[Tracy Whitney was 18 years old when she was found dead in a river near Sumner, Washington in 1988. Her murder was ruled a homicide, and despite police collecting DNA samples, an arrest was never made. Her sister, Robin Whitney, was only 11 years old at the time of her death and had avoided talking about it for decades.
Twenty years after the murder, the police got a DNA sample from the crime scene, and to her father’s surprise, Robin began to revisit her sister’s life, sharing stories with her daughters. In 2005, the police reopened the case by uploading the DNA sample to the FBI’s national genetic database, but there were no matches.
In 2018, the FBI used familial DNA searches to identify a possible suspect, but it wasn’t until 2022 that DNA analysis led detectives to John Guillot Jr. as the killer. However, Guillot Jr. had passed away eight months earlier, making it impossible to make an arrest.
Parabon NanoLabs tested the DNA sample and traced the suspect’s family lines to the 1700s. The results pointed to Guillot Jr. as the main suspect. To confirm the finding, detectives compared the DNA to the sample collected from the crime scene in 1988, but it was not possible as Guillot Jr.’s remains had been cremated.
However, the genealogy lab findings led investigators to Guillot Jr.’s biological son, John Guillot III, who had recently died, and his DNA was available through the medical examiner’s office. Further genetic testing confirmed that Guillot Jr. was the match for the suspect’s genetic profile.
Detectives believe that Guillot Jr. and Whitney did not know each other prior to the killing. Since Guillot Jr. died before he was identified as the perpetrator, his profile could not be uploaded to the national DNA database to see if he was responsible for any other crimes.
For Robin, the discovery of the killer’s identity brought both relief and sadness. She had been waiting “almost her entire life” to know the truth, and while she got the justice she had been seeking, she acknowledged that her father had not faced the criminal process and got away with the crime.
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