ATLANTA (Michigan News Source) – The case of a Michigan teen murdered in Georgia in 1988 has been solved – and her killer identified – through the use of the genetic DNA method.

19-year-old Stacey Lyn Chahorski had been missing since September of 1988 when her mother had last heard from her. The Michigan teen had told her mom, Mary Beth Smith, that she was in North Carolina on the way to Flint, Michigan and then she would be coming home to Norton Shores in Muskegon County.

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Three months later, in Dade County, Georgia, about five miles from the Alabama state line, the body of a woman was found on December 16, 1988. She had been murdered and dropped off on the side of Interstate 59, but law enforcement was unable to identify her after she was discovered by two Department of Transportation employees.

She had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.

In the mid-2000’s Georgia investigators found additional evidence and sent it to the FBI lab for testing for a DNA profile but the results didn’t match anyone in the missing person’s database.

Later, the George Bureau of Investigation (GBI) decided to seek the FBI’s assistance to help with finding possible genealogy DNA matches and the FBI turned to Othram labs for their aid.

The remains of the Georgia murder victim were identified in late March of 2022 by Othram, a Texas-based company who uses DNA along with traditional genealogy to connect relatives to killers of cold case crimes by identifying them through their family tree.

Experts at Othram compared Chahorski’s DNA profile against the millions of samples of DNA that exist in databases from services like Ancestry and Gedmatch and they were able to create a family tree from the DNA which led them to her family in Norton Shores. A fingerprint match confirmed that the body was that of Chahorski.

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Once the identification of the body was made, Joe Montgomery, GBI Special Agent in Charge said “Today marks the day where we hunt for the killer now. The biggest problem is being able to solve this case is we have no identity of the victim so we had no starting point. Now we have a starting point and that’s a big jump for us.”

Moving forward with the same identification process, the killer was also able to be identified through genetic genealogy by Othram and that happened a few months later in June of 2022. Investigators had found what they thought to be the killer’s DNA at the crime scene but a match to the murderer hadn’t been found until recently.

On Tuesday, officials announced the killer’s DNA matched a deceased truck driver named Henry Fredrick “Hoss” Wise. He was 34-years-old at the time of the murder and was also a stunt driver. He was burned to death in a car accident at the Myrtle Beach Speedway in 1999.

He had a criminal history of assault, theft and obstruction of a police officer but his crimes in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina had predated mandatory DNA testing for felony crimes so his DNA was never entered into a database.

After getting results from Othram in June, the investigators in Georgia interviewed family members of Wise and collected DNA swabs which assisted in helping them link Wise to the murder of Chahorski. Those results were just released to the public on Tuesday.

Genetic genealogy technology became widely known when it was used to solve the cold case that identified the Golden State killer in May of 2018 and also through the television documentary “Genetic Detective“ featuring genealogist CeCe Moore who worked with Parabon NanoLabs, showing cases that were solved using genetic
genealogy.

Genetic genealogy has been proven to be invaluable in identifying missing persons and crime victims, criminals, helping adopted children find family members, and clearing innocent people of crimes they haven’t committed.

Chahorski was buried in Dade County in George as a Jane Doe in 1989 in an unmarked
grave but will be returned to her family along with some jewelry found with her.

Chahorski, had she lived, would have been 52-years-old this year.