17 October 2023 , 21:51
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A cold case from 1986 has been solved, but it is too late to arrest the suspect, local authorities said.
Nurse Teresa Lee Scalf, 29, was stabbed by an unknown assailant in her home on October 27, 1986. She was killed just 18 months after her brother died aged 23 in a diving accident.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said the suspect is her now-deceased neighbour Donald Douglas, who was 33 at the time of the woman's death. He wasn't suspected for the crime at the time of the killing because he "had the right answer" when he was questioned.
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DNA evidence led to the suspect (Polk County Sheriff’s Office)
Donald Douglas (Polk County Sheriff’s Office)Detectives then said Douglas had no obvious injuries and it wasn't until a review of DNA pointed towards him and a "sexual rejection" being his motive for the crime. Police think he held an unknown desire for Teresa, before he acted on it in a brutal way.
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“Teresa had told us about some creepy neighbor that had showed up at her house with what looked like he had yanked a flower out of the ground and slapped it into a pot, and he was sort of stalkerish,” her sister Lynn Scalf said Monday. “She had told us about him, but she never described him.”
Douglas' DNA turned up no hits when it was added to a database in the 2000s, Law and Crime reported. Last year, detectives teamed up with the genetic genealogy database Othram.
A DNA sample was provided by Douglas' "mortified" son because his father died at the age of 54 in 2008.
Teresa's mum Betty Scalf, 84, believes she has lived to her age because she wanted to see justice for her daughter. "All I want to say is, I’m 84 years old," she said. "I lived to see this done. I think that’s why I lived so long."
“We don’t have closure for grief,” her sister Lynn Scalf said in a press conference on Monday. “There will never be closure when you have something this violent against a decent human being. It’s not human. It’s not humane. So for that, we will have no closure, but we have closure of questioning constantly because when it’s a deliberate act, you question everybody — her best friend, her ex-boyfriend, the cousins, anyone she’s run into in the last five years.”
Sister Pam Shade said: "The first thing that I would like to say is Teresa was a wonderful person, the most loving person. She didn’t deserve this. Our family didn’t deserve this."
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