DNA from an “unprovable” rape case was used to make an arrest in “one of the oldest cold case murders in the country” to be solved with the help of DNA, prosecutors in Washington state said.
Harold W. Carpenter, 63, was arrested in El Dorado County, Washington on Tuesday in connection with the 1979 murder of Patricia Carnahan in California after his DNA matched for an unrelated crime in Washington state.
Carnahan was beaten, strangled and left for dead at a South Lake Tahoe campground, a resort city in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, on Sept. 28, 1979, the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office said.
After her body was recovered, investigators gathered evidence, which included a sexual assault kit that provided a DNA sample, but they couldn’t identify the victim or a suspect.
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She was buried in a nondescript grave marked “unidentified female” and remained in the ground for decades as her case was all but forgotten until eight years ago.
In 2015, the El Dorado County Cold Case Homicide Unit revived the case and released pictures of her jewelry to local newspapers.
Family members identified a pendent that she frequently wore, and DNA taken from her family matched the victim, giving “unidentified female” a name, but there was still no suspect in her death.
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Separate DNA collected in what was deemed an “unprovable” Spokane, Washington, rape case from 1994 was retested earlier this year as part of a nationwide effort to eliminate a backlog of untested sexual assault kits.
The DNA was entered into CODIS – the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System – and it matched DNA evidence collected from Carnahan.
That led law enforcement to Harold Carpenter, who’s currently being held in a Spokane County Jail on a fugitive charge and pending extradition to California on a murder warrant.
“This is one of the oldest…
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