Hair Strand and DNA Sleuths Crack 1983 Murder of Teen Girl
After 14-year-old Rashell Ward was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and shot dead while walking to her Seventh Day Adventist school in 1983, a notorious serial killer named Henry Lee Lucas took responsibility.
Lucas, however, was as mendacious as he was violent, and detectives quickly found inconsistencies in his statement and determined that his confession was one of hundreds of false claims he would make through the years.
At another point in the investigation, rumors that the sheriff was the culprit ran rampant through Red Bluff, California, a small city in the Sacramento River Valley that was rocked by Rashell’s abduction and slaying.
“No evidence supported any of these rumors through the years of investigation,” said the current Tehama County sheriff, Dave Kain. (A grand jury investigated allegations former Sheriff Ron Koenig was part of a child-porn ring, but he was cleared.)
None of the other leads in the case panned out, either, and none of the suspects investigated by police over the decades were identified as Rashell’s killer.
But in a now-familiar turn of events, 40 years after the teen’s body was discovered near the Pine Creek Bridge, police say they know who put her there—thanks to a new investigative technique known as genetic genealogy that has closed a slew of other cold cases.
Investigators were able to use DNA collected from the crime scene—a single strand of hair, which was largely useless to them at the time—to create a genetic profile of the murderer. They then compared that profile to the millions of other profiles captured by family-tree sites like Ancestry to search for possible relatives.
That process led them to a name: Johnny Coy. And Coy’s background led them to believe they were on the right track.
A resident of Red Bluff, Coy had a violent history. In 1989, he kidnapped a mother and her 21-year-old daughter at gunpoint and sexually assaulted the daughter. After being convicted in that crime, he was sentenced to life in prison—and that is where he died in 2019.
Authorities were able to obtain a DNA sample from his incarceration and it matched the hair strand found with Rashell.
“The Tehama County Sheriff’s Office is pleased to offer the family of Rashell Ward closure in this case after all these years,” Kain said at a press conference on Wednesday.
“We are also pleased to be able to clear the name of former Sheriff Koenig of any criminal involvement in this case. The Tehama County Sheriff’s Office now considers this case solved and closed.”
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