Cops Crack ‘Nation River Lady’ Cold Case After Half-Century
Police say they have cracked a murder case that has been cold since 1975, using genealogical DNA tracing to identify a middle-aged woman found in a river and nab her alleged killer.
The victim was spotted floating in Canada’s Nation River by a farmer. A slender strawberry blonde, she had been strangled with a TV cable, and neckties were used to bind her wrists and ankles.
Nearly half a century later she has been identified as Jewell “Lalla” Langford, 48, who was a prominent Tennessee businesswoman at the time of her disappearance.
Authorities say her murderer is Rodney Nichols, 81, most recently of Hollywood, Florida. Langford reportedly spent time with him in Canada before she was killed, police said.
The answers to the mystery of the woman in the river began unspooling in 2019 when authorities exhumed the unidentified body to get a new DNA sample.
The genetic material compared to other DNA profiles in private and public databases, and experts found two hits: potential relatives.
That led them to Langford’s name and they learned that she was from Jackson, Tennessee, where she co-owned a health spa with her ex-husband and had won accolades from the business community.
“We were incredibly lucky with a couple of elements in this case: We had a couple matches that are fairly closely related to our Nation River Lady and once we got close, we uncovered newspaper articles specifically mentioning Jewell Langford’s disappearance,” the DNA Doe Project, which did the genetic investigation, said in a statement.
“She was practically there waiting for us to find her. The heartbreaking part is that Jewell’s mother clearly searched for her for years and unfortunately died not knowing what happened to her daughter.”
Artistic and forensic renderings of “Nation River Lady,” later identified as Jewell Langford
Investigators learned that Langford went to Montréal in April 1975 and never returned home. She was reported missing but was never linked to the body found by a farmer in the Nation River later that year.
Once she was identified, a coalition of law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, began investigating what might have happened to her while she was visiting Canada.
In late 2022, police said, Nichols was charged with killing Langford, although that was not made public until this week to protect the investigation, officials said.
Investigators did not say how the two knew each other or the alleged motive for the killing.
Langford was declared legally dead a few years after she vanished and a gravestone in her local Tennessee cemetery bore the inscription: “Missing... but not forgotten.” Her remains were returned to the U.S. last year and that gravestone has been updated to say: “Finally Home and at Peace.”
“From everything that I can remember, she was just a very caring person. She loved to help the community. She was big in health and fitness. She and her then-husband owned several spas,” her niece, Denise Parchman Chung, told The Jackson Post.
“She was just a very outgoing person and very happy in life. She loved to travel. I remember going to their house, and she would always take me shopping and let me get what I wanted. My dad helped them build their house, and to me back then, it was just a mansion for the times and Jackson.”
Chung said Langford’s parents never stopped trying to get answers about what happened to her, frequently calling police in the U.S. and in Canada.
“Slowly as family members passed away, it kind of fell back on me to continuously push. I didn’t think that anybody had any idea. I really thought the case was completely cold and no one was doing anything. Until I was contacted in 2020 about providing DNA.”
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