Corps found in two states several decades ago linked as mother and son

Feb. 5, 2019, 20:54 GMT

In Associated Press

Decades after the discovery of the unidentified bodies of a woman and a 10-year-old boy in separate states, investigators now say that they were a mother and son and that the boy's father confessed to having killed them.

The case was cracked through an online DNA database, with the help of the international police and a consultant whose work led to an arrest in the investigation into the Golden State Killer. The authorities of North Carolina and South Carolina said Tuesday.

But investigators from both states said they had never stopped trying to resolve the 1998 unrelated cases, separated by 215 miles along Interstate 85.

"J & I always kept the document box under my desk, where it deliberately embarrassed.Every time I turned, I hit it in the leg.I did it so that the little boy could not be forgotten, "said Orange County, North. Carolina, Sheriff Major Tim Horne, who works

Authorities in North Carolina have even called in experts to create a drawing and a bust reconstructing the appearance of the child. But despite extensive dissemination, no one was able to identify it.

Investigators did not know that cases were related until December 2018, when consultant Barbara Rae-Venter reviewed the latest DNA tests performed on the boy's body in Orange County. Sheriff Charles Blackwood said in a statement. Rae-Venter's work with online DNA databases had already led to the arrest of a man charged with 26 counts of murder and kidnapping in California in the United States. 1970s and 1980s.

The boy's remains were found in September 1998 by workers mowing grass on a frontage road near I-85 in Durham, North Carolina, Blackwood said. The DNA tests revealed that he had Asian and Caucasian parents.

Rae-Venter compared the child's DNA to the DNA of a close relative who had submitted the information to an online database. After contacting the parent, the investigators learned that the boy was Robert "Bobby" Adam Whitt, born in Michigan and raised in Ohio, Blackwood said. He also said that they had received strong evidence that his mother – who had disappeared the same year as her son – was also dead.

Meanwhile, MPs in South Carolina had found an unidentified woman whose naked body had been thrown into the woods near I-85 in May 1998, said Lt. Kevin Bobo of the Spartanburg County Sheriff . Her hands were tied and she was suffocated.

After the DNA tests confirmed that the victims were a mother and son, US investigators asked the Korean authorities and the international police to identify this woman, Myoung Hwa Cho.

Cho's husband, the boy's father, is currently incarcerated in a federal prison under unrelated indictment charges. After being interrogated several times, he confessed to the murder of his wife and son, said Bobo.

The authorities do not reveal his name because he has not yet been charged. The charges may not be filed until investigators know exactly where the two victims were killed, Bobo said. Investigators believe that the woman and her son were killed elsewhere and thrown next to the highway.