Nursing student was murdered while walking to a friend’s house. 40 years later, DNA leads police to suspected killer
A nursing student was kidnapped, sexually assaulted and murdered while walking to a friend’s house in 1980.
Now, 40 years later, genetic genealogy has finally led police to her suspected killer.
Susan Leigh Wolfe, a 25-year-old who had only recently enrolled as a nursing student at the University of Texas, was heading to a friend’s house in Austin, Texas, at around 10pm on the night of January 9 1980, according to police.
A witness told police they saw a car stop and a driver exit and grab Wolfe before forcing her into the back of his car, ABC News reported.
The next morning, Wolfe’s body was found in an alley.
Investigators found evidence of strangulation and determined her cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head.
Over the following year, police tracked down dozens of potential suspects who fit the description from the witness. Police eventually settled on six suspects, but were unable to bring charges against any of them.
Then in 2023, detectives submitted evidence from Wolfe’s sexual assault examination to the Texas Department of Public Crime Laboratory, where forensics experts were able to use DNA to build a profile for the suspect.
Police finally received the results in February and found that none of the six original suspects fit the DNA profile.
They then entered the DNA profile into the Combined DNA Index System, which collects local, state, and national DNA profiles from convicted offenders, unsolved crime scene evidence, and missing persons, according to police.
In March, it came back a match: to a man named Deck Brewer Jr.
Brewer, 78, was already in prison in Massachusetts on unrelated charges.
After talking to Brewer, investigators learned he had been in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, around the time that Wolfe was murdered.
When he was told that DNA had been found at the scene of the woman’s murder, he reportedly requested his attorney, police said.
He was charged with her murder.
