AWhen Sharron Prior said goodbye to her mother on the eve of Easter almost 50 years ago, she promised to come home a few hours later.
As on previous weekends, the Canadian schoolgirl had arranged to meet up with friends at the “Marina’s” pizzeria in Point-Saint-Charles, a district of Montreal. However, the 16-year-old did not arrive at the restaurant just a few blocks away.
Three days after Prior’s disappearance at the end of March 1975, her body was found in a field in neighboring Longueuil – with her lower body bare, bound and covered in blood. The killer had draped her underwear in a tree. Before strangling the teenager, he raped her and smashed her skull in.
More than 100 suspects
After decades of investigations into more than 100 suspects, the Canadian judiciary has now cleared up the Causa Prior, one of the most sensational murder cases in the country. At a press conference on Tuesday, investigators identified American Franklin Romine as the perpetrator.
Longueuil cold case officers said they had tracked the violent criminal by comparing genetic material found on the girl’s blue T-shirt and clothing with DNA found on genealogy websites. “That’s how investigators came across the name of Romine and began digging through the police files,” said prosecutor Mark Sorsaia, who was assisting the investigation in the US county of Putnam, West Virginia, the killer’s homeland.
During the research it turned out that Romine had commuted between Canada and the United States in the 1970s to avoid being noticed after rapes and other violent crimes. After his mysterious death in 1982, the offender was buried in Putnam County. Three weeks ago, prosecutors in Montreal and Putnam exhumed Romine’s body to ensure they had uncovered “Sharron’s” killer after nearly 50 years.
“Comparing his DNA profile to that of the clothes revealed a 140 million times greater likelihood that the genetic material came from him than from any other white man,” the investigators said. Prior’s relatives, including her 85-year-old mother Yvonne, had repeatedly pushed for investigations in the past almost 50 years. “Solving the case will not bring Sharron back to us,” said Doreen Prior, a sister of the student, on Tuesday. “But knowing that her killer is no longer alive and can continue killing helps us close the crime.”
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