A suspect in the decades-old murders of two Southern California women has been identified after a DNA match, officials said Monday.
The first murder took place in 1987, when Shannon Rose Lloyd, 23, was found dead in a room she rented in Garden Grove, Orange County. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death, according to the Orange County Attorney’s Office.
Then, in 2003, a crime lab linked Lloyd’s death to the 1989 murder of another woman, 27-year-old Renee Cuevas, whose body was found near a marine base in the same county.
Both cases were shelved until 2021, when an investigative genetics team identified a possible suspect: Reuben J. Smith.
Smith was a Las Vegas man who committed suicide in 1999 at age 39, a year after being arrested in Las Vegas on suspicion of sexual assault and attempting to kill a third woman, the prosecutor’s office said. The victim reacted and managed to escape, according to authorities.
“The evil in him. I know that if I didn’t fight, I was going to die,” said the unnamed woman who survived the 1998 attack in a statement released by the prosecution. “It was horrible. The things he did, the things he said. He told me he was going to kill me.”
DNA evidence collected during Smith’s arrest was a positive match to the DNA profile left at Lloyd and Cuevas’ crime scenes in the 1980s.
Smith lived in Orange County in the 1980s when the murders took place, before moving to Nevada.
“The loved ones of Renee Cuevas and Shannon Lloyd have the answers to the question they’ve been asking for more than three decades,” Orange County Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement.
“The justice that every victim deserves was hidden in DNA, but with advances in IGG technology combined with the relentless dedication of generations of detectives and the talented prosecutors and forensic scientists at the Public Ministry, we now know who killed Renee and Shannon. ”
“Justice has no expiration date,” added the prosecutor.
This is the second time a suspect has been identified in a cold case in the city of Garden Grove with the help of the genetic genealogy unit in the past year, officials said.
Investigative genetic genealogy, which combines DNA analysis with genealogical research, is around the world to solve decades-old crimes.
In one of the most high-profile cases, the so-called Golden State Killer from California was identified using the then-new investigative technique.
Investigators identified former California police officer Joseph DeAngelo as a suspect after DNA from a crime scene matched the genetic material of one of his relatives, which authorities said was recorded on a genealogy website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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