Police: DNA links 3 deaths to serial killer who died in 1999
Police: DNA links 3 deaths to serial killer who died in 1999
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This undated photo provided by the Missouri State Highway Patrol shows Robert Brashers. Authorities said on Friday, October 5, 2018 that DNA tests have identified Brashers as the man who killed three people and raped a girl in the 1990s, although the suspect committed suicide almost 20 years ago. Investigators say they have solved three homicides and one rape case, all since the 1990s, after obtaining the DNA by digging up the body of the Brasher. (Highway patrol of the state of Missouri through AP)
S T. LOUIS - An Arkansas man who committed suicide during a police confrontation in 1999 at a Missouri motel was a serial killer and a rapist who strangled a woman from South Carolina in 1990 and shot and killed an eight-year-old mother and daughter from Missouri later, authorities said on Friday.
Advances in DNA testing allowed investigators to link the three murders and the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Memphis, Tennessee, to Robert Brashers, said the Missouri State Highway Patrol. Brashers, a man from Paragould, Arkansas, who had a long criminal record, committed suicide during a four-hour standoff at a motel in Kennett, a city about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northeast of Paragould, in a southeastern area from Missouri, located between Arkansas and Tennessee.
"Make no mistake about this gentleman: he's a serial rapist and a serial killer, but no more," Sheriff Terry Stevens said in the county of New Madrid, Missouri, at a press conference.
Brashers killed Genevieve Zitricki of Greenville, South Carolina, in 1990. She was beaten and strangled in the bathtub, authorities said. The year after he raped the Tennessee girl, Brashers killed Sherri Scherer and her 12-year-old daughter, Megan, at her home in Portageville, which is in the same corner of Missouri and approximately 155 miles (250 kilometers) away. southeast of St. Louis He also sexually assaulted Megan, they said.
The confrontation in which Brashers committed suicide began when Kennett police tried to interrogate him in a stolen license plate investigation. He was not suspected of the murders or the rape case at that time.
Police gathered DNA evidence over the years that linked the crimes, but it was not until earlier this year that a private company helped establish the connection with Brashers. The researchers hired Parabon NanoLabs, whose technology combines DNA testing and genetic genealogical analysis. The company's tests indicated that the DNA was from Brashers.
Because he was dead, the researchers obtained DNA samples from Brashers' relatives. That DNA evidence led authorities to exhume Brashers' body last week to take DNA from his corpse that was paired with DNA found at crime scenes.
Stevens said that even 20 years later, he never considered Scherer's murders a cold case: his officers were constantly investigating and re-investigating clues "because it was too important for this family and the Portageville community."
Anthony Scherer returned from agricultural work on March 28, 1998 and found the bodies of his 38-year-old wife and daughter on the living room floor. They had been shot.
Less than three hours after the murders, a man stopped at a house in Dyersburg, Tennessee, asked the woman who lived there for directions and then tried to force his way in. He shot her in the arm during a fight, but she survived.
The ballistics tests showed that the same weapon was used in both crimes. But the DNA in both crime scenes lacked the necessary markers to place the information in a national database known as CODIS, said the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
DNA technology improved and in 2006, the crime scene DNA was introduced into the CODIS system, coinciding with the April 6, 1990 murder of Zitricki, who was 28 years old when she was strangled. His body was found on April 6, 1990 in his apartment in South Carolina after being unable to report to work.
In May of 2017, another DNA match was discovered that linked the same suspect to the rape of a 14-year-old girl in Memphis on March 11, 1997. Police said the attacker knocked on the door of a house, pulled out a weapon and pushed its way inward.
The patrol said Brashers had a long criminal history that included a 1986 conviction for attempted murder in the second degree, along with theft, personification of an officer and illegal possession of a weapon. He was also arrested in Paragould in 1998 for trying to enter a woman's house.
SOURCE LINK ERESVIRAL.COM https://www.beviral.online
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