Was woman found dead in metro-east creek bed the victim to confessed serial killer?
Carol Hemphill told her daughter on a July evening in 2001 she was going to the store after dinner, according to her husband.
Her family never saw her again.
Hemphill’s remains were found in a creek bed in Columbia in March 2022 and on Friday the Columbia Police Department said investigators had positively identified her with the help of advances in DNA technology.
Columbia Police Chief Jason Donjon said investigators are working to determine whether Hemphill was a victim of confessed serial killer Maury Travis, a 36-year-old Missouri man who told police he killed 17 people. He committed suicide in the St. Louis County jail in June 2002, three days after he was arrested on murder charges in connection with the killings of two women.
“Now with the identification, we’re reaching out to … the other departments that dealt with some of these other murders,” Donjon said in a news conference Friday.
Donjon said Hemphill’s DNA will be checked to see if anything matches with clothing or other evidence collected two decades ago by officers investigating Travis.
Hemphill’s family members said Friday that Travis had been seen in their St. Louis neighborhood.
“The guy had been known in the neighborhood,” said Ricky Hemphill, the husband of Carol Hemphill.
Their daughter, Catricia, said a close acquaintance of a family member had seen Travis in the area.
Carol Hemphill was 39 when she was reported missing on July 27, 2001. A cause of death has not been released but the manner of death has been ruled a homicide.
Memories of victim
Ricky Hemphill, who is now 63 and now lives in Houston, said he went to lay down after dinner on the night his wife was last seen by loved ones.
He was 18 when he first met his wife and said she was a “loving person.”
“Everybody loved her and she loved everybody,” Hemphill said in an interview following a news conference at the Columbia Police Department Friday. “She really was an open person.
“She was a happy person. She was a wonderful woman.”
Police investigation
The remains of Carol Hemphill were found nearly 23 years ago on March 28, 2002, by an Illinois Department of Transportation crew along Illinois 3 near Gall Road, Donjon said in a news release Friday.
Detective Sgt. Michael Barnett and Detective Luke Moravec of the Columbia Police Department “began taking a new look at the investigation in recent years, as advancements in DNA technology provide new opportunities for further analysis,” according to the news release.
A portion of the skeletal remains were sent to a lab at the University of North Texas Center for Human Identification after the case was selected for a 2022 grant providing funding for “forensic genetic genealogy testing,” Donjon stated.
“In late October 2024, the detectives received a crucial lab report which revealed a connection between the human remains and a male DNA sample belonging to Dale Howard. Further analysis confirmed that Dale Howard’s biological mother was identified as Carol Hemphill.”
DNA samples of Hemphill’s family members were collected and submitted to the University of North Texas for comparison, Donjon said. The final laboratory results confirmed Hemphill’s identity on Feb. 24.
After the human remains were found in 2002, the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis was activated to investigate the “Jane Doe” case.
The News-Democrat reported in 2019 that police believed Travis dumped four of his victims in East St. Louis. Travis videotaped the torture and murders of some of his victims in the basement of his Ferguson, Missouri, home, according to the BND report.
Barnett said this case highlights the importance of databases of DNA samples. He recommends that when persons participate in DNA testing that they “opt in” to allow their information to be entered into a database.
