The suspect, Franklin Romin, is an American from West Virginia who was living in Montreal at the time of the incident.
Posted on – Wed, 5/24/23 at 02:46pm
Ottawa: Investigators have confirmed that the 1975 rape and murder of teenagers in Montreal, Canada, was finally solved after authorities exhumed the suspect’s body and conducted DNA testing.
Sharron Prior, 16, went missing after meeting friends at a pizzeria near her home in the Pointe-St-Charles neighborhood of the city, CBC News reported.
Her body was found three days later in a wooded area in Longueuil, on Montreal’s South Shore.
The suspect, Franklin Romin, is an American from West Virginia who was living in Montreal at the time of the incident.
He has a long criminal record and encounters with law enforcement in Montreal and West Virginia, including at least one rape conviction, but was not initially a suspect in Pryor’s death.
He died in 1982 at the age of 36.
Romine matched the suspect’s description and his car matched tire tracks found at the scene where Prior’s body was found.
Despite investigating more than 100 suspects over the years, police have never arrested anyone.
In 1975, the amount of DNA collected at the scene was insufficient for testing or use in court, but it was kept for years in the hope that as technology improved it could one day be used to find a match for a suspect.
The samples were sent to a lab in West Virginia in 2019 and were subsequently matched with Romin’s relatives using data from genealogy websites, Sky News reported. Earlier this month, police exhumed Romin’s body from a West Virginia cemetery and found a DNA match.
Extracting a complete genetic profile from Romine’s skeleton was a daunting task, Sarah Bourgoin, director of the biology and DNA division at Quebec’s National Forensic Laboratory, said Tuesday.
“Happily, it worked here. We were able to establish a genetic profile by comparing it to the unknown profile in Sharron Prior’s case.
We noticed it was the same, which confirmed that it was indeed Franklin Romin who left his DNA at the scene,” Bourgoin was quoted as saying by CBC News.
At a news conference Tuesday, Prior’s sisters Doreen and Maureen said Sharon was a kind, warm-hearted little girl who dreamed of becoming a veterinarian.
“She was a beautiful young lady with a heart of gold,” Doreen said.
