Nearly 25 years after the body of a woman who'd been brutally raped and murdered was found in a grassy area of southwest Broward, authorities have arrested her alleged killer.
Broward Sheriff's Office officials announced Tuesday that cold case unit detectives have arrested Lucious Boyd, a convicted murderer, rapist and suspected serial killer, in the 1998 slaying.
The gruesome discovery was made in December 1998, when a boater on a weekend outing found the woman's body dumped near a boat ramp off U.S. 27, BSO officials said.
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For more than 20 years, the woman was known only as Jane Doe, but in May, BSO identified the victim as Eileen Truppner, a mother of two who'd left her native Puerto Rico and moved to South Florida. Her cause of death was determined to be strangulation.
According to BSO, investigators contacted the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and requested the assistance of their genetic genealogy unit which allows authorities to investigative leads for unsolved crimes. The DNA results led to the first major breakthrough in the case – her identity.
In a news release Tuesday, BSO said Boyd remains on death row for the murder of 21-year-old Dawnia Dacosta, who was murdered approximately two weeks prior to Truppner.
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Advancements in DNA testing technology enabled crime lab detectives to connect Truppner's DNA to Boyd’s DNA, which had been collected as evidence in the Dacosta homicide, BSO said in a news release Tuesday.
On Nov. 29, a Broward County grand jury indicted Boyd for Truppner's murder.
Boyd now faces additional first-degree murder and sexual battery charges.
Using the DNA, detectives were able to locate Truppner's family. Det. Zack Scott had to break the news to her sister, Nancy Truppner.
"The upside is you're able to give them some answers. The downside is you have to tell them 'listen, she was the victim of a murder,'" Scott said. "It's certainly not the outcome that they wanted."
Nancy Truppner said she lived in anguish for years not knowing what happened to her sister.
“Lucious Boyd’s indictment for Eileen’s homicide is possible due to the collaborative efforts of BSO cold case detectives, crime lab analysts and crime scene investigators,” Sheriff Gregory Tony said in a news release Tuesday. “Now, Eileen’s family can put an end to decades of living with uncertainty while detectives continue their mission with one thing in mind - justice has no expiration date.”
