Ohio Authorities Link Man to 1978 Murder and Say He May Have Killed 3 Others

Further investigation revealed that Mr. Howell had been arrested in 1983 after he picked up a woman up on the side of a road and offered a ride home in his newspaper delivery vehicle, prosecutors said. He told her he wanted to have sex with her and began to strangle her, but she managed to fight him off and escape, Mr. Deters said.

When investigators discovered the case, they contacted Mr. Howell’s family members, who submitted DNA samples, which indicated that the semen found on Ms. Thompson’s body was from their close relative, Mr. Deters said.

This summer, investigators exhumed Mr. Howell’s body and extracted a DNA sample from his jawbone, which matched the DNA from the semen on Ms. Thompson’s body Mr. Deters said.

Mr. Deters said that investigators met with Ms. Thompson’s family and told them that the man who had killed her was dead but that they would present the evidence to a grand jury, if the family wanted “further closure.”

The family accepted the offer, and a Hamilton County grand jury indicted Mr. Howell on charges of rape and aggravated murder. There will not be a trial, prosecutors said. Mr. Thompson said he supported the decision to charge Mr. Howell.

“For me, it helped finalizing it, knowing that a person had been charged with the murder of my sister,” he said. “Whether he was dead or not, it really didn’t to matter to me.”

Mr. Deters said investigators believe that Mr. Howell might have murdered at least three other women: Charmaine Stolla, 17, who was found in Hamilton County on March 12, 1978; Nancy Ann Theobald, who was found in neighboring Butler County on Dec. 26, 1977; and Victoria Hincher, 24, who was found on Oct. 31, 1976, also in Butler County. All three had been raped and strangled, he said.