Almost half a century later, the brutal murder of a 16-year-old Montreal teenager who was kidnapped, raped and beaten to death was solved.
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Police confirmed early Tuesday afternoon that young Sharron Prior’s killer was Franklin Romine, an American who died in unclear circumstances a few years after the teenager’s murder.
Sharron Prior was kidnapped on March 29, 1975 in the Pointe-Saint-Charles neighborhood of Montreal. She was raped and beaten to death. His lifeless body was found four days later on a vacant lot in Longueuil.
Scientific advances in genetic genealogy have allowed police to link DNA from evidence found at the crime scene to that of an American family living in West Virginia.
“Then investigators discovered that a member of this family was living in Montreal at the time of the murder and had died in Verdun hospital in 1982,” Longueuil police said in a press release.
Armed with an arrest warrant, Longueuil investigators traveled to the United States on May 2 to exhume the body of suspected assassin Franklin Romine.
Courtesy of SPAL
“The results of the biological examination confirmed 100% that Franklin Romine, born April 2, 1946, was indeed the killer that police had been trying to identify for nearly five decades,” police said.
Franklin Romine had a very heavy criminal record, both in the United States and in Quebec. In particular, he had been convicted on American soil for beating and raping a woman in Parkersburg, West Virginia.
Romine suffered a “violent death” in 1982, with no details released. He was 36 years old.