Jan 3 2020
2019 in review: Big cold case solve highlights '19 in crime
"Solving the 46-year-old cold case slaying of a Indiana State University student leads the highlights of 2019 in the area of crime and court actions in Vigo County.
Terre Haute Police Chief Shawn Keen in May identified the man who killed 19-year-old Pam Milam in September 1972.
Keen’s investigation and the use of emerging DNA technologies led police to identify Jeffrey Lynn Hand, a 23-year-old delivery man who traveled the Midwest and happened to be on the ISU campus on the night Milam was abducted and killed.
Hand was not a suspect in the original investigations into Milam’s death, and he died in 1978 during a shootout with police in Kokomo.
Keen became a city police detective in 2001 and chief of detectives in 2008. When he divided the department’s cold-case files among detectives, he kept the Milam case for himself. It also was in 2008 that Keen got a partial DNA profile of a suspect from the rope used to bind Milam.
He took that evidence and the work he’d done over the years and narrowed the field of suspects, but again the investigation seemed to stall.
Eventually, further developments in DNA technology — specifically in an area called phenotype testing — along with Keen’s work with Indiana State Police and with Parabon NanoLabs allowed him to essentially backtrack Jeffrey Lynn Hand’s identity. The suspect’s samples showed a 99.9999 match of DNA to the father of Hand’s sons."
