WASHINGTON, Ind. — A southern Indiana man was arrested Wednesday for the murder of a woman in Georgia more than 30 years ago.
Police in Washington, Indiana arrested 59-year-old Larry Padgett of Loogootee for the 1989 murder of 23-year-old Mary Willfong.
According to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office in Georgia, Willfong's body was found near Interstate 75 by deer hunters on Nov. 21, 1989. An autopsy later determined she had been sexually assaulted, and her cause of death had been strangulation.
An investigation was able to pinpoint her last known location as Forest Park, where she had been seen at the local farmer's market getting into a tractor-trailer with a white man. The sheriff's office said that at the time, a number of suspects were interviewed and gave DNA samples, but none of those samples matched, and the trail went cold.
Marked closed and unsolved, the case was eventually reopened in 2019.
A sheriff's office investigator, Marc Mansfield, "took the original evidence and re-submitted it to the GBI crime lab due to new technology." He also took the evidence to Miami for a genealogy trace.
The re-opened investigation led investigators to a suspect in Indiana. With the help of local authorities here, further DNA evidence was collected and matched to DNA taken from Willfong's body.
"While in Indiana, investigators were able to obtain more evidence in the case linking Padgett to the murder of Mary Willfong. Padgett will be held in Indiana until a waiver of extradition is signed," the sheriff's office said.
