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Canadian police stated Tuesday they’ve solved one of many highest-profile chilly instances in Quebec historical past, linking the 1975 rape and homicide of a 16-year-old woman to a West Virginia man who died greater than 40 years in the past.
Police in Longueuil, Quebec, stated that DNA proof permits them to be 100% sure that Franklin Maywood Romine murdered teenager Sharron Prior within the Montreal suburb.
The physique of Romine, who was born in 1946 in West Virginia’s second largest metropolis of Huntington and died in 1982 on the age of 36 in Verdun, Montreal below mysterious circumstances, was exhumed from a West Virginia cemetery in early Could for DNA testing meant to substantiate his hyperlink to the crime.
Longueuil police say the DNA of Romine – who had a protracted prison historical past – matches a pattern discovered on the homicide scene. He additionally matched a witness’ bodily description of the suspect.
The rape and killing of Prior had gone unsolved since she disappeared on March 29, 1975, after getting down to meet associates at a pizza parlor close to her house in Montreal’s Pointe-St-Charles neighborhood.
Her physique was discovered three days later in a wooded space in Longueuil, on Montreal’s South Shore.
“The fixing of Sharron’s case won’t ever deliver Sharron again. However understanding that her killer is now not on this Earth and will not kill anymore, brings us to considerably of a closure,” Prior’s sister Doreen stated Tuesday, in line with CTV Information.
Legislation enforcement investigated greater than 100 suspects through the years, however by no means made any arrests. Yvonne Prior, {the teenager}’s mom, is now in her 80s, nonetheless lives in Canada, and has spent her life looking for her daughter’s killer.
Romine’s title did not come up in investigation till final yr, in line with WCHS-TV of Charleston, West Virginia. When Longueuil police stated began wanting via prison information, they discovered an intensive historical past of violence and makes an attempt by Romine to evade regulation enforcement by shifting between West Virginia and Canada.
Romine first tried escape from the West Virginia Penitentiary in 1964 and later escaped in 1967, in line with information obtained by WCHS. Two years later, Romine already had a Canadian rap sheet.
In 1974, he was arrested for breaking right into a home and raping a lady in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He was launched on a $2,500 bond two months later and fled to Canada, in line with an Related Press story from the time.
Simply months after Prior’s homicide in 1975, Romine was captured by Canadian border officers and extradited again to West Virginia, the place he was sentenced to 5 to 10 years in jail for sexual assault within the Parkersburg case.
He died in Canada in 1982, shortly after his launch, though officers say they have not been capable of finding a demise certificates detailing the circumstances that result in his demise. His physique was returned to his mom in West Virginia, the place his household buried him within the Putnam County, West Virginia Pine Grove Cemetery.
Putnam County Prosecutor Mark Sorsaia instructed CBS affiliate WOWK-TV earlier this month that he filed the courtroom’s authorized petition to get approval for the exhumation.
Sorsaia known as the crime in opposition to Prior “essentially the most evil component within the human race.”
“It is a mixture of essentially the most evil component within the human race, contacting essentially the most harmless component within the human race – a toddler,” he instructed WCHS. “Some issues are worse than demise – shedding a toddler like that, for a household, for a mother. To know that your baby died that method.”
On Tuesday, Prior’s household thanked the police for the “miracle of science” that lastly recognized the killer, CTV Information reported.
“You might by no means have come again to our home or Congregation Road that weekend however you’ve got by no means left our hearts and also you by no means will,” Sharron’s sister Moreen stated.
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