Reesa Trexler.
You’ve gotta respect the Mail for just coming out and saying “it was a nigger lol.”
The other media outlets tried to downplay that rather important detail.
Police in North Carolina have finally cracked the 35-year-old cold-case murder of a 15-year-old girl thanks to advanced DNA testing and genetic genealogy, which helped them identify the long-deceased killer.
At a press conference on Tuesday, officials announced that the suspect in the 1984 murder and sexual assault of Reesa Trexler was a black man in his 40s with a criminal record who passed away in 2007.
While police would not name him, the local newspaper Salisbury Post and the station WBTV have obtained a petition for exhumation that identified the alleged killer as Curtis Blair.
On June 15, 1984, the body of Reesa Trexler was found naked and covered in blood and semen in a bedroom at her grandparents’ house on North Shaver Street in Salisbury.
Trexler had suffered multiple stab wounds to her neck and chest, the worst of which severed her spinal cord.
At the time of her autopsy, a steel blade from the murder weapon was still lodged in her shoulder.
Semen samples were collected from the victim’s body, but DNA testing was only in its infancy at the time.
Trexler’s grandparents were not home at the time of the attack, and her sister Jodie, then aged 13, was at a house next door.
For years, Jodie Texler Laird was rumored to have been involved in her sister’s brutal murder, a claim she has vehemently denied.
Last year, Trexler Laird went on the Dr Phil show and passed a polygraph test to prove her innocence.
Her appearance on the daytime program renewed interest in her sister’s unsolved murder, prompting Salisbury Police Department Sgt Travis Shulenberger in March 2018 to seek the services of Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Virginia.
Using semen samples from the crime scene, the laboratory created a genetic data profile and submitted it to a public genetic genealogy database for comparison in hopes of finding relatives who share significant amounts of DNA with the unknown suspect.
After getting several matches, scientists constructed their individual family trees using online genealogy databases, newspaper archives, public family trees, obituaries, and other public records.
After additional research, the lab narrowed down the matches to a final list of suspects, which were presented to the police to continue the investigation, which ultimately led them to Curtis Blair.