Kitsap County Sheriff's Office in Washington state has announced the identity of the man who killed 61-year-old Patricia Barnes in 1995.
Barnes was living in homeless shelters in the Seattle area after she lost her apartment in a fire. She was last seen with a man whom she appeared to know in downtown Seattle. On August 25, 1995, she was found dead. Her remains were naked and partially covered by a sleeping bag in a ditch.
Evidence collected from a second crime scene about 50 yards away, which included hair rollers and cigarette butts, was kept as part of the investigation. DNA on one of those cigarette butts has now led police to Barnes' killer, Douglas Keith Krohne.
"There were a lot of branches and leaves from things that looked very out of place dumped with her body," Kitsap County Sheriff's Office detective Mike Grant told People.
"It wasn't stuff that you would normally find just growing along the shoulder of any road in Kitsap County."
One of the cigarette butts at the second crime scene had DNA evidence that has now given closure to this case.
"Having evidence that links the deceased victim of a homicide to the scene where she was found was almost better than a confession," he said.
"Trying to explain why a cigarette butt with their DNA is in two counties away from where they live at the location where their body was found. It would be extremely difficult to try to explain that away. It's almost irrefutable evidence."
A witness had stated that Barnes was last seen with a man in the downtown Seattle area.
"[The witness] just saw their initial encounter and got the impression that may be they knew each other somehow," said Grant.
"There was a statement about this witness possibly going, but they said there wasn't room. I assume that meant there wasn't room in their vehicle."
Patricia Barnes was found with two gunshots behind her left ear just three days after she was last seen. Investigators believe she was killed elsewhere and her remains were dumped.
"My working theory was that she had likely been transported in the back of a truck," Grant said.
"I kind of picture in my mind's eye that she was dragged out of the bed of a truck and maybe covered with this foliage or covered with this sleeping bag."
"The cigarette butts were probably amongst the items that were maybe in the bed of the truck or in the vehicle that transported her and just contemporaneously deposited with the non-native foliage," he continued.
"I didn't picture a circumstance where somebody was standing there taking a break, smoking a cigarette after they had disposed of her body. I would suspect that the homicide occurred elsewhere, and she was brought to Kitsap County just to kind of confuse investigators and disassociate geographically with the victim and the suspect."
Barnes' case was reopened in 2018 as part of a push to solve cold cases. That's when DNA labs received evidence from the 1995 scene. Private DNA lab testing included "forensic grade genome sequencing and the use of forensic genealogy that involved searching genealogical databases for genetic relatives to the known profile."
Othram Labs gave detectives a potential suspect linked to the DNA in December 2021.
"They told me that they had a first or second cousin that was corresponding with the DNA that had been submitted, which they said was extreme[ly] promising," the detective shared.
"It was the week before Christmas, and they gave me the name Douglas Krohne. It was promising because Douglas Krohne had connections to the area in Seattle and Tacoma, and he had criminal history here. It wasn't some random person who was living in Florida in the nineties."
Krohne last lived at an address in Arizona. He died in 2016.
"He died from electrocution, which was an accident," the detective revealed.
"And he was living in a trailer park and had enlisted the help of a neighbor to rig up this very tall TV antenna apparently. In the process of setting up this TV antenna, it hit the overhead power lines. The neighbor was injured but lived, but then Krohne died as a result of his injuries from the electrocution."
Detective Grant was able to get a blood sample from the autopsy from the Pima County Medical Examiner in Arizona. This confirmed Krohne was the murderer.
"[Investigators] had done an excellent job processing the scene and their attention to detail. It really paid off," he said.
"If it wasn't for the work that they had done, this would've easily gone unsolved."
