By Simone Jasper
Source The Charlotte Observer
A woman vanished on a road trip in 1988 — and now a truck driver is accused of killing her, Georgia officials said.
More than 30 years after the missing woman’s body was found, DNA testing led officials to name Henry Fredrick Wise as a suspect in her death, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) wrote Sept. 6 in a news release.
But decades before investigators linked Wise to the case, he reportedly died in a fiery crash.
“In 1999, Wise was killed in a car accident at Myrtle Beach Speedway in South Carolina and was burned to death,” officials wrote.
The case dates to 1988, when 19-year-old Stacey Chahorski embarked on a road trip. Chahorski was from Michigan and was last known to be in North Carolina, McClatchy News reported.
Her disappearance remained a mystery for years.
Meanwhile, an unidentified body was found along Interstate 59 in Dade County, Georgia, near the Alabama border. Investigators said they looked into the case for years before turning to a “new type of genealogy investigation.”
That tool helped officials to determine that the body belonged to Chahorski, McClatchy News reported in March.
“The biggest problem in being able to solve this case is we had no identity of the victim, so we had no starting point,” said Joe Montgomery, a special agent with the GBI, said at the time. “Now we have a starting point and that’s a big jump for us.”
Now, months later, officials reported that genealogy was used to find her accused killer, presumably marking the first time the technology had been used to identify a suspect and victim in a homicide case.
Officials made the discovery after they found DNA at the crime scene but couldn’t match it to anyone, according to the FBI. Investigators also had thought that a truck driver was involved, Montgomery said during a news conference.
“The GBI began to interview family and obtained DNA swabs for comparison to the profile created through genealogy DNA and identified Wise,” investigators wrote in their release.
Wise — also known as Hoss Wise — was 34 years old at the time of the crime. Officials said he had traveled through Dade County on a regular basis as part of his route.
“At least we can get some answers for Stacey’s family, and they can go to bed knowing that their daughter’s killer — their loved one’s killer — is not out there on the prowl anymore,” said Chris Arnt, district attorney for the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit District, according to video from the news conference.
____
©2022 The Charlotte Observer.
Visit charlotteobserver.com.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
