Cigarette butt helps Washington police hunt 1980 murder suspect across country: ‘I was hooked in this case’
An Arkansas man has been arrested and charged with a decades-old rape and murder of a young woman in Washington after DNA from his cigarette linked him to the victim.
"I was just so relieved," Kent Police Det. Sgt. Tim Ford, the lead investigator on the case, told Fox News Digital.
Kent detectives and Van Buren County Sheriff's deputies arrested Kenneth Duane Kundert, 65, Aug. 20 at his home near Clinton, Arkansas. He has been charged with first-degree murder.
The arrest brings to a close almost 45 years of searching for a suspect.
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On the night of Feb. 23, 1980, 30-year-old Dorothy "Dottie" Marie Silzel was last seen after her shift at the local pizza restaurant in Washington, according to police charging documents.
Three days later, after Silzel's friends and family grew concerned, officers went to her condo, where they found her partially nude body. Her death was ruled a homicide due to suffocation, and police determined she had been sexually assaulted.
The case went cold until 2015, when Silzel's brother called Sgt. Ford, who worked as a supervisor in the Kent Police Major Crimes Unit at the time.
"Once I got off the phone with him and listened to his story, and I knew it was a really old case … I just began reading it, and I got everything I could find," Ford, who has been with the Kent Police Department 28 years, told Fox News Digital. "Instantly, I was hooked in this case … and I couldn't even tell you why. I just wanted to work and solve that thing."
Ford has spent the last nine years trying to solve the case. As his position at the police department changed over the years and he worked on other assignments, he said he literally carried the case box with him from place to place.
"I was going to retire in March of this year, 2024, but I didn't want to retire until it was solved," he said.
In February 1980, Silzel was an instructor for Boeing who worked part time at Gaetano's Pizza restaurant and volunteered with the Special Olympics.
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"Part of the problem with the case was … she knew so many people," Ford said. "So, you can't rule anybody out. So, trying to figure out how I'm going to narrow down the suspect pool was pretty daunting."
Yet, he never gave up on the case, crediting the detectives who worked on it before him.
"The toughest ones to solve are the crimes of opportunities and … the random crimes because most murder victims, they know their killer at some point. They have some sort of a connection," Ford said. "And so the detectives back in 1980, they did the best they could with the information they had and the technology they had."
As DNA technology advanced over the years, a male DNA profile, labeled as "Individual A," was obtained from samples from Silzel's body, according to charges.
This profile was entered into the Combined DNA Index System ("CODIS"), a searchable computer program that manages local, state and national databases and contains DNA profiles from convicted offenders, arrested individuals and crime scene evidence.
Ford and his team reached out to Identifinders International, a forensic genealogy company in California. In March 2022, senior forensic genealogist Misty Gillis performed genealogy comparisons of the DNA profile from "Individual A." She identified 11 potential suspects, who are all related as first cousins.
"We're fortunate today that technology has advanced so much that, you know, scientists … can put the other pieces together that we normal people can't see," Ford said.
He and other investigators began researching and collecting covert DNA samples from the identified group of potential suspects, but none of the samples matched the profile of "Individual A."
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In September 2023, detectives began researching two of the 11 potential suspects — brothers Kenneth Kundert and Kurt Kundert, who lived in Arkansas. Ford then coordinated with the Van Buren County Sheriff's Office to assist with the investigation. When Kurt Kundert's DNA was not a match, he was excluded as a suspect, and authorities then focused their attention on Kenneth.
"We were able to locate our target … and do surveillance on him and watch as he smoked a cigarette in a Walmart parking lot and then ultimately extinguish it and drop it in the cigarette butt receptacle that's outside the door," Ford said. "And we just collected all the cigarette butts in there … we end up sending off three of them up to the lab, and one of them was a match."
Investigators also discovered that Kenneth Kundert's brother potentially lived in an apartment complex just 1,200 feet away from where Silzel lived and was found dead.
On Aug. 20, police arrested Kundert for the murder of Silzel. He is being held at Van Buren correctional center on $3,000,000 bail, awaiting extradition to Washington state. Kundert has a history of convictions and arrests for misdemeanor offenses in four states.
It was not immediately clear if Kundert had retained an attorney.
Ford said Kundert's arrest was "surreal," adding, "The first thing I did was text the family. … I'm glad we were able to get some sort of closure for them."
"Hopefully, we can convict this guy of doing what he did. He's a monster," Silzel's niece, Leanne Milligan, told Fox13.
"To killers who think they got away with it, they should be nervous about every knock on the door because it doesn't matter how many years it's been, that knock is coming," Casey McNerthney with the King County Prosecutor's Office told Fox13.
Ford credited his colleagues with helping him on the case, saying "it was a team effort," while Silzel's sister-in-law, Carol Yantzer, told Fox13, "Tim has definitely elevated the Kent Police Department very high."
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Ford said forensic genealogy "can only help us and give hope for other future victims or victims of the past."
The connection between Kundert and Silzel remains unclear, and authorities are still investigating the case.