“I want to hear it,” he said.
On Wednesday, about a week after informing Klaber, the sheriff’s office announced that it had solved a cold case that had thrust the Klaber family into a decadeslong tangle of mystery and frustration after Carol Sue Klaber was sexually assaulted and killed in Kentucky in 1976.
Her body was found on June 5 that year in Walton, Kentucky, about 95km north of Lexington. Investigators had scoured the grassy hills of Boone County, which borders the Ohio River, for clues.
Through DNA evidence, the sheriff’s office concluded that Thomas W. Dunaway, who was then 19, had killed the young woman.
At the time, Dunaway had been living in Park Hills, Kentucky, where Klaber, who played the violin and loved her acoustic guitar, was last seen getting into a car, possibly a grey Chevrolet or Pontiac Grand Prix, Cox said. It was possible that Dunaway and Carol Sue Klaber knew each other in the neighbourhood, he said.
Thomas Klaber, a retired bass trombonist for the Cleveland Orchestra, took a deep breath when he heard the news.
“When he exhaled, you could see, physically, his body just kind of settle into it,” Cox said.
Still, there was a lingering sense of anger for Klaber when he learned that Dunaway had died in 1990 at age 33.
That meant no formal charges. No trial. No chance to sit in a courtroom and look at the man responsible for his sister’s killing.
“I wish I had known in 1990. What do you say after all this time?” Klaber said, adding, “I had some rather un-Christian plans for him.”
While the answers brought some relief, he said he had a new thorny question to reckon with: What does justice mean now?
One former detective with the Boone County Sheriff’s Office, Jerry Keith, had obsessively tried to bring the investigation to a close years ago. He had a copy of the case report at his home.
“He literally carried this case with him his whole life,” Cox said.
Before his death in September 2017, Keith had developed theories that pointed to two possible assailants. That same year, the sheriff’s office established its cold case unit, staffed by Cox and Detective Tim Adams, and together they pursued Keith’s theories.
In the end, the killer was neither of the possible assailants Keith had considered, but Cox said he was grateful to the former detective because “in cases, a lot of times, you have to prove who didn’t do it to get to who did.”
The detectives sent DNA left by the killer on the victim to a lab to be tested through genetic genealogy, the process in which DNA samples are used to find relatives of suspects, which in this case was Dunaway. Detectives travelled to meet a child of Dunaway’s — who had never really known their father — to collect DNA.
“They were shocked,” Cox said of the child, who was not identified.
The detectives then learned more about Dunaway’s past: He had killed another person, Ron Townsend, in Northern Kentucky in December 1976 — just months after Carol Sue Klaber was killed — and served more than seven years in prison for that crime.
He had also enlisted in the US Army days after Klaber’s body was found. On Christmas Eve of that year, he had been arrested in South Carolina for burning a Chevrolet Impala and illegally possessing a sawed-off shotgun.
On March 1, Thomas Klaber sat in his chair, taking in all the investigative findings.
The case had traumatized his family, including his older brother, and he had long wondered why he hadn’t sought therapy after seeing what the killer had done to his sister.
He said that sight had left him with “a vague darkness somewhere down inside me.”
His son, Daniel Klaber, 28, said that when he was out late with friends, his father would frantically call several times and plead: “It’s been too long. Call me. Where are you?”
“Whenever someone was overdue, I would start not just worrying, but, you know, I was expecting this to happen again,” the senior Klaber said.
This month, as he processed the news, he realised that one small detail gave him comfort.
All his life, he had worried about investigators potentially exhuming his sister to collect DNA. Cox told him that, in the end, it was Dunaway’s body that had been exhumed for that reason.
“There’s a little bit of justice,” Klaber said. “You’re going to disturb somebody’s remains? Dig him up.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Eduardo Medina
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
