A cold case. A DNA hit. And finally justice. Or was it? – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Claire Hough was nearing her 15th birthday when she traveled from Rhode Island to San Diego to visit her grandparents. She never got to blow out any candles. Somebody killed her first.

Her murder in August of 1984 became one of the countys most troubling unsolved homicides, brutal in its details and frightening in its location: scenic Torrey Pines State Beach, visited by thousands of people annually.

As the years went by, San Diego police cold-case detectives revisited the slaying from time to time, looking through the files for missed clues and asking criminalists if there was some new way to extract DNA from the evidence.

It turned out there was.

What happened next is the stuff of Hollywood movies, mystery novels and true-crime podcasts at long last an answer to the question of what happened to Claire Hough. A triumph, it seemed, of tenacity and technology.

But the DNA results became more complicated than that, and more tragic.

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A cold case. A DNA hit. And finally justice. Or was it? - The San Diego Union-Tribune