DNA Match Links Negroid to 1984 Murder of White Navy Recruit

Thomas Lewis Garner.

Aaaaaaaaand it was her black classmate the whole time.

C’mon police, even I could have told you that.

Military:

Pamela Cahanes was a 25-year-old U.S. Navy recruit at the Orlando Naval Training Center when she was beaten and strangled in 1984.

Now a 59-year-old Jacksonville man who was a military classmate of hers 34 years ago is in a county jail in Sanford, charged in her death, according to the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office.

Thomas Lewis Garner was arrested early Wednesday outside his apartment in the 1300 block of Dunn Avenue on Jacksonville’s Northside, then taken to Seminole County on a first-degree pre-meditated murder charge, according to authorities.

In 2005 the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory helped investigators by creating a DNA profile that gave them more information, the sheriff said. And in 2015 they worked with Identifinders, a forensic genealogical service, and found the DNA profile fit a black male.

Working with FDLE and other DNA experts in recent years, they later produced a full profile that was used to create a better idea of the suspect, the sheriff said. That led to an investigation of Garner, who served in the U.S. Navy at the same time as Cahanes.

“It was scientific confirmation that his DNA matched that of the person responsible for the brutal killing,” Lemma said.

Pamela Cahanes.