On March 8, 2023, the Boone County Sheriff’s Office held a press conference that had been more than four decades in the making. Detective Coy Cox stood at a podium beside an enlarged photograph of a teenage girl. For the first time in 46 years, he spoke the name of the man who had killed her: Thomas W. Dunaway.

Then, describing the moment he had sat down with the victim’s surviving brother to deliver the news, Cox broke down and cried. The brother had spent his entire adult life carrying a burden few can imagine. Nearly fifty years earlier, as a teenager, he had been asked to identify the body of his little sister. When Cox and two detectives finally told him they had a name, the brother’s body seemed to release the tension of decades.

Cox recalled that the man’s body visibly relaxed, the air leaving his frame. “I have closure,” he said. The victim was Carol Sue Claybour. She was sixteen years old.

Carol was born on November 28, 1959, in Fort Wright, Kentucky, a quiet community in the northern tip of the state, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. By every account, she was an extraordinary young woman. She was the only daughter in her household, with two older brothers, Charles and Thomas. Her father had died of a heart condition in 1970, when Carol was ten.

The loss did not harden her. She volunteered as a candy striper at St. Charles Nursing Home, spending her free hours with elderly residents who had few visitors. She had been a Brownie, then a Girl Scout.

She was modest, with a quiet sense of humor, content to be present rather than the center of attention. And she was a musician. She began piano lessons at age five and by sixteen had performed twice at the Taft Museum in Cincinnati, chosen by her teacher to represent her students at the Ohio Music Association. She was also learning the violin and loved her guitar.

Her family remembered her singing in the bathtub and playing records in her room. Music was not something Carol did; it was something she was. She was set to begin her senior year at Dixie Heights High School in the fall of 1976. On Friday evening, June 4, 1976, Carol left her home on foot.

She had dropped off her bike and was going to meet friends for supper. It was an ordinary evening in an ordinary June. At some point between leaving the house and reaching her destination, she got into a car, a light-colored Chevrolet Monte Carlo, or possibly a Pontiac Grand Prix. Witnesses disagreed on the exact model but agreed on the driver: a young man with sandy blonde hair.

Carol closed the door. It was the last time anyone who loved her saw her alive. Her body was found the next morning, June 5, in a roadside ditch on Chambers Road in Walton, Kentucky. A dentist driving past noticed something in the ditch around 8:00 a.

m. and reported it. Kentucky State Police arrived to find the worst kind of scene. Carol had been sexually assaulted.

She had been struck in the head seven times with an object investigators believed resembled a tire iron or jack handle. She had been strangled with a heavy chain necklace she had been wearing that evening. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death blunt force trauma, with evidence of both strangulation and sexual assault. She had not died quickly.

In 1976, forensic DNA science did not exist as it does today. But investigators collected biological evidence from the scene anyway, standard practice even then. They also lifted fingerprints. That evidence was cataloged, preserved, and stored.

It would sit for four decades, waiting for science to catch up. The investigation began immediately. Witnesses at Devou Park, where Carol liked to ride her bike, reported seeing her get into the light-colored vehicle. A composite sketch of the driver was produced and distributed.

Three days after the body was found, on Monday, June 7, the Kentucky Post ran an article describing the vehicle, the suspect, and what investigators were looking for. The article landed on breakfast tables across Northern Kentucky. One of the people who almost certainly read it was the man who killed her. He lived close enough that it would have been in his local paper.

Seven days later, on June 14, 1976, Thomas Dunaway walked into a military recruiting office and enlisted in the United States Army. He was nineteen years old. He lived in Park Hills, a small community in northern Kentucky, half a mile from Devou Park. He drove a 1973 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, nearly identical to the vehicle witnesses had described.

In the days before the murder, witnesses had reported seeing a young man matching his description talking with Carol at Devou Park. None of that was known at the time. Kentucky State Police Detective Jerry Keith took ownership of the case and worked it for nearly a decade. He chased leads, interviewed witnesses, developed persons of interest.

But the case went cold. The physical evidence was insufficient to make an arrest. Witnesses had incomplete information. The suspect left no obvious trail.

The composite sketch existed, the vehicle description existed, the biological evidence existed, but without the science to analyze it and without a name to attach to it, the case sat. The Claybour family sat too, living every year with a question that had no answer. Carol’s mother and brothers carried it for decades, a burden that never grew lighter, only more familiar. Time moved on.

Forensic science advanced. DNA technology evolved. The evidence collected from that ditch in 1976 remained preserved. In 2017, the Boone County Sheriff’s Office established a cold case unit with just two detectives, Coy Cox and Tim Adams.

One of the first cases they adopted was Carol Sue Claybour’s. They went to meet Jerry Keith, long since retired but still carrying the case. He handed over everything: every note, every lead, every name, every thread he had never been able to pull far enough. Cox and Adams began pulling.

They first confirmed that the biological evidence from the crime scene contained the suspect’s DNA, and they had fingerprints. If they could find the right person to compare against, the science would give them a definitive answer. Keith had identified two credible suspects over the years. Cox and Adams pursued both.

The first, a man who had stolen a vehicle matching the car description in northern Indiana, cooperated fully. He admitted he had done things he was not proud of but insisted he had not killed Carol. His DNA was tested and he was eliminated. The second suspect had a more troubling history.

In October 1978, two years after Carol’s murder, a rape occurred in a nearby community with similarities to her case. The victim survived and described her attacker, eventually identified as a man named Michael Dean Tate. When caught, Tate confessed to the 1978 rape but denied killing Carol. His DNA did not match the evidence.

Cox and Adams were back to square one. Two suspects, two eliminations, a DNA profile with no name attached. In September 2022, they made a decision that changed everything. They had exhausted conventional paths.

Standard forensic databases had returned nothing. So they contacted Othram Inc. , a laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, that specializes in forensic DNA that conventional methods cannot crack. Othram uses forensic-grade genome sequencing, a process that can take a degraded, decades-old biological sample and extract hundreds of thousands of genetic markers.

The goal was not a direct match but a family match. If the unknown suspect was not in the system, the logic went, look for relatives: a cousin, a second cousin, someone who shares enough genetic material to point the investigation in a direction. From there, build a family tree, trace the branches, narrow the field, and arrive at a name. Funding for the test came from Season of Justice, an organization that supports cold case investigations through forensic genealogy.

Cox and Adams submitted the DNA extract in the fall of 2022. In January 2023, less than two months later, Othram returned an answer. The genealogy team had traced the unknown suspect’s family tree and returned leads that pointed to a specific name: Thomas W. Dunaway.

There was a problem. Dunaway was dead. He had died in December 1990 at age thirty-three. Cox and Adams needed to prove that the DNA profile matched Dunaway specifically, not just his family tree.

They obtained a DNA sample from a living biological relative. The result came back as a one hundred percent parent-child match. Thomas Dunaway had killed Carol Sue Claybour. Then the detectives started pulling every thread they could find on Dunaway.

What they found painted a portrait of violence. The timeline was damning. Carol’s body was found on June 5, 1976. The Kentucky Post article describing the suspect and vehicle ran on June 7.

On June 14, nine days after the body was found, Dunaway enlisted in the Army. Cox said it plainly at the press conference: the article comes out describing the vehicle and the individual, and nine days later, he is putting pen to paper, enlisting. Dunaway completed basic training at Fort Knox in August 1976, reported to Fort Carson, Colorado on August 24, and went AWOL on December 3. He had come back to northern Kentucky.

On December 17, 1976, six months and twelve days after Carol’s body was found, a nineteen-year-old man named Ronald Townsend was found shot multiple times. He died four days later. Dunaway was arrested on unrelated charges: arson and possession of an illegal firearm, specifically a sawed-off shotgun. He eventually confessed to Townsend’s murder, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to life in prison.

He was released after seven and a half years and died in 1990, free, never charged for Carol’s murder. Cox obtained a court order to exhume Dunaway’s remains. The parent-child DNA match had already confirmed the identification, but the exhumation served a different purpose. By law, for DNA to be entered into CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, the sample must be collected directly from the biological source.

A family match was not sufficient. Cox explained the hope plainly: to get Dunaway’s DNA into the database so he could be held accountable for all the crimes he had committed. In the days before the press conference, the Boone County Sheriff’s Office asked the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office to issue a posthumous indictment against Dunaway for Carol’s murder. The request was denied.

On March 3, 2023, Commonwealth Attorney Louis D. Kelly and Assistant Commonwealth Attorney Jason E. Hilt formally declined, citing the ethical reality that a dead man cannot be prosecuted. But the letter went further.

Kelly wrote that if Dunaway were still alive, there now existed sufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he murdered Carol Sue Claybour. Were he alive, his office would be presenting the case to a grand jury and seeking full prosecution. Carol’s brother Thomas, in an interview with the New York Times, admitted he struggled with the reality that Dunaway would never face formal charges. “I had some rather un-Christian plans for him,” he said.

But he found a measure of peace in one detail: the investigation had disturbed Dunaway’s remains, not his sister’s. “There is a little bit of justice,” he said. “You’re going to disturb somebody’s remains, dig them up. ”

For forty-six years, the answer sat less than a mile and a half from Carol Sue Claybour’s front door.

Detective Cox said it plainly: “We were looking all over, and the answer was a mile and a half from her residence. ” Investigators spent careers on the case. Jerry Keith carried it through his entire retirement. Cox and Adams spent years eliminating the wrong men before the science finally pointed them at the right one.

The science caught up, but not in time. Thomas Dunaway died free in 1990, before forensic genealogy existed, before the technology that would have named him had even been conceived. But his name was spoken aloud at last, entered into the public record of a community that lost a sixteen-year-old girl with music in her soul and never stopped looking for the man who took her.