[Batpuff]

POLICE HOPE FOR DNA EVIDENCE IN FAMOUS UNSOLVED CASE

By Jim Warren

HERALD-LEADER STAFF WRITER

[Image: http://www.kentucky.com/images/kentucky/...650095.jpg]

Betty Gail Brown was 19 when she was found strangled on the Transy campus.
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Lexington police are hoping to recover DNA evidence that might shed new light on a 45-year-old murder case.

Sgt. Paul Williams said yesterday that police are awaiting results from tests on some items from the October 1961 murder of Transylvania University sophomore Betty Gail Brown. The hope is that some DNA still might be present that could offer new leads in the case, he said.

Williams, who is with the homicide unit, declined to say whether police have identified someone whose DNA they would like to compare.

"That, I'm not ready to comment on yet," he said. "We don't know at this time if they'll even find anything."

The Brown case is one of several old, unsolved cases that Lexington police are revisiting, using funds from a $112,500 state grant they received last year to pursue cold cases. Williams noted that officers recently also conducted some new reviews into the unsolved 1977 disappearance of Melanie Flynn, but produced no results.

They are hoping for better luck in the case of Betty Gail Brown, 19, whose body was found in her own car in the driveway of Transylvania's Old Morrison early in the morning of Oct. 27, 1961. According to police reports at the time, Brown was strangled with her own bra, about an hour after leaving Transy's Forrer Hall where she had been studying for a biology exam.

Police followed numerous leads, interviewed some of Brown's former boyfriends, questioned a married man she mentioned in her diary and even gave lie-detector tests to some members of the male student body at Transy. But nothing resulted.

Four years later, a drifter and former horse groom named Alex Arnold confessed to the crime. But when the case went to trial in October 1965, the jury could not reach a verdict. Arnold was never retried, and Brown's death became one of Lexington's most famous unsolved murders.

Williams initially described officers' new interest in the case yesterday morning in response to a caller's question while being interviewed on Jack Pattie's radio program on WVLK-590 AM.

The hope, he said later, is that some "touch DNA" still might be present on clothing or other items from the Brown case. Touch DNA refers to skin cells sometimes left behind on items an individual touches. Williams noted that in another case police were able to find touch DNA on an item that had been used to strangle a victim.

"There are a lot of possibilities that could result if there is reliable, testable DNA," he said.

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[BurntTires]

hope everything turns out for the good.