After 44 years

US cops found murderer thanks to cigarette butts

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Van Buren County Sheriffs Office)

The body of Dorothy Silzel was found in her apartment in Washington state in February 1980. According to the coroner, the 30-year-old had been raped and then strangled. The investigation into the perpetrator came to nothing. Until 44 years later, when a discarded cigarette butt finally led to the arrest of the suspected killer.

According to the Seattle Times, Silzel had worked for Boeing and lived alone. Investigators did find the killer's sperm, but DNA analysis methods were not advanced enough at the time to determine his identity. The unsolved case was forgotten until a "cold case" team from the Kent Police Department reopened the case in September 2022.

The cops fed the saved genetic samples into various criminal and sex offender databases. There were eleven matches - because all potential perpetrators were first cousins and all had previous convictions for various offenses.

A picture of the murder victim Dorothy Silzel

(Bild: Familie von Dorothy Silzel )

The investigators' inquiries revealed that only Kenneth Kundert could have been responsible for the crime. He was 20 at the time and had lived with a relative in Kent - just 50 meters from Silzel's apartment. The cops' theory: Kundert could have seen Silzel in a pizza delivery store where the woman occasionally helped out. They tracked down the now 65-year-old in the state of Arkansas.

Cops fished cigarette butts out of trash cans
The cops from Washington flew to the southern state and got on Kundert's trail. They observed him smoking a cigarette in a supermarket parking lot and then throwing it into a garbage can. The officers fished out the stub. The DNA from Kundert's saliva matched the killer's sperm sample.

Kundert was arrested on August 20 in the small town of Clinton, Arkansas, and is awaiting extradition to Kent. There he is to be tried for murder and rape.