Teen’s Rape & Murder Case Solved after 48 Years in Canada

Exhuming of the suspect’s body and DNA testing solved the rape and murder case of a teenager, which took place in 1975 in Canada’s Montreal.

Sixteen-year-old Sharron Prior disappeared in 1975 and three days later her body was found in Longueuil, on Montreal’s South Shore. The suspect, Franklin Romine, an American citizen from West Virginia, was living in Montreal at the time of the incident. He had a long criminal record in Montreal and West Virginia, including at least one rape conviction.

He died in 1982 at the age of 36. Till death, he was not proven to be the culprit behind Prior’s rape and murder.

In 1975, the amount of DNA gathered at the scene of crime was insufficient to be tested or used in court. But investigators preserved it in the hope that it could someday be used to find a match for a suspect as technology improved.

The samples were sent to a laboratory in West Virginia in 2019 and later matched to Romine’s relatives using data from genealogical websites, Sky News reported.

In May this year, police exhumed Romine’s body from a West Virginia cemetery and found that his DNA was a match. It was confirmed that it was indeed Franklin Romine who left his DNA at the scene and he was the culprit behind the rape and murder of the teenager.