A 33-year-old cold case in North Carolina has been solved, after the local sheriff announced Wednesday that the remains of a Georgia woman whose body was found in 1990 have been identified.
Investigators have identified the remains of Lisa Coburn Kesler, a Jackson County, Georgia resident who disappeared more than three decades ago at the age of 20, according to a press release from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina.
“For decades, some of our best investigators have continued to cut themselves off,” Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood said, according to a news release.
Local police, who believe the victim was strangled and her body dumped, have spent years trying to identify the woman’s remains using traditional methods. Officials even created a bust of Kesler using forensic facial reconstruction techniques based on her skull.
A digital illustration of Lisa Coburn Kesler was released by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office in 2018, but she remains unidentified.
Orange County Sheriff’s Office – North Carolina/ Carl Koppleman
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“When you can’t close a case, it gets under your skin,” Sheriff Blackwood continued. “You can set the file aside for a while, but you keep coming back to it, looking for something you didn’t notice before or hoping that the information gathered in subsequent cases is relevant to your cold case.”
Kesler’s remains were discovered in 1990 by a road crew along Interstate 40 near the New Hope Church Road exit, about 35 miles west of Durham.
ABC11 reported that according to investigators, Kesler’s family did not know she was missing at the time of her disappearance, noting that the victim voluntarily left Georgia for Michigan. When Kesler left Michigan, her family there believed she left voluntarily to return to Georgia.
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An earlier digital illustration from 2017 also revealed no traces of the 1990 cold case.
Orange County Sheriff’s Office – North Carolina/ National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
In 2018, updated technology allowed investigators to circulate a digital illustration of the deceased in hopes of identifying her, although despite their best efforts, Kesler’s identity remains a mystery.
“Investigators are also following new techniques and technologies in the field,” explained Sheriff Blackwood, “which ultimately led to the discovery in Ms. Kesler’s case.”
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In 2020, after two decades of the victim remaining unidentified, forensic investigators took over and began working with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation to solve the case. Updated technology allowed a degraded fragment of the victim’s hair to be used for DNA extraction, and investigators were able to link it to the victim’s paternal cousin using genealogical databases.
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According to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, investigators requested the DNA of another maternal cousin of Kesler, and analysis of this genetic material provides further confirmation.
While the case remains open, authorities in North Carolina now hope that further DNA analysis will allow them to identify Kesler’s killer.
Sheriff Blackwood concluded: “I am very pleased that we have solved the more than three-decade-old mystery of this young woman’s identity and I hope that this will bring comfort to members of her family. We are grateful to the many researchers, passionate volunteers and talented professionals who have assisted in this effort. I believe that together we have demonstrated the value of dogged determination, which we will now apply to the task of identifying her killer. There is no statute of limitations for murder, nor for justice.”
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Source: HIS Education