At approximately 3 a.m. on March 17th, 1983, a Montgomery County Sheriff's deputy saw a fire burning in woods beside Interstate 45 near League Line Road.

Inside the flames was the body of an unidentified woman.

She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

Three years later, fingerprints finally gave investigators her name: Laura Marie Purchase.

By then, investigators believed they already knew who killed her.

Henry Lee Lucas had confessed—and was convicted.

But decades later, DNA proved Lucas hadn't done it.

Montgomery County detectives reopened the case, eventually turning to investigative genetic genealogy. In 2021, the evidence led them to 75-year-old Thomas Elvin Darnell in Kansas City, Kansas.

His DNA matched the unknown male profile recovered from Laura's body, according to  ...