Authorities have identified a suspected killer in the 1995 cold case of a teenage girl who was en route to school when she was raped and shot twice in the face by a man who then eluded investigators for 26 years.
Atlanta police say Kelvin Arnold, 49, who died in 2021 before he could be identified, brutally assaulted and fatally shot 14-year-old Nacole Smith on June 7, 1995, as she tried to shortcut through a wooded area on her way to school.
“There are literally boxes, and boxes, and boxes of data and reports and evidence that has been analyzed as it pertains to this case,” homicide commander Ralph Woolfolk said Tuesday while announcing the breakthrough and commending the efforts of investigators in solving the decades-long mystery. “You can see the incredible persistence and the resilience, and just the relentless follow through, not only from these detectives but also a family that’s endured something like this for 26 years. We can only imagine as to how that might feel today—being able to get some type of answers as to what has happened here.”
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An updated sketch released in 2019, showing what the suspect might have looked like.
GBIFollowing Smith’s brutal murder, Atlanta police interviewed “hundreds” of people, authorities said, and directed two recruit classes to canvass the neighborhood. Police said blood samples were collected from at least 50 people, but attempts to find a matching DNA profile were unsuccessful. The case went cold until Atlanta Police Department detective Vince Velazquez revived it in 2002.
“We don't give up,” Velazquez said. “Twenty-six years, it could have been 36, you know, until I took my last breath I was going to work this case.”
Two years after he reopened Nacole’s case, Velazquez said he got a call about a forensic match after the same assailant allegedly raped another teen—13-year-old Betty Brown—not far from where Nacole was killed.
“Nacole’s killer was back,” Velazquez said, describing efforts to blast information about the unsolved case on TV to find new leads after getting a description of the man from Betty.
The efforts to track the suspect down proved futile, he said, until a major development was achieved years later, when investigators pushed to use genealogy and ancestry databases to identify the elusive suspect.
“It took a little over three years but we were able to develop a person of interest,” said Detective Scott Demeester who took up the case after Velazquez retired in 2017.
According to Demeester, investigators obtained a sample of the suspect’s DNA from evidence and learned just after Christmas that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s forensics lab was able to match it to the DNA profile obtained in both Nacole’s case and Brown’s unsolved rape case.
But, in yet another twist, Arnold was in hospice care and died in Fulton County last August from liver and kidney failure, police said. Arnold, who was 23 when he allegedly raped and killed Nacole, was never arrested or charged in either case and police told WAGA-TV that he had not been linked to other crimes.
Betty Brown speaks at a Tuesday news conference announcing a breakthrough in the case.
Facebook/Atlanta PoliceDemeester recalled the emotional phone call to Nacole’s mom, Acqunellia Smith.
“My feelings are just all over the place, I don’t know what I’m feeling right now,” Smith said on Tuesday. “But I’ll tell you I’m in so much pain.”
Betty Brown said through tears that while she didn’t feel closure, she felt some sense of resolution.
“I am so conflicted because on the one hand I want to rise above and not let this control me, but on the other hand I want his family to suffer, because he's not here to suffer,” she said.
“I want them to feel the pain that my family has felt for years, knowing that that man that you loved, that you appreciated, that you respected, did something so horrible to me and Nacole and I want you to live in that. I want you to wear that like I did, like I do every day of my life.”
