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A 60-year-old Dallas man has been nabbed in a grisly slaying 38 years ago after DNA testing linked him to the cold case, prosecutors said.
Edward Morgan was busted in the 1984 killing of Mary Jane Thompson, who was found strangled near out-of-use train tracks, Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot said in a statement Friday.
Thompson was 21 years old when she took a bus to a medical clinic that turned out to be closed, The Dallas Morning News reported.
Two days later, her body was discovered near the railroad tracks behind a warehouse.
She had been sexually abused and strangled with her own leg warmers, the paper said.
Thompson, who worked two jobs, in a florist shop and a restaurant, had moved to Dallas just six months before she was killed after living in Houston and Los Angeles. She had aspired to be a model.
Dallas police had reopened her case in 2009 and conducted DNA testing on swabs from the original autopsy, but the results matched an unknown male DNA profile, the Morning News reported.
The case was reopened a second time in 2018, and new testing techniques similar to those used to identify California’s notorious Golden State Killer, including tapping into ancestry databases, were able to match the DNA to Morgan, NBC News reported.
Investigators did not say how they narrowed down their search to Morgan, but said the case was submitted in 2020 for forensic genetic genealogy analysis and Morgan was identified as the suspect.
“It is not every day we are able to solve a 38-year-old cold-case capital murder,” Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Leighton D’Antoni said. “It takes a singular dedication and authentic commitment to justice to see it through.”
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