Tracy Whitney was last seen leaving a Burger King after an argument with her ex-boyfriend in August 1988. Less than 24 hours later, fishermen found her body in a river near Sumner, Washington, about 12 miles east of Tacoma. She was 18 years old.
An autopsy revealed Tracy had been sexually assaulted and died of strangulation, according to a statement from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office. Her death was ruled a homicide.
Detectives collected DNA samples from her body that presumably belonged to the killer, interviewed people of interest and administered polygraph tests. No suspect was identified, and the case grew cold. Tracy’s sister, Robin Whitney, was 11 years old when the murder took place. Following the loss of her “protector,” Robin vowed to avoid talking about Tracy – not to her friends, her father or eventually to her daughters. “I didn’t want to think about what had happened to her, and what her last moments were like and how scared she must’ve been,” Robin told CNN. “I’d also have to think about everything we missed out on as sisters, how unfair that was.”
She believed the case would likely never be solved, and thinking of all the “what ifs” only brought fresh waves of grief and frustration. But roughly 10 years ago, Robin’s father, who had avoided speaking of Tracy for decades, told her the police had recovered a DNA sample from the crime scene in 1988. The news gave Robin hope. And she slowly began sharing stories of her sister with her daughters. Robin also learned her father had visited the sheriff’s office several times since the murder, hoping to revive the investigation.
In 2005, the sheriff’s office renewed efforts to solve the crime by uploading the DNA sample to the FBI’s national genetic database, CODIS. They decided to resubmit Tracy’s DNA swabs after new technology became available, the sheriff’s office said, but the effort yielded no results. The first breakthrough came in 2022, after the sheriff’s office received a grant from the state attorney general’s office. With this funding, they sent the DNA sample to Parabons NanoLab in Virginia for genetic genealogy testing.
Thirty-six years after Tracy’s death, the sheriff’s office used lab data to identify John Guillot Jr. as her killer.
Sheriffs, however, could not make an arrest. Guillot Jr. died eight months before authorities could connect him to the killing, Pierce County Det. Sgt. Lindsay Kirkegaard said in a video released Sunday. Genetic genealogy, a combination of DNA analysis and family tree research, finally led detectives to Guillot Jr. A relatively new field of study, genetic genealogy gained prominence as hobbyists began looking into their family history. It has since expanded into a forensic method used by law enforcement to crack cold cases.
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