DNA testing ties neighbour to murder of elderly woman 28 years on

Almost three decades after 84-year-old Wilma Mobley was brutally murdered in her Idaho home, her killer has been identified thanks to advanced DNA technology.

Mobley was found dead inside her home in Jerome on 10 August 1995, the Jerome Police Department said in a release.

She had been strangled and attacked with an axe-type instrument.

At the time, investigators had three suspects on their radar, including a neighbour named Danny Lee Kennison.

It was Kennison’s erratic actions that initially caught the eyes of investigators.

“Everything he did afterwards showed that he was eliminating evidence. He moved, cut his hair, shaved his beard,” Sergeant Clinton Wagner, who worked on solving the case, told KMVT.

An affidavit was even submitted for his arrest, but prosecutors felt there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.

Former detective Dan Chatterton told the outlet: “The thing that was the most frustrating was the fact that we didn’t have the fingerprints, blood sample of a suspect or anything like that that would have cleared the case.”

Eventually, the case went cold, and while there were a few attempts over the years to solve the crime, it wasn’t until June 2022 – when Sgt Wagner was assigned to the case – that a break would come.

Sgt Wagner contacted the Idaho State Police Forensic Lab to see if any of the items that were collected from the crime scene 20 years earlier could be tested given the advances in DNA technology.

The lab carried out tests and, on Monday, the results came back.

A “significant amount of DNA” matching Kennison had been found on Mobley’s underclothing – tying him to her murder.

While Kennison was a neighbour of Mobley, they had no known relationship and the motive remains unclear.

Kennison died by suicide at his home in Filer, Idaho, in March 2001.

Sgt Wagner met with Mobley’s family the day after the results came in to tell them they had identified the killer and the case was now closed.