Authorities in Ohio say a man killed by police during a shootout last month has been identified through DNA evidence as the suspect in a 43-year-old cold case murder.
Mansfield Police Chief Jason Bammann said the cold case of Debra Lee Miller, an 18-year-old waitress beaten to death in her apartment in 1981, was reopened in 2021 to account for advances in DNA technology and forensic investigative techniques.
Miller was among several Mansfield, Ohio, residents whose suspicious deaths in the 1980s were investigated for links to local police. A special investigation ordered by the mayor concluded in 1989 that there was no evidence linking officers to the deaths. The report noted that Miller had written in her diary that she was sexually involved with several Mansfield police officers….