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To enjoy this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, check us out on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Forensic Tales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In the spring of 1975, 16-year-old Sharon Pryor left her mom's house to meet up with her boyfriend and friends at a nearby pizzeria but never returned home.

She was missing for three days until her body was found in a nearby field. Over the next four decades, the police did everything they could to track down her killer. But it wasn't until new advancements in DNA testing came around that they finally identified a suspect. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 262, The Murder of Sharon Pryor. ♪

In 1975, Sharon Pryor was a 16-year-old girl living with her family in Montreal, Canada.

She was born on February 9th, 1959. Two years later came twin sisters, Doreen and Maureen. After that came a younger brother. Sometime when Sharon and her siblings were young, her mom and dad split. So the kids went to go live with their mom, Yvonne Pryor, in an apartment complex in Montreal.

Growing up, Sharon was described as kind and warm-hearted. No one had a bad thing to say about her, even as a teenage girl. She didn't fit that stereotypical mold of a 16-year-old who could sometimes be rude or unruly. She was sweet, responsible, and trustworthy.

At 16, she stood at 5'3 and weighed just over 100 pounds. She had beautiful, long blonde hair and big blue eyes that would capture almost anyone's attention. She grew up heavily involved in the local boys and girls club. That's really where she learned how to play hockey and many other sports. It was also a place where she could meet friends her own age.

When people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she only had one answer. She wanted to become a veterinarian. She dreamed about spending her life helping animals. In fact, she was the kind of girl who would pick up animals off the street, nurse them back to health if they needed it, and then take the time to look for loving homes again. That was just the kind of girl that she was. So a career helping animals only made sense.

Beyond her love of animals and sports, she also liked school. Her favorite classes were science and biology, which probably also explains why she wanted to become a vet.

Easter weekend 1975 started like any other. That Saturday morning, March 29th, she got up early to make breakfast and did her chores around the house while her mom went shopping to get everything they needed to make Easter dinner that night. She also needed to pick up some chocolate eggs and other sweets for the kids. So Sharon got up, made her bed, picked up her room, and had breakfast with her younger sisters and brother.

After breakfast, Sharon spent most of the morning hard-boiling some eggs so that they could all decorate them for the Easter holiday. And when her mom returned home sometime around 3, Sharon and her mom spent some time together painting the eggs and talking about Easter. It was still just a very typical day for the family.

While sitting together at the kitchen table painting eggs, Sharon asked her mom if she thought the paint would be dry by the morning time. And her mom said yes, of course they would. And they kept on talking and having a good time together.

Sometime around 345, she finished painting the eggs with her mom and told her that she was going to go pick up her Leo's boys jacket from the Boys and Girls Club. She had been a member since she was just six years old and had spent weeks selling books of raffle tickets just to get this jacket. So this was something that she was really proud of and something that she was looking forward to.

Before heading out the door, she asked her mom if it would be alright if she could take her 4-year-old foster brother, Stephen, with her to go pick up the jacket. Her mom said yes, that was fine, and the two went off together. But when they got to the club, Sharon was told that they didn't have her size jacket. She would have to come back another time once they had her size. So the club gave her the receipt and told her that they would let her know when to come back.

At first, Sharon was upset that they didn't have the jacket. She worked really hard to sell those raffle tickets, so getting this jacket meant a lot to her. But she knew she earned it. She had put in the hard work, but just had to be a little bit more patient and wait a little bit longer. So after that, the two left the club and went back home.

By 4.15 p.m., Sharon and Stephen were back inside of the apartment, but around 15 minutes later, they had a surprise visitor. The family's reverend from the church dropped by the house to wish them a happy Easter.

He gave the kids a box of chocolate turtles while Sharon sat at the kitchen table painting more eggs. She told the reverend that she planned on reading Stephen a story about the Easter Bunny that night to get into the spirit. But the reverend told her that instead of reading a story about the Easter Bunny, she should tell him about the religious story behind Easter. So she smiled and said that that's what she was going to plan to do.

After about 45 minutes, the Reverend left and the family had dinner together. Stew. Something that all of the kids weren't too thrilled about, but they all ate it anyway. So at the dinner table was Sharon, her mom Yvonne, her grandmother who lived with them as well, the foster child Stephen, Sharon's twin sisters Maureen and Doreen, her brother Jojo, and Doug, who was one of her mom's friends.

They all tolerated this stew because they knew they were having this big turkey dinner the next day for Easter. Once all the bowls were finished, one of Sharon's friends who lived down the street stopped by the house. Sharon and the girl had been friends since they were just five years old, so they were really close and spent a lot of time together even though they were at two separate high schools.

Sharon told her girlfriend that she wanted to go down to Marina's Pizzeria, a small pizza place on the corner of Willington and Ash Avenue, about five blocks away from her mom's apartment. She said she was going to meet her boyfriend and a few other friends. And that's exactly the kind of place that Marina's Pizzeria was. It was a popular spot for teenagers to hang out at, have some soda, eat some pizza, and just hang out.

As the girls talked, Sharon was trying on different tops and outfits until she found the one that she wanted to wear. One of her mom's shirts and a brown suede jacket. She knew she wanted to wear that particular jacket because it was raining outside. So once she had the perfect outfit picked out, the two girls headed out the door together. This was right around 7.15pm.

Sharon's friend offered to walk her all the way down to the pizzeria, but Sharon said she was fine. She could walk there on her own. Plus, she was meeting up with her boyfriend and other friends once she got there. So they parted ways. The friend went in the direction back of her own house, and Sharon crossed the street. This was the last time that anyone ever saw her.

Sharon had always been a reliable kid, so when she didn't return home by her curfew at 11 p.m., her mom feared that something might be wrong. If she ever planned on staying out later than her curfew, Sharon would usually call and give her mom a heads up so she wouldn't have to worry. But this night was different. Her mom didn't hear from her, and she had every right to be worried.

Her mom went to bed that night without her daughter returning home. She thought it was too late to call around to her friends, so she went to bed and just hoped that her daughter would show up sometime in the morning. But she never did. Yvonne eventually decided it was time to call the police.

And as soon as she did, the police and dozens of volunteers began searching the neighborhood. She was only 16 years old, and this was completely out of character for her. So everyone's worst fear was that something bad might have happened to her on her way to the pizzeria.

Back inside Sharon's bedroom, they found almost all of her belongings. Her bus pass, her money, pretty much everything she owned was still back inside of her bedroom. So it was pretty obvious she didn't plan on going anywhere besides meeting up with her boyfriend and friends. And she wasn't the type of kid to run away. So for the next few days, people looked for her and everyone became increasingly worried.

By Tuesday night, the search had lasted three whole days. But the search was about to be over.

Sharon's body was found in a nearby field that was usually only used by beekeepers. One of them had alerted the police that something might be wrong after they got to the field and noticed that the front gate was unlocked. It was usually always padlocked shut, so the police were called and that's when they discovered her body. She was found lying in the snow wearing the same clothes she wore the night she left the house to meet up with friends.

that brown suede jacket, her sweater, shoes, and socks. But about six feet away were her jeans and underwear.

Her jeans were found on the ground in the snow, but her underwear was found hanging from a nearby tree. So this led the police to consider two things. One, she had probably been sexually assaulted. And number two, someone probably drove to the field, dumped her body in the snow, went back to the car to grab her underwear and jeans, then went back to the field and threw them out the window.

There was a trail of blood leading toward her body, and there was no mud or dirt found on Sharon's shoes, suggesting that someone probably carried her. They even thought that more than one person could be involved. There was also evidence found around her body, including tire tracks from some type of vehicle, a size 8.5 boot print, and a men's shirt, a size 17 collar with 34-inch sleeves,

With those kind of shirt dimensions, the police thought the killer had to be around 6 feet tall or so. The shoe print also told a story. Given its size and the depth it went into the snow, the police theorized that the guy was around 200 pounds. So we're looking for a pretty big person, over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds.

When it came to how the men's shirt got there in the first place, the police had a theory for that too. They suspected that it was used to either bind or tie Sharon up. It was basically used like a piece of rope.

Other evidence they collected was a partially chewed tape that was found caught in her hair like maybe someone had used it like a gag. But since no tape was found at the scene, it's likely the killer had taken it with them to try to cover his tracks. So all of this evidence was collected and bagged. The next day, investigators performed the autopsy, and this is what they discovered.

On top of being sexually assaulted, she had also been beaten and suffocated to death. The killer might have even used that men's shirt to suffocate her. She had clearly suffered a horrifying and senseless death for just being a 16-year-old girl on her way to meet up with some friends. What kind of monster does something like that? This episode is brought to you by Shopify.

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But even more disturbing was this. The autopsy suggested that she had died Tuesday afternoon, so she might have been held captive somewhere before that. She also had bruises covering most of her body, two jaw fractures on both sides of her mouth, a broken nose, a hole in one of her cheeks, and blood in her lungs.

Finally, the worst detail of all. She was still alive when whoever did this dumped her body in that field. When the police found her, she was clutching onto tree branches. She might not have been fully awake, but she was definitely alive.

Almost instantly, the police suspected that the killer was familiar with the area. Otherwise, how would they even know this field existed in the first place? There was snow on the ground. It was cold. Beekeepers didn't even use this field until late spring. So the police thought the killer had to have already known about it. Or maybe he was a beekeeper himself. Nobody knew at this point exactly what they were looking for.

DNA was collected from Sharon's shirt, and when it was tested, there wasn't enough of it to generate a profile. This is 1975 here. Whatever DNA was on the t-shirt, it wouldn't be enough to do anything with it anyway. They could maybe do blood typing, figure out what type of blood, A, B, O it was, but that was pretty much it.

But instead of getting rid of it, the DNA was kept over the years in hope that it could someday be used to find a match. They also kept blood and tissue samples from the autopsy, as well as her underwear, in hopes that it could be tested later on. Smart idea.

Back at the crime scene, impressions were taken of the tire tracks found in the snow, and they were eventually analyzed. But nothing important was gained right away. The tire tracks matched at least 37 different models of cars on the road during that period of time. Just one of them was a Jeep Wrangler. But there were also 36 other models of cars that they could belong to. So although the tire tracks told a story about how Sharon's body got there,

it didn't prove useful to identifying her killer, at least not yet anyway. So the police didn't have much to work with. This was long before cell phones, so they couldn't use cell phone towers to look for anything there. The same thing could be said about surveillance cameras. DNA testing was practically non-existent like we already talked about.

There weren't any witnesses. This was a very remote field. So finding her killer would definitely be an uphill battle. And it was.

After a while, the case fell on the detectives' backburners. They had other cases to work, and without any solid leads or tips, solving Sharon's murder seemed to be hopeless. They had a lot of other cases that they had a better chance at solving, but that didn't mean there weren't any theories about what happened. One theory was that maybe she had accepted a ride from someone on the way to the pizzeria, and the person who gave her a ride killed her.

We know it was raining that night, so maybe she didn't want to walk the five blocks to the restaurant in the pouring rain. She probably thought the guy seemed nice enough, so she hopped in his car. Another theory was that someone had taken her. He pulled up next to her on the street, used some type of weapon to get her inside of the car, then he held her captive somewhere for three days before killing her and disposing of her body.

If the streets were empty that night, this all could have happened within a matter of seconds. There were also rumors about a possible serial killer being involved. At the time, there were a lot of unsolved murders in the area, and some people believed that they might have been committed by a serial killer. So maybe Sharon had become a victim.

Another possible idea was that the same person responsible for the attempted kidnapping of a 22-year-old woman might have done it. In that particular incident, a woman reported that a tall, white, English-speaking man with blue eyes, brown hair, and a mustache attempted to kidnap her at gunpoint.

This happened around the same time that Sharon disappeared. It even happened on the same street that she disappeared from on her way to the pizzeria. So a lot of people wondered if these two cases could be connected.

Sharon's murder was devastating for her close-knit family, especially her mom. Sharon was her firstborn and had always held a special place in her heart. So for her to be murdered in such a brutal, cold-blooded way was almost unimaginable. How does a mother deal with that kind of grief?

There were also so many unanswered questions. Why Sharon? Was she targeted? Was this something pre-planned? Was it someone that she knew? Or had she simply been at the wrong place at the wrong time? Whoever did this saw her walking alone that night and made their move.

On the first anniversary of the case, the local newspaper published an article about the story. It talked about all the details that had been made public, hoping someone with information would come forward. They also hoped that by putting it in the local newspaper, this would keep Sharon's story alive. Because as soon as people stop talking about these types of cases, the sooner law enforcement stops working them and the quicker they become cold.

Also during the first year of the investigation, the police questioned more than 38 people, including six considered credible prime suspects. But just as quickly as they were questioned, they were all released. There was nothing tying them to any crime. So eventually, the case turns cold. No arrests, no suspects, nothing.

29 years later in 2004, there was finally a break in the case. The police received a tip that led to a search of a garage behind an apartment building. During the search, they were specifically looking for DNA evidence that could help them finally track down the killer. Now, not much was made public about why they searched this particular garage for DNA, but this was all that was released. They

They received a tip saying that there might be forensic evidence inside this garage connected to Sharon's murder. This might be the location where she was held captive before she was killed, so the police searched it. This had been the biggest lead in the case in decades, and the garage itself was just a few streets away from where the prior family lived, so the location made sense.

More than two dozen officers were brought to the scene, and they spent over 15 hours searching. It was a garage that held small storage lockers for the people who lived in the apartment building. Now, according to investigators, they weren't interested in the lockers themselves, but more interested in the building structure. They also weren't too interested in the people who currently lived in the building. They had no reason to suspect that any of them had done anything.

So they looked at everything, the concrete floor, the walls, the ceiling, the doors, anything that could possibly contain DNA evidence. Also something interesting that you should know about, at the time of Sharon's murder, the building had been home to a family friend of the Pryor family. So there was a little connection already there. It wasn't just some random apartment building.

When the search was all said and done, the police were able to collect three DNA samples from the garage and had them sent to a lab for testing. Once they were at the lab, they were compared to dozens of profiles from possible suspects. These were people the police had interviewed and considered persons of interest in the case.

But one by one, each person was crossed off the list. None of their DNA matched and no one was arrested. Support for this episode comes from Smart Labels. Have you ever gone on a hunt for a holiday decoration that you know you have, but you just can't remember where you put it last year? Well, those days are over with Smart Labels.

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Several more years went by, and eventually, a scholarship was created in Sharon's honor. It was a scholarship designed to give local residents of the community a chance to go to college. It became a way for Sharon's family to keep her memory alive, even if they wouldn't be able to solve her murder. If Sharon didn't get the chance to go to vet school, then maybe some other kid her age could.

Even beyond the local community where Sharon and her family lived, this case haunted Montreal for decades. People really feared that whoever did this would get away with it. So this case was really considered one of the highest profile cases in the area at one point. Fast forward to the summer of 2022, June.

By this point, the case was well over 40 years old, and Sharon's siblings had long since grown up, becoming adults themselves. But for all of these years, their sister was frozen in time, forever 16 years old. But in the summer of 2022, things were about to change, and her case was about to come back alive.

By the summer of 2022, DNA testing had come a long way. It was night and day from where it was back when the murder took place. So that year, the DNA that was taken from the shirt found to the crime scene was put through several different DNA databases. They had finally been able to generate a profile, something that they couldn't do back in the 70s. They hoped for two things to happen. One, they would be able to find the DNA that was in the shirt.

One, they would find an exact match, the killer. But even if that didn't happen, there was always a second route. They could find a relative related to the killer. And from there, they could create a family tree to look for possible suspects. So that's finally where they got somewhere in the case.

The sample didn't generate an exact match, but that was okay because they were able to find a family with shared DNA with the killer, the Romine family.

The surname Romine was then entered in the penal system archives, and when they did that, there was one single name that stood out to investigators. A guy by the name of Franklin Maywood Romine, who passed away in 1982 when he was 36. Even though no one knows exactly what happened to him or how he died, the authorities said that he died in some type of violent way.

So once they had the name, the authorities dug up everything that they possibly could about him. And one of the first things they learned was that he was originally from Charleston, West Virginia in the U.S. So detectives drove 900 miles from Montreal to West Virginia as soon as they could. And

And when they arrived, they immediately met with the local police department there in West Virginia, who told the Canadian detectives that Franklin was also suspected in the 1975 rape and murder of a teenage girl in Charleston. So right away, everyone was feeling pretty good about this being their guy. And the police in the U.S. were more than willing to help the Canadian police.

Here's what we know about Franklin Romine. We already know he passed away in 1982, seven years after Sharon was murdered. But here's what happened before then.

He had spent most of his life bouncing back and forth from West Virginia in the U.S. and Canada. He also spent most of his life in and out of prisons and jails. He had a long history of sexually assaulting and harassing young women. Here's just to give you an idea of the type of person this guy was.

In 1964, when he was only 18 years old, he was arrested and convicted of beating and raping a young girl. But sometime after he was sent to prison, he had managed to escape from custody, and just three years later, he was arrested for pretty much the same thing, raping another young girl. And believe it or not, he managed to escape again. In 1969, Franklin decided he should probably skip town.

And that's when he headed up north to Canada. And once he got there, he picked up right where he left off, assaulting women. Between 1969 and the mid-1970s, Franklin did a pretty good job of staying off the police's radar. So that's when he decided he would return back to West Virginia.

Maybe he thought the police had forgotten about him, but he was wrong. Not long after he got back into the U.S., he was arrested for raping a 23-year-old waitress. Later on, this woman told detectives that he had come into a restaurant one day and asked her out on a date. She said no. He stormed off, only to return later when she got off of work.

He followed her back to her apartment, waited until she got inside, he followed her, and then he sexually assaulted her. After the attack, the woman went to the hospital where she was met by detectives, and that's where she told him that the name of her attacker was Franklin Romine, a name that they were already very familiar with.

So later that night, he was picked up and put in jail. Now at the time, rape was considered a capital crime in the state of West Virginia. So if he was convicted, he was looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. But before the case went to trial, Franklin bailed himself out of jail, packed his bags, skipped town, and headed back to Canada. Well, that plan didn't work out.

Two years later, he was picked up by the police in Canada and extradited back to the United States. On the outside looking in, this might have looked like he was finally going to be put away for good. But no one knew it at the time. Six months before this happened, Sharon Pryor was murdered.

In February of 1976, Franklin Romine was tried and convicted for the assault on the waitress, and the jury recommended a sentence of life in prison, with the possibility of parole. After that, he was transferred to the Moundsville State Prison to start serving that sentence. Now, if you think that's the end, you would be mistaken.

Four years later, 1980, his conviction was overturned based on a technicality involving improper jury instructions. He was given a brand new trial, but instead of going through with that, he agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree sexual assault. That meant, less than a year later, he was released from prison and considered a free man.

Now, where do you think he went after that? If you guessed back to Canada, then you would be right. But this would be his final trip up north, because by 1982, he had passed away, and his body was sent back to his family in West Virginia to be buried. This marked the end of his career assaulting women.

After uncovering this, detectives in both countries were becoming more and more convinced he was Sharon's killer. Everything lined up. He was in Canada at the time of the murder. He had a history of doing this. His M.O. was to sexually assault young female victims. The only difference was Sharon would have been his first murder, or at least the only one the police knew about.

To finally determine if this was their suspect, they compared the DNA from the crime scene shirt to two relatives, his brothers Noah and Michael. And when the police reached out to them to see if they would be willing to cooperate and submit a DNA sample, they were both more than happy to help. I think they too wanted to know if their brother was a killer or not.

This was also around the same time that the police found out something else about their suspect. He owned a Jeep Wrangler back in the day, the same kind of car that could have left those tire tracks back at the crime scene. Also interesting, he wore a size 8.5 shoe, just like Sharon's killer.

When the test results came back from the two brothers, they revealed that the DNA from the crime scene and Sharon's underwear had come from someone who was closely related to Noah and Michael. It was as close as a match to a brother. But still, that wasn't good enough for investigators. It had been over 40 years, and they wanted to be absolutely sure they had the right guy.

So in March of 2022, a judge in West Virginia signed off on an order that would allow the police to exhume Franklin's body. And this is when everything finally came together.

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As soon as they exhumed his body from the grave, it was taken to the lab. From there, DNA was extracted from his bones, the only part that was left of him.

Even though there was no guarantee that DNA was still testable, everyone knew this had to be done. They had come way too far just to fall short of confirming this was Sharon's killer through a direct DNA comparison. But because this is a very complex type of DNA testing, it took weeks to get the results. But in the end, the wait was worth it.

On Tuesday, May 23, 2022, it was announced that the DNA in Sharon's case and the samples taken from Franklin Romine's remains were a perfect match. Without a doubt, he was her murderer back on Easter weekend in 1975. These forensic tests finally answered the four-decade-old question, who murdered 16-year-old Sharon Pryor?

Not surprisingly, this announcement was everything the family had hoped for. Even Sharon's 85-year-old mother couldn't believe they had finally identified her daughter's killer all of these years later. She could finally put a name to paper. She got to live to see him identified.

When it comes to justice, you might say there is only half justice in this case. There's justice in the sense that we finally know who took Sharon's life. But there's no justice in the sense that the person responsible is already dead. So we can't put him behind bars for all of the crimes that he's committed. Closure? Maybe. Justice? I'll leave that up to you.

No one quite knows the motive. The simple explanation might be that Sharon simply found herself in the crosshairs of a sexual predator that night. He might have only tried to sexually assault her, but the encounter somehow turned deadly. Or maybe he always intended to murder her. We don't know. We also don't know how he did it. Did he offer her a ride to the restaurant because it was raining?

Or did he forcefully grab her off the street during that short five-block walk? All we know is that a precious life was taken far too early, and her name is Sharon Pryor.

Thanks to advanced DNA testing and forensic testing, a four-decade-old case is finally solved, bringing an end to one of Montreal's most high-profile cases. If Sharon's case can be solved with advanced forensic testing, who's next? To share your thoughts on this week's episode, follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.

To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode sharing my personal thoughts. Don't forget to subscribe to Forensic Tales so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday. If you love the show, consider leaving us a positive review.

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If you'd like to become a producer of the show, head over to our Patreon page or send me an email at Courtney at ForensicTales.com. For a complete list of sources used in this episode, please visit ForensicTales.com. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.