Authorities say a discarded cigarette butt helped solve the decades-old, unsolved case of a Boeing instructor who was raped and strangled in her Washington state home 44 years ago.
Kenneth Kundert, 65, was arrested this week in connection with the murder of Dorothy Silzel, who was found dead on the second floor of her Kent condominium in February 1980, police said.
The 30-year-old employee of an aerospace company, who also worked part-time in a pizzeria, was last seen alive on February 23 of the same year. Three days later, she was found dead during a welfare check.
The medical examiner's office found that Silzel had been sexually assaulted, suffered blunt force trauma to the head and died of strangulation, the Seattle Times reported this week.
At the time of the murder, sperm was obtained through swabs, but DNA technology was decades behind today's standards and the police were unable to determine the identity of the murderer.
The case eventually stalled until it was reopened more than 40 years later in March 2022, when a forensic genealogist uploaded a DNA profile to two databases. The profile identified 11 possible suspects, all of whom are first cousins, the newspaper reported, citing court documents.
In September, Kent authorities targeted Kundert and contacted the Arkansas Sheriff's Office to obtain the suspected killer's DNA.
The Van Buren County Sheriff's Office, which was already investigating Kundert for another assault case, questioned him at one point. During the questioning, the suspect reportedly smoked cigarettes, but put each cigarette he took a drag into his pocket afterward.
In March, Kent police traveled to Arkansas, where they secretly followed Kundert into a Walmart parking lot as he smoked an all-white cigarette while parking. He threw the cigarette butt away, and investigators searched the trash and found three all-white cigarette butts, according to the Seattle Times.
One of these three matched an unknown DNA sample taken from Silzel's body at the time.
Although no connection between the suspect and the victim is known, a relative of Kundert was living in an apartment near Silzel at the time of the murder, and the suspect, then 20, was working in Washington around 1987, THV 11 reported.
Previous documents regarding his place of work were not available.
Kundert was taken into custody by Van Buren Sheriffs on August 20 and is being held on $3 million bail. He is scheduled to be extradited to Washington at a later date.
Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Kundert would face murder charges once he is returned to the West Coast.
