A 78-year-old man has been charged with a murder that took place over four decades ago after investigators used genetic genealogy to link him.
Deck Brewer Jr., who is already serving time in a Massachusetts jail allegedly killed 25-year-old Susan Leigh Wolfe in 1980, according to the Austin Police Department.
Wolfe had just begun studying as a nursing student at the University of Texas at Austin when she was abducted, sexually assaulted, and killed on January 9, 1980, ABC News reports.
Investigators said Wolfe walked a block from her home toward a friend’s house around 10 p.m. when a driver stopped, got out, grabbed her in a “bear hug,” covered her head with a coat, and forced her into the back of the car, according to a witness.
The following morning, police discovered Wolfe’s body in an Austin alley. Police determined that someone had strangled her with a ligature and shot her in the head, causing her death.
Despite having more than 40 suspects throughout the years, police couldn’t find enough evidence for an arrest until 2023, when forensic experts at the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Laboratory were given evidence that could be successfully analyzed.
In February 2024, Austin police received test results that revealed a male Short Tandem Repeat (STR) profile, ruling out the six known suspects. TX DPS entered the STR profile into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS).
A month later, TX DPS notified APD of a potential match in CODIS located in Massachusetts, later identified as Brewer Jr.
The Travis County District Court established probable cause to issue a DNA search warrant, authorizing the collection of a DNA sample from Deck Brewer Jr. for direct comparison with evidence from Susan Wolfe’s autopsy.
FOX 7 reports that the analysis showed that Deck Brewer Jr. cannot be excluded as the contributor to the “partial major component of this DNA profile.”
Brewer Jr. matches the partial major component of the DNA profile, with the chance of finding an unrelated individual with the same match being approximately 1 in 550.5 quintillion, where a quintillion is a number with 18 zeros.
