Sylvia Quayle
The long search for justice in a 1981 cold-case murder in Cherry Hills, derailed first by a false confession and more recently a mistrial, ended this week with the conviction of a suspect identified decades after the killing through genetic detective work.
An Arapahoe County jury on Thursday found David Dwayne Anderson, 62, guilty of first-degree murder after deliberation and first-degree felony murder in the 1981 killing of Sylvia Quayle in her home.
"For more than 40 years, the defendant carried with him a dark secret, a secret that was finally revealed during this trial," Deputy District Attorney Grant Grosgebauer, one of the prosecutors on the case, said in a news release.
On Aug. 4, 1981, Quayle's father found the 34-year-old's body inside her home in the 3800 block of South Ogden Street. She had been raped, stabbed multiple times and shot in the head, prosecutors said.
The police investigation showed the attacker appeared to have pried open a window and cut the home's telephone line.
Two years later, a self-professed serial killer named Ottis Toole, already in custody in an unrelated murder case, confessed to the crime, causing local police to close their investigation — though Toole was never charged with Quayle's murder.
But in 1993, DNA testing proved Toole's confession false. Police then reopened their investigation into Quayle's killing, but the case sat cold for years.
It wasn't until 2020 that new DNA analysis pointed to Anderson, of Nebraska, as the prime suspect in the decades-old crime.
The Cherry Hills Village Police Department and United Data Connect, a genetic genealogy company, began working together and, in 2021, an investigator with United Data Connect went to Anderson's residence and discretely obtained a new DNA sample by collecting trash bags.
Lab results found DNA on a soda can from Anderson's trash that matched DNA collected from the crime scene, prosecutors said.
The 18th Judicial District Attorney's Office charged Anderson with two counts of first-degree murder and initially went to trial in March — though, after five days of deliberation, jurors were unable to reach a verdict and the judge declared a mistrial.
The retrial in late June ended with guilty verdicts on two counts of murder. Anderson is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 4 and faces a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Chris Gallo said in a news release that they "hope that his small measure of justice brings some degree of peace to Sylvia Quayle's family, who has waited more than 40 years for this result."
No comments:
Post a Comment