Indiana Police May Have Solved Near 50-Year-Old Indiana State University Murder

Authorities in Indiana may have finally found a suspect in a nearly 50-year-old murder case.

Pamela Milam was a 19-year-old student at Indiana State University when she disappeared the night of Sept. 15, 1972. She had disappeared after leaving a sorority event held in Terre Haute, a city 80 miles outside Indianapolis. Milam’s body was found bound and gagged in the trunk of her car the next day.

Police had two suspects but were unable to prove either as there were no witnesses or description of a suspect.

First was Robert Wayne Austin, who was arrested a few weeks after Milam’s body was found. Austin had committed a series of sexual assaults on University grounds but police couldn’t find a link to Milam.

The other suspect police looked at was Jeffrey Lynn Hand. Hand was considered violent and had a history that included abduction and murder. He was arrested in 1973 for the murder of a hitchhiker but was found not guilty on grounds of insanity.

However, it was never proven as Hand was killed during an attempted abduction.

Terre Haute Police Chief Shawn Keen spoke about it during a press conference on Monday. He said Hand “tried to abduct another female as she was getting into her car at a mall parking lot," but there was an off-duty sheriff’s deputy present.

"A pursuit ensues, he shoots the sheriff's deputy twice, and a city officer there shoot and kills him," Keen said.

Keen, whose team had been working on the case since 2008, decided to run a “reverse paternity” test on DNA from Hand’s children to compare against the original DNA from Milam’s murder scene. The test came back with 99.9 percent probability that the DNA was a match.

This new finding, according to Keen, would have been enough for prosecutors to charge Hand with Milam’s murder.