A double homicide that science unveiled 20 years later

A boy and his mother were murdered in North Carolina, United States, at the end of the last century. Having no way of identifying who the bodies of the victims belonged to, the investigators had to wait 20 years until technology allows them to unravel the mystery.

It all began on September 25, 1998 with the discovery of the body of Robert "Bobby" Adam Whitt, a boy of 10, in Mebane County. According to the statement issued by the sheriff: "A maintenance crew was mowing the lawn under a sign in the industrial unit near Interstate-85 when the tractor driver noticed a skull on the edge of the wood line and called the police . Here's how decomposition of human remains of the baby. "

The doctors determined that the death of the child was the result of a suffocation. From there, the detectives of the case began to make comparisons with the case file of lost children cases. However, none coincided with his features. The mystery would remain unsolved for 20 years and would be known as "boy under the billboard" (boy under the billboard).

In this period, a young woman called Natalie Mosteller he started looking for two relatives he had not seen for a long time: his little cousin nicknamed "Bobby"And the mother of the latter, Myoung Hwa Cho. "My sisters and I spent a lot of time looking for them on Facebook and Instagram,No result", Assured the 39-year-old woman.According to her story, the boy's father reportedly told his family that He and his mother had left the country to go to South Korea, the homeland of the latter.

Natalie gave more details about her research: "Over the years and without finding my cousin, the situation started to annoy me … I refused to think anything could have happened to her." J & # 39; hoped that in the worst case, his family would eventually put him against us. I did not want to believe that he was really dead. "

Over time, science has created new tools to shed light on what has happened. So the researchers asked him to Barbara Rae-Venter, a renowned geneticist consultant, who will cross the DNA traces found in the body of the victim with an open database containing profiles of several generations.

After a thorough badysis, Rae-Venter determined that the child's DNA found at the roadside belonged to a person first generation of Caucasian and Asian. It was thus that they met a relative of Natalie who had uploaded her data to the platform and with whom the victim had shared her DNA. The latter, whose name was not revealed, said that there was a similar case, adding that, according to the story of the father, the boy and his mother had disappeared in South Korea. At that time, the researchers realized that it was possible for them to be confronted with a double homicide. But if the body belonged to "Bobby",where was his mother?

After a search for unidentified corpses detectives discovered that on May 13, 1998, several months before the discovery of the boy's body, a group of women Asian had been found dead in Spartanbug County, South Carolina. The woman murdered by suffocation and had marks of attachment, had been thrown into the Interstate 85, 320 kilometers from the panel where they found the baby.

Finally, genetic comparisons between victims determined that They were mother and son: Myoung Hwa Cho and Robert Adam Whitt. Immediately, the police went in search of the murderer who, without he confessed both crimes.

"Bobby was a handsome boy, so kind, so kind. He loved his father. It's another thing that fades me on the subject: the fact that their relationship from father to son seemed so close and could happen in this way, "said Natalie, 20 years later, when she learned that had happened.