Carol Sue Klaber was just 16 years old when she was brutally murdered and left for dead in a ditch on Chambers Road in Walton, Kentucky in June 1976. Kentucky State Police had been the ones to respond to the horrific scene on the side of such a quiet road. KSP had come to a conclusion that Ms. Klaber had died as a result of blunt force trauma, with evidence of strangulation. Jerry Keith, a KSP leading detective at the time, had worked the investigation for a decade before it went cold.
In 2017, the Boone County Cold Case unit had been established, and they adopted the case to look further into cracking a case that had been cold for nearly 4 decades. They then built up a DNA profile for the suspect from the Kentucky State Police Central Forensic Center in hopes of having a match in the system. After a lot of forensic genetic genealogy tracking, they were able to positively identify the suspect, who was found to be Thomas W. Dunaway. Dunaway was only 19 when he committed this heinous crime. He had since then got into a violent criminal history and ended up dying in 1990 at the age of 33. This murder had been one of the first cold cases to have been solved by genealogy testing in Northern Kentucky.
