D.C. police and the FBI are banking on advances in forensic technology to solve a homicide that’s more than 30 years old.
Two weeks before Christmas in 1974, Eileen Kelly disappeared after leaving the Department of Justice, where she’d just gotten a job as a secretary in the economic litigation section. She was supposed to get on a bus to Hyattsville to meet her father to sign loan papers for an AMC Gremlin she wanted to buy. She never showed up.
On Dec. 22, 1974, her partially clad body was found in an alley behind 42 R St. NW. She had been raped and strangled, and a section of her panty hose had been wrapped around her neck.
She was 18 years old. Today would have been her 50th birthday.
The case has lingered unsolved for decades, but authorities have found new hope in old samples of possible semen recovered during Kelly’s autopsy. The samples may yet yield DNA evidence and lead to a break in the case, D.C. police detective Jim Trainum said Thursday. Officials want to develop a DNA profile of the killer that could be compared to that of suspects.
“We’re spending a lot of energy refocusing on this investigation,” Trainum said.
There was no DNA testing when Kelly died. But today forensic scientistscan often extract a workable sample from a single cell left at a scene.
“We’re very hopeful,” Trainum said.
FBI special agent Bradley Garrett has also been assigned to the case.
“These crimes are psychologically driven,” Garrett said. “It’s driven by the sexual fantasy of the offender.”
Given that, it’s likely that whoever killed Kelly has raped — and perhaps killed — other women, so authorities are poring over reports of other unsolved rapes, homicides and disappearances that are similar to Kelly’s slaying, Garrett said.
Garrett said that authorities have learned a great deal about the workings of sexual predators since Kelly’s death and they hope that new interviews with key witnesses will turn up long-buried clues.
“Sometimes people will be more forthcoming when you approach them later,” he said.
Asked whether authorities have any suspects, Garrett would only say, “There are people that we’re pursuing.”
Kelly was a bright, pretty girl who wore bracelets for American prisoners of war in Vietnam and was active in St. Jerome’s church in Hyattsville. Hers was one of 295 killings in the District that year, then a record.
As time passed, the case faded from public memory so that her only public legacy is the white box of file folders and tapes in Trainum’s office.
But news that the investigation is warming up again was welcomed by her family.
“This is a door that’s been opened,” said Patrick Kelly, Eileen’s younger brother.
Now a deputy sheriff in Garrett County, Maryland, Patrick Kelly was 10 when Eileen was killed. He was playing at a friend’s house when his older brother came to tell him that authorities had found her body.
“I thought he meant they found her alive. So I got excited,” Patrick Kelly said. “He threw down his cigarette and goes, ‘She’s dead, you idiot,’ and he kind of walked away.”
Patrick Kelly said he still has the purple Matchbox sports car that Eileen bought him for Christmas that year.
He has also become the guardian of Eileen’s journals. Many of the entries detail her crushes or carry various poems, notes on friends and current events.
In one of her last entries, she clipped an article from a local newspaper about a double shooting in Beltsville that involved a friend. Under it she wrote, “Why does it have to happen to one of the nicest people in the world?!”
