Pima County Sheriff's Department pursuing a new lead on cold case from 1979

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department is investigating a cold case that dates back to the 1970s after finding a lead using new DNA technology.

The victim was a girl as young as 17 and thought to be of Honduran descent. Her body was found with gunshot wounds along the side of the I-10 outside Tucson in 1979.

Neither she nor a suspect in her killing has ever been identified. But, a lead has emerged with the help of a newer DNA technology called forensic investigative genetic genealogy.

“So these cases that have sat unresolved for years are now being re-approached, and rather than target the individual, we’re targeting the family tree of the individual,” Miguel Flores, a detective with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department’s cold case unit.

Flores says they were able to match the victim’s DNA with a potential family member who used an at-home DNA collection kit — like those used for services like 23&Me and Ancestry.com, and opted to allow it to be used by law enforcement.

It’s an advancement that wasn’t possible with older technology, which Flores says only works if the exact person’s DNA is already in the database, rather than a relative.

But the next stage of the investigation could take months, he says, as the sheriff’s department and the FBI now look into how closely the victim in this case and her potential relative are related, if at all. The case has also been expanded to include international databases.

“The investigative lead we have right now appears to be from the same region [as the victim],” Flores says. “The issue is that the database we have for that region is very very limited right now.”

Geneticists will next try to build off that lead and learn more. Earlier this month, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also released a new rendering of what the victim likely looked like when she was alive.

Flores says this is one of more than 200 cold cases his department is investigating.