Coke can helps police solve 40-year-old murder mystery, leads to arrest
25 Feb, 2021 11:14 PM
2 minutes to read
Sylvia Quayle was 34 when she was murdered in August 1981. David Anderson in 1980. Photos / Cherry Hills Village Police Department
NZ Herald
DNA from a Vanilla Coke can has led Colorado police to crack a brutal murder which has remained a mystery for 40 years.
62-year-old David Dwayne Anderson has been arrested by police.
He is accused of breaking into the Colorado home of Sylvia Quayle, 34, and sexually assaulting, strangling and stabbing her to death in 1981. It s been a journey, and then getting to know Jo, and understanding, being a little sister and what Sylvia meant to her, it s been a little breathtaking, Cherry Hills Village Police Chief Michelle Tovrea told local media.
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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