Fingerprint on wooden coffee table helps solve cold case 27 years later, NY cops say
A fingerprint from a wooden coffee table helped identify a suspect 27 years after an 81-year-old woman was killed in her apartment, New York police said.
Wilomeana “Violet” Filkins was killed on Aug. 17, 1994, in East Greenbush, the city police department said during a Thursday, Jan. 19, news conference.
Police said they identified Jeremiah James Guyette as the suspect in Filkens’ death in 2021 through DNA testing.
In 1994, Filkins’ brother and niece found her dead two days after she was killed, police said.
Investigators followed roughly 2,000 leads after her death, but they never identified a suspect.
Then in 2019, investigators got a tip from Guyette’s ex-girlfriend that led the case forward, police said.
She told detectives that in 2009 he started crying and said “that poor old woman, I robbed her, I hit her, and I just left her there.”
When investigators showed up at Guyette’s home on Oct. 1, 2019, to ask questions, he became “defensive, visibly upset and stated he would not speak to us without an attorney.”
The next day he died from suicide, police said.
Before his death, he called a family member and told them he didn’t want to go to prison after he had robbed a person and stole their car when he was younger, police said. He also said someone had died, police said.
Investigators collected DNA from Guyette and resubmitted it as evidence in the case, which included an unidentified fingerprint that was found on a wooden corner piece of the coffee table at the crime scene in 1994, police said.
In January 2021, investigators with New York State Police tested the fingerprints, and they were a match, police said.
Guyette was 18 at the time of the woman’s death and was a senior in high school, police said.
Shortly after Filkins’ death, he moved away before going into the U.S. Air Force in Florida.
This story was originally published January 20, 2023 at 5:35 PM with the headline "Fingerprint on wooden coffee table helps solve cold case 27 years later, NY cops say."
