A Texas woman has been arrested by the Police for murder involving an elderly couple in the spring of 2005.
According to reports, the Texas woman is accused of being the author of this double murder.
An elderly couple was found dead in their home in the spring of 2005. According to the elements found at the crime scene, the attack was extremely violent, bloody and brutal. Nearly 20 years later, the police believe they have finally caught the killer. And more precisely the killer. Shelley Susan Thompson-Lemoine, a 41-year-old woman, was arrested this Friday, July 8, in Angleton, Texas.
In April 2005, Antonio Rodriguez, an 80-year-old World War II veteran, and his 77-year-old wife, Luz Rodriguez, were found beaten and strangled to death in their home in Cleveland, Texas.
According to information from the Montgomery County Police reporter , it was their daughter who discovered her parents’ bodies, lying inside their home. The young woman had come to prepare lunch for her parents that day and thought that her parents were sleeping. It was there that she found her father on the floor, and her mother in her room.
For years, the couple’s daughter hoped that the perpetrator of her parents’ murder would one day be found. “I knew it would come,” she told local TV station KTRK .
“I didn’t know it would last this long, but I knew this day would come.” She also thanks the police who allowed the arrest of the young woman: “They have not abandoned the case of my mother and my father. They worked hard”.
DNA helped solve this cold case
It is thanks to the DNA found in the house, in particular on a carpet and the side of a box of dentures, that the police believe to have got their hands on the author of this double murder. The case stagnated until 2021 when it surged forward. That year, the accused was imprisoned for a drug affair.
That’s how the investigators were able to take his fingerprints. By entering them into the FBI’s DNA index system, the police realized that they matched those found at the crime scene 17 years earlier. To confirm his identity, investigators took a mouth swab.
And in 2022, the result is clear: his DNA is the same as that found in the Rodriguez. “Sometimes such small pieces of evidence can solve a case and in this case that piece of carpet that was found inside the house that had a bloodstain on it,” the police department chief said. of Cleveland, Darrel Broussard .
For her part, the Texas woman, Shelley Susan Thompson-Lemoine denies being the author of this double homicide. “I never saw it. I don’t recognize his name or anything,” she said of one of the victims. While awaiting trial, the accused is being held in Liberty County Jail, according to local media outlet Bluebonnet News .