A cigarette butt and an old scrap of paper leads to an arrest in a 26-year-old unsolved killing

The bartender didn't know the man's name, but he remembered his hair: a bushy red mullet.

The man was young, perhaps in his mid-20s, was having drinks with a woman much older. This one the bartender knew: Marilyn Hickey, 57, who lived by herself in a studio apartment in Bremerton, Washington. On the night of Sept. 8, 1992, she went to the Drift Inn Tavern, where she liked to shoot pool, and closed it down with the red-haired man, leaving with him in a cab at about 2 a.m. the following morning. The bartender had seen the two of them there together before, but that night would be the last.

Days later, after neighbors feared she had suffered a seizure alone in her apartment, paramedics breached a window with a pocket knife to get inside. They found her half-naked and strangled to death on her living room floor.

Police feverishly sought the identity of the man at the bar, to no avail. What they didn't know, at least not for 25 years, was that they already had his name: It was buried in the fine print in their case file, a footnote jotted down like an afterthought.

Read more: https://www.wctrib.com/news/crime-and-courts/4553163-cigarette-butt-and-old-scrap-paper-leads-arrest-26-year-old-unsolved