An unidentified body found in Dade County nearly 34 years ago turned out to be missing Michigan teenager Stacey Lyn Chahorski, Georgia law enforcement officials announced Thursday.
Authorities credited decades of persistence, coordination among multiple law enforcement agencies and a new type of genealogy investigation for the break in this case.
“This is the fourth cold case that agents have either brought a killer to justice and/or brought the victim home that’s been identified to their families,” said Joe Montgomery, Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent in charge, at a Thursday news conference. “Today marks the day where we hunt for the killer now.”
The solved cold cases were from the past four years of investigations out of GBI’s Calhoun office, which covers 12 counties in Northwest Georgia, Montgomery said in a follow-up phone interview.
Chahorski last talked to her mother Sept. 15, 1988, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a database on missing persons. Montgomery said no one knows why she was in Georgia, but investigators think she was traveling from either Knoxville or Charlotte, North Carolina, by bus or hitchhiking.