It took multiple generations of Boone County, Kentucky homicide investigators to finally bring to a close the case of Carol Sue Klaber (pictured above in a news report), who was sexually assaulted and murdered all the way back in 1976. Speaking with The New York Times in March 2023, soon after the conclusion was announced, investigator Coy Cox revealed how former colleague Jerry Keith had obsessively compiled information on the case, keeping the file with him at his home: “He literally carried this case with him his whole life,” Cox said. While the suspects Detective Keith had focused on did not pan out, Detective Cox nevertheless credits him with helping bring the case to its eventual closure, noting, “… a lot of times, you have to prove who didn’t do it to get to who did.”
That person was Thomas Dunaway, only 19 at the time of the murder, whom investigators zeroed in on after securing a match with familial DNA. Dunaway, in the years after killing Klaber, had enlisted in the Army, but was soon after arrested for possessing an illegal firearm; years later, he had killed someone else, eventually spending seven years in prison.
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Dunaway died in 1990, making the finding a bittersweet one for Klaber’s brother Thomas, who had undertaken the unenviable task of identifying his little sister’s body. He told the Times that he was comforted, though, in the knowledge that there had been no need to exhume Klaber’s remains to resolve the crime — the remains of Dunaway had instead been processed to secure an exact DNA match. “There’s a little bit of justice,” Klaber said. “You’re going to disturb somebody’s remains? Dig him up.”
