MONROE COUNTY, Ga. — It took 34 years, multiple states and following one strand of DNA to close the murder case of Mary Wilfong. This week, 60-year-old Larry Padgett was sentenced to life after pleading guilty to killing her.
Reverse genealogy was the missing link in the case. Monroe County Sheriff Brad Freeman said it helped them track down Padgett and arrest him last year.
"It was a lot of man-hours. There were a lot of other agencies that assisted us," Freeman said.
Back in 1989, Mary Wilfong was found dead off I-75 in Monroe County. She was sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Sheriff Freeman decided to revisit this case after more than three decades with no leads.
"You know fast forward 30 years, we decided to take another look at it because of new technologies out there," Freeman said.
That technology is reverse genealogy and it hasn't been around that long.
Investigator Marc Mansfield was assigned to this case. He said genealogy has made a huge impact and is a groundbreaking tool in solving cases.
"When you see throughout the United States all of the cases that have been solved with this type of — now it's not easy you know it's not as easy as — it's a lot of work to be done when you do it," Mansfield said.
It became a step-by-step process that started with Wilfong's DNA from the scene of the crime.
"We still had a sample and the sample was intact it wasn't contaminated, so we traveled down to Florida. Took it down there and got them to analyze it that takes several months if not a year," Mansfield said.
After a DNA profile was built, they started to narrow down their search until they found a common thread.
"Expected to occur in a given population of approximately one in two hundred quintillion," Mansfield said.
A common distant cousin helped investigators backtrack until they came up with three suspects who were all brothers, all in Indiana and all truck drivers. They started to follow their routes.
"Two of the brothers were local truck drivers meaning they never really left the state of Indiana, but the other brother was an over-the-road truck driver so he would've been in Georgia or had the opportunity to be in Georgia, so that's where you know we were able to obtain a search warrant for his DNA and got a match," Freeman said.
Neither Wilfong nor Padgett were from Monroe County, but Sheriff Freeman said that doesn't mean they don't investigate.
"We just don't work for the citizens of Monroe County. We work for the citizens that happened to be in Monroe County traveling, doing business, whatever," Freeman said.
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