DNA links same man to 2 cold case murders from 1980s
CBSN
More than 30 years after two women were found dead in separate killings, police and local officials in Orange County, California, say they were finally able to solve the murders. After an ongoing probe conducted by the sheriff and district attorney's offices — which specifically employed the latter's investigative genealogy unit — DNA evidence revealed that both homicides were committed by the same man.
Reuben J. Smith, a former resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, was originally identified last year as a possible suspect in the 1987 and 1989 murders of Shannon Rose Lloyd and Renee Cuevas. The women were 23 and 27 years old, respectively, when they were killed in Garden Grove, an Orange County city between Anaheim and Santa Ana.
Smith was arrested in Las Vegas in 1998 for sexual assault and attempted murder of another woman, and died by suicide the following year, according to the Garden Grove Police Department. Two decades after the Orange County Crime Lab first linked Lloyd and Cuevas' murders, DNA profiles taken from the crime scenes was compared with evidence collected during Smith's arrest. Per Garden Grove PD, all three samples matched.
Ashley White received her earliest combat action badge from the United States Army soon after the first lieutenant arrived in Afghanistan. The silver military award, recognizing soldiers who've been personally engaged by an attacker during conflict, was considered an achievement in and of itself as well as an affirming rite of passage for the newly deployed. White had earned it for using her own body to shield a group of civilian women and children from gunfire that broke out in the midst of her third mission in Kandahar province. All of them survived. She never mentioned the badge to anyone in her battalion.