Update Roy Allan Melanson
Colorado prison inmate Roy Allan Melanson might never stand trial for the murders that his DNA says he committed in Louisiana and California decades ago. He will die in a Bent County prison for a 1974 murder that took nearly 20 years to solve, but new evidence links him to at least two other cold cases that cast the former drifter as a serial killer.
Last week, DNA from semen on a victim’s sock connected Melanson, now 73, to the 1988 murder of a 24-year-old Louisiana woman. And last November, similar clues pointed to him in the 1974 killing of a former California beauty queen.
Solid proof of Melanson’s ties to other cold cases was missing until recently. His DNA had been added to a national databank after a federal law in 2000 compelled him to do so, and state crime labs across the country have been methodical in resubmitting their locally stored evidence. In California and Louisiana, that led them to Melanson.
His DNA placed him in Napa, Calif., on July 10, 1974, the night 51-year-old Anita Andrews was closing up her family’s lounge as a stranger lingered at the bar. The next morning, the body of the one-time county fair beauty queen was found sprawled on the floor. She has been raped, and her throat was slashed. Two months later, Melanson was in Crested Butte, and soon, Michele French was dead. In her case, it was a strand of hair on her scalp found five years later that finally gave authorities proof that she was dead and a solid reason to arrest Melanson. That arrest is what opened the possibility of solving the other cases across the country.
Read more here.
Categories: Help the Cops!, News: Cold Cases, Solved, Unsolved
Tags: Anita Elizabeth Andrews, California, Colorado, DNA, Louisiana, Michelle French, Napa Police, Police, Unsolved Homicide, Victim