Investigators working up a case use a very extensive and advanced DNA technology and the knowledge of a man being already behind bars in the state prison in order to solve a very cold case regarding a 2009 stabbing on the west side of Houston, Texas.\
Surprising Solve
A 50 year old man who goes by the name Jorge Trevino Cardenas, has been charged with murder in an undue connection with the stabbing death of Domatila Alvarez, a 38 year old woman. The law enforcement officers had found Alvarez inside the officer at her family’s auto repair shop in 4200 block of B street with numerous stab wounds.
She was pronounced dead at the scene itself and that’s when the officers started investigating the circumstances surrounding her mysterious death. They did find a few new leads which might have been directly or indirectly responsible for her demise. Investigators working with the department’s cold case squad had reopened the case back in 2021 as a part of a review project.
Quite substantially, Houston’s cold case investigators have been going around, sorting and filing through old cases in order to figure out and identity which one at all could be benefited from having a perpetual DNA sample testing.
Hope In Times Of Distress
Sargent Richard Rodriguez who is the cold case unit’s supervisor remarked all of this in a police press conference. New technology is undoubtedly more sensitive to smaller samples sizes and can at times even lead to major breakthroughs in most cases which weren’t moving forward or seeing the light of the day due to an inherent lack of evidence.
DNA Technology has since a long time, helped in digging back old unsolved crimes and solving them with a little bit of ease as compared to before when things weren’t solid. The case of Lavender Doe for example has seen massive success because of gene coordination and forming a family tree through genealogy. Departmental success stories like this vividly increases manifold, the hopes of the victims’ families and their closed ones. A scrunching 34% of cases every year are buried down as being cold cases for there’s no proper proof or scientifically backed evidence to make it move forward in the court of law. However, with the success and growth of genealogy, a variety of old cases have been now coming up front, even those as old as 2006.
After having quite a few discoveries in this case as such, investigators then went to visit Alvarez’s five children. None of those five apparently recognized Cardenas, as remarked by the Sargent. But a lot of family members of Cardenas also placed him near the actual scene of crime while they were having interviews individually with the investigators as told by Sargent Richard Rodriguez. Cardenas was already being captive in the state prison in Teague, on the east of Waco along Interstate 45, when the prosecutors brought the murder charge against him.
