Colorado police have solved the murder of 20-year-old Teree Becker, 48 years after she was killed.
According to the Westminster Police Department , Becker was last seen on Dec. 4, 1975, as she hitchhiked to visit her boyfriend at the Adams County Jail in Brighton, Colorado. Her body was found by a couple the next morning, and it appeared to have been dumped in a field with her clothing and other personal effects. Investigators found that she had been raped and asphyxiated.
The cold case has been reviewed multiple times over the decades, police said, including in 2003, when the Colorado Bureau of Investigation took male DNA from a piece of evidence related to the case. That DNA generated a profile, which was entered in the Combined DNA Index System nationwide database, but no match was found.
In 2013, a DNA profile submitted to the same database by the Las Vegas Police Department matched the profile generated in 2003. The Las Vegas profile had been generated while reviewing a 1991 cold case in the city, also involving a woman who had been raped and murdered. Police were able to determine that the same suspect was involved in both cases. Neither department had a suspect at the time.