Source The Charlotte Observer
A man was found guilty in a college student’s 1980 killing after DNA from a piece of chewing gum linked him to the crime, Oregon officials say.
In a bench trial, Robert Plympton, 60, was found guilty of first-degree murder, along with four counts of second-degree murder, in the death of Barbara Tucker, the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said in a March 18 news release.
In an email to McClatchy News, Stephen Houze and Jacob Houze, Plympton’s attorneys, said they plan to appeal the case.
“We are confident that his convictions will be overturned,” the attorneys wrote.
Tucker, a student at Mt. Hood Community College, was found dead “in a wooded area” in Gresham by students arriving for class the morning of Jan. 16, 1980, prosecutors said.
The night prior, Tucker “was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and beaten to death near a campus parking lot,” according to prosecutors.
To solve the case, prosecutors said detectives turned their efforts to genetic genealogy in 2021.
Genetic genealogy uses DNA testing coupled with “traditional genealogical methods” to create “family history profiles,” according to the Library of Congress. With genealogical DNA testing, researchers can determine if and how people are biologically related.
Using a DNA profile created for a suspect in 2000, a Parabon Nanolabs genealogist identified Plympton as a suspect, according to prosecutors.
Gresham police detectives were surveying Plympton when they saw him “spit a piece of chewing gum onto the ground,” prosecutors said.
Detectives collected it and submitted it for DNA analysis, officials said.
The DNA profile from the gum was a match to the DNA profile for the suspect in Tucker’s case, according to prosecutors.
Plympton was arrested in June 2021, prosecutors said.
“The saddest part is that she will always be 19,” Alice Juan, Tucker’s sister, told Oregon Live after Plympton’s arrest. “We didn’t get to watch her grow up, we didn’t get to see her turn into a woman, who could’ve had her own business, get married and have children of her own.”
Until her death in 1995, Tucker’s mother, Louise Tucker, never gave up on solving her daughter’s case, KOIN reported.
“If it takes 10 years, I don’t care,” Louise Tucker wrote in a handwritten record, the outlet reported. “I just can’t let it rest.”
Plympton is expected to appear in court again in June for sentencing, prosecutors said.
Gresham is about a 15-mile drive east from Portland.
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