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Kelly Ann Prosser was abducted while walking home. DNA technology led to the discovery of the man who murdered her.

On September 20, 1982, in Columbus Ohio, eight-year-old Kelly Ann Prosser said goodbye to her teacher and classmates and began the fifteen block walk home. She took the same route every day. It was a busy road with local businesses and lots of people all around — an unlikely place for a child to be in danger.

Witnesses said they remembered seeing her walking down the busy East 16th Street, but she disappeared when crossing an intersection.

When Kelly Ann failed to return home at her usual time, her mother wasn’t immediately concerned. She thought that Kelly Ann went to a friend’s house or stayed at school late. However, after a few hours, she began calling around. First to the school and then friends. By six pm, her mother called 911 to report her daughter missing in a panic.

Police started their investigation around seven pm. Already hours behind, it was hard for them to catch up. Despite the massive search, they found it challenging to find leads. Witness accounts didn’t see her get abducted, though that was what police had felt had happened.

Two days into the search, Kelly-ann’s body was discovered, dumped in a cornfield. She had been beaten, assaulted, and strangled to death. DNA from the scene was collected and preserved. Leads eventually ran out, evidence led to dead ends, and the case went cold.

Kelly Ann’s family was left without answers for nearly four decades before being informed of a break in the case. Columbus investigators had begun working with a reverse engineering company called Advance DNA to identify suspects in cold cases.

Upon reopening up Kelly Ann’s case, they discovered distant relatives of a suspect. They tracked the DNA back to a man named Harold Warren Jarrell, a now-deceased man. He had never been a suspect in the case, even though he had only been out of jail for less than a year for harming an eight-year-old girl in the same area. At the time of Kelly Ann’s slaying, he was fifty-three.

Police used his living relatives to confirm that Jarrell had been the source of the DNA left on Kelly Ann. In a statement, police said that Jarrell had worked at a local radio station in the ’70s and early ’80s before moving to Las Vegas.

Jarrell passed in 1996; he only lived to be sixty-seven. Kelly Ann’s life was cut so short. In their statement to the media, her family said that they “don’t feel a sense of justice was served because justice is only a consolation prize.” However, they are grateful the killer is deceased as it spares them the torment of a painful trial.