In December 2007, a woman’s dismembered body was found in a burning bag, left beside the road in west Georgia.
Troup County deputies quickly arrived at the corner of Whitfield and Stitcher roads.
“When they arrived on scene, they discovered what appeared to be human remains that had been dumped at the location and a bag was smoldering,” the sheriff’s office said Wednesday. “The remains were partial as the hands, feet and head were missing.”
But the case went cold until this week. That’s when advances in DNA allowed investigators in two separate labs to positively identify the woman found dead 16 years ago: 24-year-old Nicole Alston. It was the latest in a string of cold cases in metro Atlanta and Georgia solved in recent months with the help of DNA technology. The evidence had been collected at the crime scenes, but the science simply hadn’t progressed far enough to solve the cases when they happened.
In September, Cobb County investigators solved the 1972 homicide of 9-year-old Debbie Lynn Randall by identifying her killer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution previously reported. William Rose’s DNA was found on Randall; he died just two years after he killed the little girl.
“If you made a mistake, if you left something behind, technology is going to find you,” longtime investigator Morris Nix said when Randall’s case was solved. “Technology was seeking out William Rose and was looking for William Rose. Technology does not get old, it doesn’t retire, it doesn’t get sick and it doesn’t quit. Technology was seeking William Rose and it found him in the grave.”
In the Troup case, Alston’s last known address was Manhattan, New York, but she had moved to the Atlanta area in July 2006, her family told investigators. Then, she went missing and her family never heard from her again.
When the remains were found, they were sent to the GBI Crime Lab for identification.
“The only determination made was that it was an obvious homicide and the victim was an unidentified adult black female,” the sheriff’s office said.
After an in-depth investigation, the case went cold. Earlier this year, DNA was sent to Innovative Forensic Investigations in Emporia, Virginia, and Gene by Gene Laboratories in Houston, Texas, for analysis. Those forensic results were then sent to the GBI for comparison, and this week, Troup investigators learned that the DNA matched that of Alston.
Now, investigators have shifted the focus to finding the woman’s killer, the sheriff’s office said.
Anyone with information regarding the case is asked to call the Criminal Investigation Division at 706-883-1616 or Crime Stoppers at 706-812-1000.
About the Author
