Authorities identified the remains of a woman 25 years later in a roadside park in west Michigan.
According to the investigators, a woman in her 20s was killed in 1997 in the grand rapids area of west Michigan. 25 years later they learned that Stephanie Judson hailed from Benton Harbor.
Help from genealogy and DNA tracing revealed the identity of the woman who was slain 25 years ago.
The investigation was stretched all the way from Kent County to distant families in Mississippi and back to West Michigan.
According to the details, “a maintenance worker located bones at a roadside park east of Ada on July 31, 1997, and called the Kent County Sheriff’s Office. The death was quickly ruled a homicide.
Police say her remains were sent to the University of North Texas to extract the DNA from the bones, but the sample did not result in any matches.”
Kent county detectives and investigators tried to solve this case for decades. Even a clay model of the victim; the skull was also created in hopes to identify her.
Detectives had learned that the victim was a black woman who was aged between 18 to 25 years at the time of death. It is said that she was about 5’2” in height.
“It’s incredible,” said Dustin Cook, a detective at the sheriff’s office.
He said “Judson “got caught up in a party lifestyle” and had relocated to Grand Rapids from Benton Harbor.”
The investigators found the sister of slain woman Judson but their mother had already died before the mystery could get resolved.
“She wanted her mom to be here in person to hear this news,” Cook said of Judson’s sister, “but she did say, ‘That just goes to show, even my mom being in heaven, she never stopped working to find her daughter.’”
The Kent County sheriff’s office has stated that the investigation of the murder is still going on and have asked people to connect with them in case of any kind of information related to the murder of Stephanie Judson.
