Columbia Police say advancements in DNA technology helping in cold case investigations
Meghan Drakas
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Columbia Police say advancements in DNA technology are helping in cold case investigations.
Police are investigating 16 cold case homicides dating back to 1985. Three of these cases are over 30 years old. This includes the case of 59-year-old George Showalter, who was found dead inside a Red Roof Inn motel room on April 17, 1994.
Photo of George Showalter, date unknown
“With the increase in DNA technology and genealogy, the spectrum is more wide open now that you have just a little piece of evidence that can take you so much farther now than what it could, especially back in 1994,” Columbia Police Department Lt. Matt Gremore said.
Gremore oversees criminal investigations with the Columbia Police Department including violent assaults, rapes and homicides. Gremore said he couldn’t go into detail on the evidence collected at the Red Roof crime scene, but gave insight into evidence testing on unsolved cold cases.
“We’ve had several cold cases that we’ve looked at to send new evidence off to private labs,” Gremore said. “And this case is one of those cases that we’re looking into to see if we can get something to come from it.”
Gremore said when he started working, police had 35 mm film. But now, everything is centered around video and DNA.
“I think that there must have been training back in the ’80s for detectives to know, this is going to be important years from now,” Gremore said. “The things that they collected back then that they held on to, they had to have had some kind of forethought of how important those items were going to be.”
In March, a North Carolina man was sentenced to life in prision for the rape and assault of a woman in Columbia in 1984. The cold case was reopened by the Columbia Police Department in 2020 and DNA evidence was sent off to a lab in Salt Lake City. The suspect’s DNA profile was then matched to James Wilson.
Gremore worked on the case and said it’s a great example of finding new information by processing evidence decades later.
“It’s actually very impressive to see the work done by the police going back that far to realize that this will become something later,” Gremore said. “It’s just amazing.”
Watch the latest “Mid-Missouri’s Cold Case Files: The Case of George Showalter” at 10 p.m. Thursday on ABC 17 News.