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Authorities in Indiana said Monday that the 1972 murder of a college student has been solved, marking the latest example of a cold case cleared through DNA testing and genealogy.
Terre Haute Police Chief Shawn Keen identified Jeffrey Lynn Hand as the possible killer of Pamela Milam, 19.
Hand was killed in a shootout with police in 1978 during an attempted kidnapping, Keen said in a news release.
“It’s been a long 46 years, seven months and 20 days,” Milam’s sister, Charlene Sanford, said during a news conference Monday. “Many of us, as we got older, thought we would die before we ever learned who killed our sister.”
"We were happy to know he hasn't been out there living a great life for 47 years," she added.
Milam was last seen on the night of Sept. 15, 1972, leaving a sorority event at Indiana State University in Terra Haute, southwest of Indianapolis, Keen said. Her body was found bound and gagged in the trunk of her car the next night.
“We had no witnesses, no description of a suspect,” Keen told reporters.
Authorities believed a man who was arrested seven weeks later for a series of sexual assaults on campus had also killed Milam. But they were never able to link the man, Robert Wayne Austin, to Milam’s murder, Keen said.
After taking over the case in 2008, Keen said he cleared Austin using DNA evidence obtained from the crime scene.
Last year, Keen began working with Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based company that works with law enforcement using DNA, ancestry databases and traditional genealogical work, to try and solve Milam’s murder.
Working with Parabon, Keen eventually narrowed down possible suspects to a single member of one family—Jeffery Hand. After tracking down Hand’s widow and two sons, Keen obtained their DNA and submitted it to Indiana’s state crime lab.
The results came back with a 99.9 percent probability that the DNA he’d obtained matched the crime scene DNA, Keen said.