Weird & Strange

In 1980, 19-year-old Barbara Tucker was assaulted and murdered in Gresham, near Portland, USA. For forty years, there was no trace of the perpetrator. But recently, the murderer was found, thanks to the discovery of a spit-out piece of chewing gum.

Robert Plympton, now 60, is now safely behind bars. This summer, a judge in the American state of Oregon found him guilty of the murder of Barbara Tucker. He risks life imprisonment, but because he was only 16 at the time of events, he could be released early after serving a 30-year prison sentence.

Frustrating cold case
On the year of her murder, 19-year-old Barbara failed to show up for business administration class and was found dead near a parking lot on campus. She had been kidnapped, assaulted and beaten to death.

For all those years, the search for the perpetrator remained unfruitful. The American media called it a real 'cold case'. But a smear taken during the autopsy made it possible to take a step forward in the investigation many years later. In 2000, the police used new techniques to create a DNA profile of the perpetrator, based on that smear. However, no match was found in the DNA databases. The breakthrough did not come until twenty years later, in 2021, when investigators had the DNA profile analyzed by Parabon NanoLabs, a Virginia-based technology company that specializes in DNA. They saw a high probability that the perpetrator had red hair.

Red-haired man and family line who fought in the army
After hours of digging through family trees and looking up conscripts who had served in World War II, the investigators came across Robert Plympton: a now bald man with red hair.

Bingo!
The police followed the man and when investigators saw him spit out a piece of chewing gum during a bike ride, they picked it up. His DNA matched the DNA traces of the victim's swab. He was arrested on June 8, 2021. He is now appearing in court and will soon receive his sentence for the murder of the 19-year-old student in 1980.

Robert Plympton denies the facts, but was found guilty. Incidentally, he already had a criminal record before the trial. He was convicted of "second-degree kidnapping" in 1985 in Multnomah County.

(MH with FVDV for Tagtik/Source: Daily Mail - NBC/Picture by Gaspar Zaldo for Pexels)