More than 33 years ago, Stacey Lyn Chahorski disappeared from Norton Shores, Michigan, after leaving home to see the country. It was September 1988 when Chahorski last spoke to her mother and was never seen again.
Three months later, in December 1988, two Georgia Department of Transportation employees found the body of a woman near a highway. Georgia detectives tried for three decades to identify the woman, but could not.
This month, however, both cases merged when the Dade County Sheriff’s Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) announced that the remains found in Georgia were those of Chahorski. The remains were identified using advanced DNA technology, CNN reported, and “will be soon returned to her family in Michigan.”
“Today marks the day where we hunt for the killer now,” GBI Special Agent in Charge Joe Montgomery said during a press conference on Thursday, according to CNN. “The biggest problem in being able to solve this case is we had no identity of the victim so we had no starting point. Now we have a starting point and that’s a big jump for us.”
“I think we have a good probability of solving this case and bringing the killer to justice,” Montgomery added.
The GBI issued a press release on Thursday explaining how they determined the remains found in 1988 belonged to Chahorski. For years after the remains were discovered, investigators tried to identify the victim, with a GBI forensic artist even making a clay rendering and drawn composites in an attempt to show what the victim looked like in the hopes that someone would recognize her. More from the press release:
In the mid-2000’s, the case was reassigned, and investigators found additional evidence that could possibly identify the victim. Investigators sent the evidence to the FBI lab in Washington D.C. for further testing. Analysts developed a DNA profile of the victim and entered the profile in the missing persons DNA database.
In 2015, the case was reassigned again, and a GBI forensic artist did new clay renderings and composites of the victim for an age progression. The GBI contacted the FBI about the possibility of using a new type of genealogy investigation that had been credited with assisting in solving other cold cases, particularly homicide investigations. With this technology, Stacey Lyn Chahorski was identified. She was reported missing in January 1989 and would be 52 today.
The GBI used Othram, a Texas-based forensic genealogy lab, to assist with the DNA identification.
Othram made news earlier this month when it was credited with identifying the remains of “Little Miss Nobody,” who was found in the Arizona desert back in 1960. As The Daily Wire reported, the body of a young girl had been found by a Las Vegas school teacher. About 400 miles away, a four-year-old girl named Sharon Lee Gallegos had been abducted from her home. Authorities in Arizona thought the remains belonged to a seven-year-old and ruled Gallegos out. Sixty years later, Othram showed the remains did, indeed, belong to Gallegos.
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Source: Dailywire
