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Nightmare on Elm Street Murder Solved After 36 Years
An unsolved murder from New Mexico dating back to the late 1980s has been solved after police exhumed the suspect’s body and tested the DNA.
Authorities in New Mexico have announced they have solved a cold case murder dating back nearly four decades after funding was provided for DNA testing.
Donna Sue Hyatt was last seen alive on a July evening in 1987, with witnesses saying they spotted her leaving a store in Carlsbad with a tall Causcasian male at around 9:15 PM.
When Donna’s daughter returned to the family home they shared on Elm Street at around 11:40 PM, she came upon a terrible scene: Donna lay dead, having been sexually assaulted, stabbed and strangled.
Although investigators followed up as many leads as they possibly could, they could never identify the mysterious man or work out why Donna might have been with him that fateful night.
Crime scene technicians collected and preserved the evidence from inside the Elm Street home, but with forensic science in its infancy there was little that could be gleaned from it. Slowly, the case went cold.
Now, though, Carlsbad Police have announced they have been working with a laboratory specialising in DNA technology — and that they have identified a suspect in Donna’s killing.
They said DNA collected from the 1987 crime scene matches that taken from the exhumed body of a man named Michael Ruff Wigley. What’s more, interviews have ascertained that Wigley was in Carlsbad at the time of the murder.
Little additional information is available about how he crossed paths with Donna, but it is thought the suspect was a soldier. He died in a traffic accident involving a train in 1989.
And it looks as though Donna wasn’t Wigley’s first victim. According to the news release, he had been convicted and imprisoned for sexual assault in Texas — and he was charged with the murder of an 18-year-old newlywed from Oklahoma in 1980.
According to the Gatesville Messenger and Star-Forum, Wigley was indicted after the naked body of Sandra Bellman was discovered near Copperas Cove the previous…
