Cold case murder of Canadian teenager solved after 50 years as body of killer exhumed

Police say DNA tests prove that Sharron Prior was killed by Franklin Maywood Romine in 1975

Canadian police have solved a 48-year-old cold case of a teenager’s rape and murder using DNA evidence.

Investigators in Longueuil, Quebec says that the evidence allows them to be 100 per cent certain that Franklin Maywood Romine murdered teenager Sharron Prior in 1975.

Romine was born in Huntington, West Virginia, in 1946 and died in 1982 at the age of 36 in Verdun, Montreal, under mysterious circumstances.

Sharron Prior and Franklin Maywood Romine (Longueuil Police)

His body was exhumed from a West Virginia cemetery earlier this month and the DNA testing linked him to the murder. Police say that the DNA from Romine, who had a long criminal history, matched DNA found at the crime scene.

Prior disappeared on 29 March 1975 after leaving her home in Montreal’s Pointe-St-Charles neighbourhood to meet friends for pizza. Her body was found three days later in a wooded area of Montreal’s South Shore.

“The solving of Sharron’s case will never bring Sharron back. But knowing that her killer is no longer on this Earth and won’t kill anymore, brings us to somewhat of a closure,” Prior’s sister Doreen said, according to CTV News.

And her sister Moreen added: “You may never have come back to our house or Congregation Street that weekend but you have never left our hearts and you never will.”

Investigators had looked at more than 100 suspects over the decades, but Romine’s name did not come up until last year, reported WCHS-TV of West Virginia.

Picture of crime scene (Longueuil Police)

Police in Longueuil began combing through criminal records and found that Romine had a long history of violence and had moved regularly between West Virginia and Canada to evade the authorities.

Officials say that Romine first attempted to escape from the West Virginia Penitentiary in 1967, according to WCHS.

In 1974, he was arrested for breaking into a house and raping a woman in Parkersburg, West Virginia. When he was released on $2,500 bail several months later he fled to Canada.

Several months after Prior’s 1975 slaying, Romine was arrested by Canadian border officials and sent back to West Virginia where he was sentenced to five to 10 years in the Parkersburg case.

He died in 1982 shortly after his release from prison and his family buried him in the Pine Grove Cemetery in West Virginia’s Putnam County.

“It’s a combination of the most evil element in the human race, contacting the most innocent element in the human race – a child,” Putnam County Prosecutor Mark Sorsaia told WCHS.

“Some things are worse than death – losing a child like that, for a family, for a mom. To know that your child died that way.”