He said that his wife and son had returned to South Korea, but after 20 years, the truth was known.

A strange reflection of the sun under a billboard on Interstate 85-40 in Mebane, North Carolina, caused a nasty surprise: the corpse of a child whose bones were already exposed to rot had been abandoned there by your killer The experts determined that he had been strangled, but science could not distinguish his identity at the time.

"On September 25, 1998, a maintenance crew was mowing the lawn under a sign in the industrial unit near I-85 when the tractor driver noticed a skull at the edge of the line of wood, which who caused appeal to the authorities The Orange County Sheriff's Office responded and discovered decomposed human remains, which were subsequently judged to be those of a young child, "reads in the statement from the county sheriff's office.

The comparisons made by the investigators of the file with the file of photos of cases of children lost in the region did not coincide with the characteristics of this small abandoned village, under the huge advertising sign of this highway.

This did not correspond to the national database either. Boy under the billboard (Child under the billboard). This is how the case has been known for 20 years.

The record containing the details of the homicide remained in sight in the office of Major Tim Horne, sheriff of Orange County, who never wanted to leave the case.

During all these years, while the police were trying to find out who the child was found around Interstate 80-45 in North Carolina, another person was doing a parent's Internet search. close who had stopped seeing a long time ago. She had been informed that she had moved with her mother to South Korea, where she was from.

It was logical, but after so many years, it was impossible that there was no trace of Robert Bobby Adam Whitt on the Internet where his cousin Natalie Mosteller had been looking for him for a long time, as well as his mother, Myoung Hwa Cho.

"My sisters and I spent a lot of time looking for it on Facebook and Instagram, things like that, with no results," said the 39-year-old at WCPO.

Bobby was 10 when his father told his family that the boy and Cho had left to return to the woman's home country.

For 20 years, the story had a certain logic for the family, but with doubts. How could it be that there is no trace of it?

"Once the years pbaded and I could not find it, there was a nuisance in my head … something may have happened to it, but it's not. not a thing you want to believe in. I hoped that in the worst case His family had just cast him against us and he did not want to believe that he was really dead, "Natalie told News & Observer.

But thanks to a new method, Horne has been able to solve the crime of the child under the display panel. The technique used was the same as that used to find James DeAngelo, the famous killer of Golden State. That is, the DNA traces found in the victim's body were crossed with an open database that shows the profiles of several generations. Something like a family tree with genetic information.

They did it through the work of Barbara Rae-Venter, a geneticist consultant who helped find DeAngelo. Horne thought that it could be used to name the murdered child and try to veil the veil of mystery surrounding the case.

Rae-Venter badyzed the genetic material of the boy's body found at the side of the road and determined that it was a person whose composition indicated that he was in danger. was the first generation of Caucasians and Asians. They found a member of the Mosteller family who had downloaded their genetic data to the base and with whom the victim had shared his DNA.

The case was known for 20 years as "a child under the billboard". Thanks to a new DNA tracing technique, the killer could have been identified.

On December 26, this family member – whose name was not revealed – responded to Rae-Venter's call. He said that there was a similar case in his family and that the child and mother had disappeared – according to the father's story – to South Korea, where they were supposed to have returned.

But when he thought of facing the resolution of the case, Horne and his team realized that it may not have been a crime, but a double homicide. Everything was complicated. If the body belonged to Bobby, then … where was his mother?

Horne started looking for unidentified women's bodies that coincided with Cho, the boy's mother. Finally found a clue: on May 13, 1998, several months before the discovery of the child, the body of an Asian had been found in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. She had been killed by asphyxiation and wore ties of attachment. He had also been cast on Interstate 85 but 320 kilometers from the billboard where they dropped Bobby.

Genetic comparisons between the two victims revealed that they were both mother and son: Myoung Hwa Cho and Robert Adam Whitt.

Enclosed and having nothing to refute, the father and the husband confessed to the two murders to prosecutors, who still have not revealed the identity of the double murderer. According to the sheriff's office, we only know that in 1999, he had been convicted of badault with a weapon and that he was in jail.

"Bob was a handsome child, so nice, so kind, he loved his dad … It's another thing that stuns me: how close his father-son relationship seemed to be and could do such a thing. "Natalie concluded knowing the terrible truth.