Breakthrough in Decades-Old Cold Case: Identifying Lisa Coburn Kesler’s Killer

A Three-Decade Mystery Solved

In a remarkable breakthrough, North Carolina investigators have cracked a chilling cold case, using DNA and forensic genealogy to identify a young woman who was strangled to death and abandoned alongside a freeway over thirty years ago.

Lisa Coburn Kesler, a 20-year-old hailing from Jacksonville, Georgia, met a tragic end when her lifeless body was discovered on the side of I-40 East near the New Hope Church Road exit in September 1990. The case left authorities baffled, despite their relentless pursuit of hundreds of leads that led to nothing.

The Quest for Answers

Over the years, determined investigators took a creative approach. They employed forensic facial reconstruction techniques to craft a bust of the victim and generated a digital illustration of her face, which was shared on social media by the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.

During that time, DNA technology was in its infancy and wasn’t readily available to assist in cracking the case. Sheriff Charles Blackwood remarked, “Throughout the decades, some of our finest investigators kept plugging away. When you can’t close a case, it gets under your skin. You set the file aside for a while, but you keep coming back to it.”

A Ray of Hope

The turning point occurred in June 2020 when Investigator Dylan Hendricks took the reins of the case. He sent a degraded hair fragment to Astrea Forensics for DNA extraction. The lab successfully generated a profile of the victim.

Forensic genealogist Leslie Kaufman was then brought in to employ genealogy databases such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA in an attempt to identify family members. A hit on paternal cousins paved the way to mapping out a family tree, and investigators began interviewing relatives. Lisa Coburn Kesler’s name swiftly surfaced as a relative who had vanished three decades prior.

Hendricks explained, “Essentially, there was a Lisa-shaped hole on a branch of the family tree right where the DNA told us Lisa should be, and no one knew where she was.”

A Conclusion to the Mystery

A maternal relative provided a DNA sample, confirming Kesler’s identity. The chief medical examiner has officially added her name to her death certificate. With her identity confirmed, investigators can now shift their focus towards solving her murder.

Sheriff Charles Blackwood stated, “I believe we collectively demonstrated the value of dogged determination, which we will now apply to the task of identifying her killer.”

The Call for Information

Anyone with information related to this case is urged to contact the Orange County Sheriff’s Office at 919-245-2951 or submit an anonymous tip at www.ocsonc.com.