Quayle, 35, was found murdered in her Cherry Hills home on August 4, 1981. She was nude and had been strangled, stabbed and shot.
From there, progress in the inquiry was made at an agonizingly slow pace. As noted in a February 25 press conference about the Anderson bust, investigators collected 140 pieces of evidence, and two years later, testing of an area rug revealed so-called foreign material of the sort that might offer opportunities for DNA testing. But it took until 1995 for the rug to be sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigations for analysis, and another five years after that for a DNA profile to be developed.
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Sylvia Quayle, 34, from Cherry Hills near Denver was murdered in August 1981
A man was jailed for her murder but his confession was later found unreliable
In 2000, murder scene DNA was sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation
A match was finally found in May 2020 with David Anderson, 62, of Nebraska
Small Cherry Hill police sent the DNA on to a genetic genealogy company
In January an investigator headed to Nebraska where Anderson was living and took DNA samples from his trash, including a Vanilla Coke can
The DNA matches and Anderson has been charged with first-degree murder