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ghosttruck

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Police are hoping to close North Carolina’s oldest cold case after new DNA technology helped lead to the arrest of a homeless Florida man for the 1972 killing of a woman found bound and shot beside her 4-month-old baby, authorities announced Tuesday.

Larry Joe Scott, 65, was arrested Monday in Bradenton, Fla., and charged with murder and kidnapping in the death of 33-year-old Bonnie Neighbors, said Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell.

“I was finally able to tell her son that we had found his mother’s murderer,” Bizzell said.

Neighbors was allegedly kidnapped with her infant son almost 47 years ago while on her way to pick up her 7-year-old boy from school. Days after disappearing, her body was found in a migrant worker house near Benson, N.C., the Raleigh News & Observer reported.

The 4-month-old child was found shivering, curled next to his mother’s body, having survived the cold December temperatures.

Bizzell, only a teenager at the time of the murder, recalled how the case still haunted him when it was reopened in 2007.

“In 1972, I was only 14 years old, but something about Bonnie Neighbors’ killing and about this case always bothered me,” Bizzell told the paper. “After I became sheriff in 2007, I was still haunted because her killer had not been found.”

Scott was a homeless man who frequented labor camps near the area where Neighbors lived, WRAL-TV reported. Authorities said he was also homeless at the time of his arrest in Florida.

Early DNA evidence hadn’t been able to produce any links to the murder, the News & Observer reported. But in 2017, the Crime Lab developed technology that produced a useable DNA profile, which led authorities to Scott.

 
A man charged with raping and killing a woman in North Carolina nearly 50 years ago has died in a state prison while awaiting trial, authorities said Monday.

Larry Joe Scott, 68, was in the custody of the state Department of Public Safety “for safekeeping due to medical conditions” when he died Friday at a prison in Raleigh, Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell and District Attorney Susan Doyle said in a joint statement.

The statement didn't elaborate on the circumstances of Scott's death or identify a possible cause.

Scott was scheduled to be tried in August on charges of first-degree murder, rape and kidnapping in the December 1972 killing of 33-year-old Bonnie Neighbors.

The News & Observer reports that Neighbors had picked up her oldest son from school before she was found bound and fatally shot, with her infant son found alive next to her.

Scott was arrested in Bradenton, Florida, in April 2019. The sheriff's office had reopened the investigation of Neighbors' killing in 2007.

Authorities said DNA evidence from the crime scene and fingerprints found inside Neighbors' car had tied Scott to the killing.

“We were confident and ready for trial,” Doyle said in the statement. “The evidence against Scott was conclusive and overwhelming.”

“I hope (Neighbors’) family can find some closure, knowing that we got the right man,” Bizzell said.
 
I wonder if, since he wasn’t convicted, they are still able to put his dna in the databases in case he committed other similar crimes?
 
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