FAMILY TREE FOUND

Hallmark Shopkeeper’s 1987 Murder Solved With New DNA Method

Police in Boise, Idaho, say the man who sexually assaulted and killed Joyce Casper died in 2007.

Idaho police say they have used genetic genealogy to crack the murder of a Hallmark store owner who was abducted as she left work in 1987 and found sexually assaulted and murdered a short distance away. Boise cops announced Friday that DNA showed a man named Frank Rodriguez, who died in 2007, killed 65-year-old Joyce Casper. A private lab contracted in 2017 was able to use DNA from the crime scene to provide a rough description of the assailant. Two years later, another lab re-examined the genetic material and was able to narrow it to a specific family tree; relatives gave DNA swabs that confirmed Rodriguez was the culprit, police said.