Ledyard ― For the past 50 years, one of the two murder victims found shot in the head and buried in a shallow grave off Shewville Road was known only as the “unidentified woman.”

Thanks to a DNA match with a relative, she is no longer a Jane Doe.

Connecticut State Police announced Wednesday that the woman shot and killed on New Year’s Eve in 1970 is Linda Sue Childers, formerly of Kentucky. At the time of her death, she was using the name Lorraine Stahl as an alias and traveling with a wanted man going by the name Dirk Stahl.

“Conversations with the family confirmed (Childers’) whereabouts in the northeast throughout the years before her disappearance,” state police said in a statement on Wednesday. “It is gratifying to have helped identify Linda and, most importantly, give her family some answers.”

Childers’ identity was for decades a missing piece of information that had stumped investigators even as two men were arrested and convicted in the double murder.

Information about Childers, such as her description and dental x-rays, was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System database in 2011. Her DNA was added to a national database, Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), in 2012, but police said there were no matches and she remained unidentified.

In July 2022, police said samples were sent to Othram, a private forensic DNA testing company that works with law enforcement. The company has a laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas, and uses DNASolves, a crowdfunding platform to fund research on its cases.

Michelle Clark, an investigator with the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, worked with Connecticut State Police Detective Michael Hamel on the case.

In January, police said, a likely match for the unidentified woman was revealed -- the victim’s sister. The sister was contacted, and investigators learned that Childers had a daughter. Police said the daughter provided DNA that was confirmed in February to be a match to Childers.

Born Sept. 4, 1946, and originally from Louisville, Ky., Childers would have been 24 at the time of her death.

Reports by The Day in 1974 show the second murder victim discovered with Childers on May 30, 1974, was Gustavous Lee Carmichael, 38, a convicted bank robber who was a fugitive from Boston at the time and reported to be Childers’ boyfriend.

Richard DeFreitas and Donald R. Brant were arrested, prosecuted by former New London County State’s Attorney C. Robert Satti and later convicted of the murders. They were sentenced to life in prison and are both deceased, police said.

Investigators at the time, said Childers and Carmichael were shot and killed on Dec. 31, 1970 and buried near a Shewville Road home rented by DeFreitas.

Defreitas’ former girlfriend led police to the bodies, which were exhumed on May 30, 1974, published reports show. At trial, prosecutors alleged that Carmichael had come to hide at DeFreitas’ home with $30,000 from a bank robbery. Childers and Carmichael were killed when DeFreitas and Brant, both of whom were wanted by police, thought Childers might go to police with information about them.

At the time of his arrest in 1974, Brant was a suspect in a 1972 double murder in Rhode Island and DeFreitas was in prison serving a 10-year prison sentence for armed robbery.

In August, Othram announced a collaboration with the Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner “to leverage advanced DNA testing technology to solve human remains cases that have long remained unresolved.”

David Mittelman, Othram’s CEO, said on Wednesday that the Ledyard Jane Doe case is one of many in Connecticut and elsewhere with which Othram has had success.

“We started a partnership with the OCME to resolve the identification of human remains that have remained unsolved in some cases for decades,“ he said.

Othram collaborates exclusively with law enforcement -- local, state and federal agencies -- who are working to identify human remains or suspects in crimes. Mittelman said the lab can use a DNA sample, something as small as a bone fragment, to build a DNA profile for a genealogical search.

Mittelman said often the DNA comes up a match to a distant relative -- a fourth or fifth cousin -- and investigators can use that information to work backwards through a family tree to find a match.

For more information visit: DNASolves.

How it’s done​

Claire Glynn, a professor in forensic science department at the University of New Haven, said the investigative method used to identify Childers is known as forensic investigative genetic genealogy (FIGG), a relatively new tool for law enforcement and forensic professionals. Glynn established the FIGG program at UNH in 2020 and helped train the investigator who worked on the Childers case.

The FIGG method involves taking DNA, sequencing the DNA in a different way then it has traditionally been done over the past 40 years. The data from the DNA sample is compared to other available data to find others who are genetically related. The amount of matching DNA will determine how closely related the match is. DNA data is currently pulled from those people who opt in to two genetic databases, GEDmatch and Family Tree.

FIGG gained attention in 2018 when Joseph DeAngelo, known as the Golden State Killer, was caught when investigators matched DNA pulled from crime scenes to members of his family.

DeAngelo is a serial killer and rapist who committed at least 13 murders and 51 rapes, along with dozens of burglaries across California over a 12-year period in the 1970s and 1980s.

“It’s great to see that law enforcement and forensic professionals are taking the time to learn how to do this method,” Glynn said. “People are recognizing the demand and need for this tool to be applied to cases across the country and the need to be trained on how to do it well.”

g.smith@theday.com