Laura Marie Purchase
Henry Lee Lucas, a self-proclaimed serial
killer, confessed to killing Purchase just months after her death and
was convicted of the murder three years later, but DNA testing ruled him
out as a suspect in 2008.
According to a statement from the
Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, at around 3am on March 17, 1983, a
deputy was on patrol in the 4000 block of IH-45 near League Line Road
when he noticed a fire burning in a wooded area.
The deputy approached the site and discovered a woman's lifeless, naked body that had been set alight.
An
autopsy later determined that the then-unidentified victim had been
sexually assaulted and strangled to death. The post-mortem examination
also detected traces of a man's DNA on the corpse.
It
was not until more than three years later that the FBI ran the victim's
fingerprints through its database and positively identified her as
Laura Purchase, a missing woman from Houston.
Police
said Purchase was last known to have been seen alive in Houston on
March 5, 1983, living with a man named 'Howard' or 'Howie,' who played
in a band called Malibu, reported
ABC13
Just months after Purchase was found dead,
and long before she was identified, Lucas confessed to killing her, and
was convicted of the murder in 1986.
Henry Lee Lucas
In
all, Lucas was convicted of murdering 11 people between 1960 and 1983,
and was sentenced to death for the killing of Debra Jackson, although
his sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998. He died of a heart
failure in 2001, after confessing to some 600 murders.
An
investigation by the Texas Attorney General later concluded that Lucas
was a pathological liar who had falsely confessed to crimes he did not
commit.
He is still confirmed to have
killed at least three - making him a serial killer - with eight other
possible victims disputed by investigators.
In
2007, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Squad
resubmitted the unknown male’s DNA found on Purchase's body in 1983.
Despite Lucas' confession and conviction, both he and his co-defendant
were eliminated as suspects in that case.
In October 2019, investigators sent the
DNA evidence for genealogy testing, which produced a lead that pointed
to Darnell as a murder suspect.
On March 17, exactly 38 years after Purchase's killing, detectives executed a DNA warrant and collected a sample from Darnell.
On
April 30, Darnell's DNA sample was positively matched to the unknown
male’s DNA profile collected from Purchase, resulting in his arrest.
Darnell is being held in the Montgomery County jail without a bond.
1 comment:
Henry Lee Lucas made chumps out of Texas Rangers. They paraded him across the state and piled murder after murder on him. In the end it was too much and even the chumps realized they were chasing their tails.
Post a Comment