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Blood in the Snow: DNA Convicts Man Who ‘Butchered’ Linda Tschari
After 44 years, justice was finally delivered for the 19-year-old who was targeted in her cottage.
A jury in Erie County has convicted a man of a murder that occurred in 1978 using DNA evidence he left at the scene of the crime.
Linda Tschari, 19, had been a bartending student and was living in a small cottage in the grounds of her family’s property in the city of Buffalo.
On Wednesday 8th February 1978, Linda had gone to bed as usual when someone entered the cottage and stabbed her multiple times in an attack so vicious the investigating officers said it was as though she had been “butchered”.
The following day, Linda’s brother thought it was strange that he hadn’t heard from her and decided to go down to the cottage to check what was going on. There, he came upon a scene that must have traumatised him for life: his sister lay dead, facedown in a pool of blood in the living room of her small home.
An investigation took place to try to catch the killer, focusing on a trail of blood that had been left in several rooms and that police thought belonged to her assailant.