After 51 years, the rape and murder of 9-year-old Georgia girl, Debbie Lynn Randall, has been solved with DNA forensic testing, according to Cobb County officials.
As CrimeOnline previously reported, Debbie was abducted on January 13, 1972, while walking home from a Marietta laundromat. She was raped and murdered, with her body found 16 days later near Windy Hill and Powers Ferry Road in Cobb County.
During a Monday morning press conference, Cobb County District Attorney Flynn D. Broady, Jr. announced that Mableton resident William B. Rose was connected to the murder via genetic genealogy testing.
Two years after the victim’s death, Rose committed suicide, Broady Jr. said. Investigators said Rose didn’t know Randall and it was a “crime of opportunity.”
According to the Marietta Police Department, witnesses saw a dark pick-up truck driving along First Street around the time Debbie vanished. Police would later find a detergent bottle splashed on the ground in the same area; it was the detergent bottle Debbie was carrying while she walked home.
Debbie’s disappearance quickly spread throughout the community, and within days, thousands of volunteers scoured the woods, vacant buildings and homes, and any other area that someone could have hidden a little girl.
While searching an area close to Powers Ferry Road and Windy Hill Road, where Houston’s Restaurant currently sits, students from the Southern Polytechnic University found Debbie’s lifeless body in a wooded, remote area.
During the 1970’s and up until the mid-1990’s, DNA testing wasn’t available. From psychics giving wrong information to false confessions, Cobb detectives exhausted most options until recently, when familial DNA testing became available.
Atlanta’s Cold Case Investigative Research Institute founder and ‘Zone 7″ podcast host, Sheryl McCollum, who helped work on the case alongside former Cobb County detective, Morris Nix, said there were tears of joy and relief when the connection was made.
“The tears are long overdue. He [Nix] stayed on this case and kept Debbie’s case alive after her parents died,” McCollum told CrimeOnline. “He has kept this case alive even when other law enforcement told him it was lost cause.”
“He and I often talked about new innovative techniques to move this case to be solved. Today, it’s official. Debbie Lynn Randall’s case has been solved!”
A key piece of evidence that helped investigators solve the case was a cloth found on Randall’s body that investigators kept preserved for over 50 years. DNA technology helped them extract DNA evidence from the cloth as well as identify a hair found on the victim, which provided a partial profile.
In 2023, DNA Labs International helped identify Rose’s descendants; they cooperated with investigators and familial DNA testing. Rose’s body was then exhumed for additional testing, bringing in a match.
Morris appeared alongside McCollum in multiple 2017 “Crime Stories with Nancy Grace” episodes on the case. Listen below.
[Feature Photo: Debbie Randall/Family Handout]
