Authorities say a discarded cigarette butt helped solve the decades-old unsolved murder of a Boeing instructor who was raped and strangled to death in her Washington state home 44 years ago.
Police said Kenneth Kundert, 65, was arrested this week in connection with the murder of Dorothy Silzel, whose body was found in the second-floor of her Kent apartment in February 1980.
The 30-year-old woman, who worked for an aerospace company and part-time at a pizza shop, was last seen on February 23 of that year. She was found dead three days later during a welfare check.
The medical examiner's office determined that Silzelle had been sexually assaulted, suffered blunt force trauma to the head and died from strangulation. The Seattle Times reported this week.
A sperm swab was taken at the time of the murder, but DNA technology at the time was decades behind what it is today, and police were unable to determine the identity of the killer.
The case ultimately remained unsolved, but resurfaced more than 40 years later in March 2022, when a forensic genealogist uploaded DNA profiles to two databases. The profiles identified 11 suspects, all of whom were first cousins, according to the Journal's report, citing court documents.
Kent state authorities became aware of Kundert in September and contacted the Arkansas sheriff's office in an attempt to obtain his DNA.
At one point, Kundert was interviewed by the Van Buren County Sheriff's Office, who were already investigating him for a separate assault case, and during the interview, he reportedly smoked a cigarette, but then put all of his cigarettes in his pocket after he was done, according to the report.
By March, Kent police had followed Kundert all the way to Arkansas, where he was smoking a plain white cigarette while parked in a Walmart parking lot. According to The Seattle Times, Kundert threw out the cigarette butt, and investigators dug around in a trash can and found three plain white cigarette butts.
One of the three matched unknown DNA taken from Silzel's body at the time.
There is no known connection between the suspect and the victim, but at the time of the murder, a relative of Kundert's was living in an apartment near Silzel, and the suspect, who was 20 years old at the time, worked in Washington around 1987. THV 11 reported:
No previous records of his place of employment were available.
Kundert was arrested by Van Buren County sheriff's deputies on Aug. 20 and is being held on $3 million bail. He will be extradited to Washington at a later date.
Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said Kundert will be charged with murder once he is extradited to the West Coast.
