Filkins’ 1989 Plymouth Reliant was still parked at her apartment complex when her body was discovered on Aug. 19, 1994, it was not in its usual position, police said at the time. She had been dead for two days. Her murderer had driven her car and dumped her stolen belongings in the woods behind a nearby cemetery, in a case that stumped investigators for years.
“It is a case that has remained first and foremost in all of our investigators’ minds,” East Greenbush Police Chief Elaine Rudzinski said at Thursday’s press conference, adding that cops “never gave up on attempting to identify the depraved individual who violently took Violet’s life.”
Guyette lived with his father in the same apartment complex as Filkins. He was questioned at the time of the death, but wasn’t considered a suspect.
He moved to Rosendale after a stint in the Air Force in Florida and was working as a bus driver, transporting schoolchildren and the elderly, the Albany Times Union reported. When police told Guyette on Oct. 1, 2019, that they wanted to ask him about an incident 25 years earlier, “he became defensive, visibly upset and stated he would not speak with us without an attorney,” Detective Sergeant Michael Guadagnino told reporters.
The next day, Guyette shot himself in the head. Police took his prints and matched them to a thumbprint found on Filkins’ coffee table.
Filkins’ family members said they appreciated the closure.
“She was a very simple woman, lived quietly and would never have envisioned what occurred,” her niece, Carol Filkins, told the Times Union of her aunt. “But we’re all very thankful that it has now been resolved.”
