Sheriff's Office names killer in 1987 Prescott hiking trail murder of Catherine Sposito as Bryan Scott Bennett
PRESCOTT — Thirty-six years after college student Catherine Sposito was killed while hiking on Prescott's Thumb Butte Trail, the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office has named her killer.
"I am saying today with high confidence, Cathy Sposito was murdered by Bryan Scott Bennett," Sheriff David Rhodes said, during a news conference Friday.
After biking to the popular trail on the morning of June 13, 1987, 23-year-old Sposito was attacked and ultimately killed.
Bennett was a 17-year-old Prescott High School student at the time of the murder.
Bennett, who died by suicide in 1994, was exhumed in November 2022 with parts retrieved for DNA analysis which ultimately connected him to the murder in addition to other crimes in the area at the time.
Bennett was confirmed as the perpetrator in a sexual assault on Prescott's Thumb Butte Trail on April 22, 1990, the same trail where Sposito was killed three years prior. Following that assault, Bennett was accused of two more sexual assaults in Yavapai County, in which the victims reported the attacker threatening to kill them.
The Sheriff's Office has had other recent successes using new technologies to advance some of its cold cases.
In March 2022, the Sheriff's Office announced that nearly 62 years after her remains were discovered in Congress, Arizona, genetic genealogy concluded that the formerly unidentified child known as "Little Miss Nobody" was actually Sharon Lee Gallegos, a 4-year-old who was abducted outside her grandmother's home in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
The press conference about the Sposito case can be watched on the Sheriff's Office's Facebook page.
Reach the reporter at LLatch@gannett.com.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Sheriff's Office names Bryan Scott Bennett as Catherine Sposito killer
