A murder was unsolved for nearly 25 years. A beer can led to the killer’s arrest, cops say
A 54-year-old man has been charged with murder and robbery nearly 25 years after the manager of a Florida convenience store was found stabbed to death inside the store’s bathroom.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday that detectives were able to crack the cold case with the help of genetic genealogy — which uses DNA testing and traditional genealogical methods to identify individuals.
Arrested was Kenneth Stough Jr., from Eustis, which is in Central Florida. He was being held in jail with no bond.
“I was just thinking if someone was stabbed 73 times, there’s got to be additional DNA that was not the victim’s and potentially the suspect’s,” said Det. Brian Savelli in a video shared on the department’s Facebook page. “And so just with the advancements in DNA ... I figured there’s gotta be something we can do.”
On Feb. 3, 1996, Orange County deputies were called to the Lil’ Champ convenience store (now Kwik Stop) in northwest Orange County. A passerby noticed that the lights were off, which was unusual for 7 a.m., according to a warrant. The man then stopped and noticed that the doors were locked. He later called 911.
When deputies went inside, they found the store manager, Terrence Paquette, dead in the bathroom. The Medical Examiner’s Office later determined Paquette had been stabbed 73 times.
“It was a very gruesome, violent scene,” Savelli noted.
Investigators collected samples of blood droplets found throughout the store on the floor, freezer, door and other places.
But they were stumped for years.
In 2019, Savelli reopened the case.
A bloodstain on a freezer handle allowed investigators to narrow down the pool of possible suspects to three brothers.
Savelli said he focused on Stough, because he had once worked at the store and lived close to Paquette.
The next step was to get a current DNA sample in order to determine whether it was a match. In September, Stough was under surveillance when investigators watched him dump a bag of Budweiser cans into a public dumpster and drive away.
The cans were collected and sent to a lab for testing. It came back as a match to the blood found at the scene of the crime, the sheriff’s office said.
“Although people think they’re forgotten about, they’re really not,” Savelli added. “Just because there’s not an arrest made in a year or two, three, four, five years, the case is still open. We are doing everything we can to get every cold case out there solved.”
