An excavation crew unearthed human remains from a home in the Hudson Valley last week — igniting and quickly destroying a town’s hopes to finally solve a decades-old missing persons case, police said Thursday.
The skeleton was found April 16 by a crew that was preparing for a new home build in the town of Patterson, according to the New York State Police.
The badly decomposed body offered little clues to the person’s identity, but investigators confirmed that it was not that of that of Robin Murphy, who mysteriously vanished on April 9, 1995 at age 17.
The victim had been dead for more than 10 years, troopers said.
The announcement initially stirred excitement through Putnam County that the remains could be that Murphy, who was last seen leaving her home to meet her friend at a local restaurant.
She went missing right around the same time as 12-year-old Josette Wright, whose remains were discovered in November of that year not far from where the excavation crew found the body last week.
Hope to finally put the case to rest was smashed Saturday, however, when troopers confirmed that the DNA sample from the body did not match Murphy’s profile.
“Her family has been through a lot and it would be amazing to close the case and get some justice,” the page administrator for Murphy’s missing persons Facebook page told Westchester News 12.
Howard Gombert, who is serving prison time in Connecticut for rape, has long been suspected of abducting and killing Murphy, but police never had enough evidence to charge him.
He was also fingered as Wright’s alleged killer by the two men who were charged with her rape and murder and later acquitted.
State troopers are still working to identify the discovered remains, stating that the case is in its “infancy.”
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