Today, the Wenatchee Police Department said it closed a 40-year-old homicide investigation thanks to genetic genealogy and the help of law enforcement from across the country and Canada. Carol Rykov was found dead behind the Stanley Center of North Wenatchee Avenue back in May of 1986. On the morning of May 14th, 1986, workers arriving to set up at the Stanley Civic Center on North Wenatchee Avenue in Wenatchee, Washington, found a woman’s body behind the building.
She was 35 years old. She had been beaten to death and sexually assaulted during during the night. The Civic Center was a performing arts venue in the middle of downtown. She had been killed in the open behind a public building and left there for the workers to find. Detectives collected biological evidence from her clothing that morning and preserved it.
The case went cold within the first few years. For nearly four decades, the DNA sat in Central Washington property storage unmatched in every law enforcement database it touched. The first time the people of Wenatchee heard the killer’s name, a building in another country had been wearing it for 17 years. Her name was Carol A. Rykov.
She was 35 years old and lived in Wenatchee, Washington, a small city in the Cascade foothills where the Wenatchee River meets the Columbia. At the time of her death, she was unhoused. She spent her days and nights in the downtown blocks around the Stanley Civic Center where the people of Wenatchee who had nowhere else to go gathered, slept, and looked out for each other.
The Stanley Civic Center stood at 1201 North Wenatchee Avenue. A large building used for concerts, community events, and public gatherings. The blocks around it were a meeting point for Wenatchee’s transient community. What Sergeant Joe Eaton of the Wenatchee Police Department later described as a known gathering place at the time.
People slept near the building, in the parking lots behind it, and in the alleys and doorways of the surrounding streets. Carol was part of that community. She knew the area around the Civic Center the way a person knows the place where they spend their days, the doors that stayed unlocked, the spots that were sheltered from the wind, the parts of the building where you could sleep without being moved along.
On the night of May 13th or the early hours of May 14th, 1986, someone attacked Carol behind the Stanley Civic Center. The attacker beat her with enough force to kill her. The cause of death was blunt force trauma. She was sexually assaulted. Biological evidence from the assault was left on her clothing. The killer left her body behind the building and walked away.
She was found the next morning when workers arrived to set up. The building was scheduled to host events that week. The workers called the police. Wenatchee Police Department officers responded and processed the crime scene. Detectives collected Carol’s clothing, the biological evidence on it, and everything else recoverable from the area behind the building.
The evidence was sent to the FBI for forensic analysis, which was standard practice for a serious crime in a town the size of Wenatchee in 1986. After dark, the back of the Civic Center was not well lit and was shielded from the street. Someone could have attacked her there without being seen or heard by anyone passing on Wenatchee Avenue.
Behind the building was an open area, no windows looking down on it, no foot traffic. The front of the building faced the road. The back faced nothing. Detectives sealed the biological evidence in evidence bags and stored it. In 1986, DNA profiling was in its earliest stages and not yet available to most law enforcement agencies in the country.
The Wenatchee Police Department could not extract a genetic profile from the evidence that year. The department stored it anyway, keeping the chain of custody intact year after year, waiting for the technology to catch up. That decision preserved the one piece of physical evidence that could ever name the man who killed Carol.
Without the clothing and the fluid on it, the case had nothing. No weapon was recovered, no fingerprints lifted from the scene, no witness ever came forward with a description of the killer. The biological evidence was the entire case. Wenatchee police worked the case hard for the next 2 years. Detectives interviewed everyone they could find who had been in the area of the Stanley Civic Center on the night Carol was killed.
They talked to people in the transient community who had known her. They knocked on doors of business owners along North Wenatchee Avenue and residents whose windows looked toward the building. Men with histories of violence or sexual offenses in Chelan County were pulled in for questioning. Detectives gave multiple polygraph tests and compared notes with other agencies in Central Washington.
The investigation faced a problem that made it harder than most homicide cases from the start. Carol’s world was not anchored to a fixed address, a workplace, or a social circle that detectives could pin down. There was no employer to call, no landlord to interview, no phone number in a directory. The people around her moved.
They drifted through Wenatchee and out again, and witnesses who might have seen something on the night of May 13th were difficult to locate weeks later, let alone months or years. No arrests were ever made and no suspect was ever named publicly. The tips dried up within months. Within a few years, the case went cold and was transferred to the Wenatchee Police Department’s cold case file.
The file stayed open, but the evidence sat in storage. Numerous detectives reviewed the case across the decades that followed. Each one read through the same thin collection of witness statements and reached the same conclusion. The biological evidence was the only path forward, and the technology was not there yet.
When DNA profiling became standard, analysts at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab developed a genetic profile from the biological evidence on Carol’s clothing. The profile was a clean male contributor. It was uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offenders. If the man who killed Carol had ever been convicted of a serious crime, the system would have flagged the match. CODIS returned nothing.
The man had never been arrested for anything that put his DNA in the system. He was a ghost in every database the police had access to. Carol’s family carried the case across four decades. The Wenatchee Police Department did not release their names to the public. A woman killed at 35 behind a public building in a small city, and no one could tell them who had done it, or why.
They endured the anniversaries and the silence that followed each one. There were no public statements, no press conferences, no candlelight vigils that drew cameras to the back of the Stanley Civic Center. The grief was carried privately, away from the slow churn of an investigation that for four decades produced no arrest.
Carol would have been 45 in 1996, 55 in 2006, 65 in 2016. She would have been 75 in 2026, the year the case was finally closed. The decades passed, and the phone did not ring with the call her family was waiting for. The investigation moved in slow cycles, periods of review followed by years of quiet, followed by another detective picking up the file and reaching the same dead end.
The family stayed in close contact with the police across all of it. They never stopped pushing for an answer to who had killed her and why. In January 2023, Detective Sergeant Ryan Weatherman of the Wenatchee Police Department took the file off the shelf. The case had been carried for nearly 37 years by then, opened and reopened by detectives who came and went.
Weatherman read through the original investigation and the decades of follow-up work, the witness statements, the polygraph reports, the long lists of men cleared one by one. He identified biological evidence as the strongest lead the case had ever produced and started looking at forensic tools that had not existed the last time anyone worked the case.
Weatherman coordinated with forensic scientist B. Wright at the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab to re-examine the evidence using current extraction methods. The goal was to develop a profile detailed enough for forensic genetic genealogy, a technique that required far more genetic data than a standard CODIS profile. Funding was the other obstacle.
Weatherman worked with the Department of Justice and the Washington Attorney General’s office to get the money the genealogy work would need. In July 2024, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab sent the DNA evidence from Carol’s case to Astrium, a private forensic laboratory in The Woodlands, Texas.
Astrium specializes in pulling DNA out of samples that are old, damaged, or too small for normal testing and has helped solve dozens of cold cases across the United States. The lab used a process called forensic grade genome sequencing to extract a single nucleotide polymorphism profile from the evidence, a far more detailed genetic map than the standard profile that had been sitting in CODIS.
Where a standard CODIS profile uses 20 genetic locations to identify a match, an Astrium profile contains hundreds of thousands of points of comparison, enough to detect distant family relationships across public ancestry databases. This technique did not require the killer himself to be in the database. All it needed was a distant relative, a second cousin, or a third cousin.
Anyone who shared enough genetic material with him who had uploaded their data for personal ancestry research. The Authurm team would then trace the connection from that relative through public records and family trees back to the source of the crime scene DNI. In December 2024, the genealogical search produced results.
Authurm’s in-house team built a family tree outward from partial matches in public databases, tracing birth records, death records, and public documents across the United States and into Canada. The main geographic connection pointed north of the border into the interior of British Columbia. The DNI results were submitted to Canadian authorities for comparison through that country’s version of CODIS.
And the Royal Canadian Mounted Police assisted with the cross-border work. On February 24th, 2025, the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab confirmed the match. The genealogy pointed at a single man. His name had never appeared in the case file. He had never been a suspect. No detective in 40 years had ever looked at him, and he had been dead for 17 years.
Detective Brian Hewitt of the Wenatchee Police Department tracked down the suspect’s only known living blood relative, a sister in Gold Bar, a small town in Snohomish County, Washington. Hewitt explained what the investigation had found and asked for a voluntary DNA sample to confirm the genealogical match. The sister cooperated.
What she told investigators next was something the police were not expecting. She said she was not surprised her brother was the suspect because of his aggressive behavior. She had known him in a way the rest of the world had not. Inside the family, he had been a different person than the one Kamloops knew. She had carried that knowledge for decades.
His name was Henry B. Leland. Henry Leland had been unhoused in Wenatchee in 1986, part of the same transient community Carol belonged to. The two of them were not strangers. According to the Wenatchee Police Department, they had been seen together in the days before Carol was killed. Investigators believed the two of them had been alone at the time of the attack.
Leland knew the area around the Stanley Civic Centre the same way Carol did. The parking lots, the alleys, the spaces where people slept and where they were left alone. He was someone she knew. After the murder, Leland continued moving between Wenatchee and Kamloops, British Columbia, a city in the interior of the province about 200 miles north of the border.
He lived the same transient life he had lived before, crossing back and forth between the two cities for years. Nobody ever questioned him about Carol’s death. He was never fingerprinted or asked to provide a biological sample. The same conditions that made Carol difficult to investigate as a victim made Leland invisible as a suspect.
Neither of them showed up in the systems detectives used to build cases, the records of employment, the listed addresses, the documented relationships. He was as hard to find as she had been. In Kamloops, Leland became known to the social services community. People who worked in shelters and outreach programs recognized him.
He slept outside when the shelters were full and moved through the same cycle of soup kitchens, warming centers, and temporary beds that thousands of homeless people in small Canadian cities move through. Over the years, he became one of the recognizable figures of the city’s unhoused community, a man whose face was known to the workers and volunteers who kept people like him alive through Kamloops winters.
On December 5th, 2007, Henry Leland died of hypothermia in Kamloops. He was found outside, alone, after a winter night on the streets. He was indigenous, and his death moved a city where homelessness was already a visible and growing problem. Bob Hughes, the executive officer of ASK Wellness Society, later spoke about what the loss had meant in Kamloops.
“Many folks, not even street involved, knew of him,” Hughes said. “People felt they had to do something to recognize a man who had died on the city’s streets, and the death became a flashpoint for conversations about supportive housing.” In 2009, 2 years after Leland’s death, the province of British Columbia opened a 28-unit supportive housing facility at 506 St.
Paul Street in downtown Kamloops. The building had previously been the Whistler Inn, purchased by the province for $1.2 million in 2007, and renovated at a total project cost of $4.45 million. It was Kamloops’ first Housing First project for the unhoused, with a $2.3 million provincial grant covering most of the renovation.
The building was funded by BC Housing, operated by ASK Wellness, and called by the province a step toward breaking the cycle of homelessness in British Columbia. The province named the building the Henry Leland House. A BC government press release at the opening described Leland as an aboriginal man who had lived on the streets of Kamloops for many years, and was regarded by the community as a kind soul.
The sign went up on the building in letters large enough to read from the street, on a downtown Kamloops corner that pedestrians passed every day. For 17 years, residents of the city walked past a facility named after a man who had beaten and sexually a woman behind a civic center across the border in Washington state.
Social workers operated programs inside a building that carried his name. People who had experienced homelessness slept in rooms under a sign honoring his memory. School children passed it on the way to class. Visitors to Kamloops who saw the sign on St. Paul’s Street had no reason to think the building was anything other than what the province had said it was when it opened.
Bob Hughes and the staff of ASK Wellness ran their programs out of a building named for one of the men they had originally set out to help. The story the province had carved into the sign in 2009 was the only one the city had ever heard about him. The name went unchallenged for 17 full years. Nobody knew.
On May 14th, 2026, exactly 40 years to the day after Carol’s body was found, the Wenatchee Police Department announced that the case had been solved. Sergeant Joe Eaton served as the department’s spokesperson at the press conference in Wenatchee. In an official statement, the department called the identification a significant breakthrough in a case that had remained unresolved for nearly 39 years.
The department credited the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, Authram, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Governor Bob Ferguson, Attorney General Nick Brown, and the Washington State Legislature for funding the forensic work that had made the identification possible. “We had no answers for 38 years,” Eaton said, “and here we are, two years past that, at the 40-year mark, where we get to recognize and give that little bit of closure.
” He told reporters it was incredible that the case had been carried as cold, not closed, for so long. Detectives could still walk into the property room and pull out items of evidence from 38, 39, 40 years ago, and get a positive hit. The big question that remained, Eaton said, was why Carol had been killed.
It would have been great if Leland was still alive so investigators could ask him for the answer. The department thanked Carol’s family for never giving up and for remaining determined to find her killer. “She would have been 75 years old,” the department’s statement read. “Detective Sergeant Weatherman, who had reopened the case in January 2023 and pushed the evidence through to Authrem, had already retired by the time the announcement was made.
” The work he had started in 2023 produced the answer he had spent two years pursuing, and he was already out of uniform when it landed. No charges were filed. The suspect had been dead for 19 years, frozen on a Kamloops street nearly two decades before his name reached the public.
The case was closed as solved, but would never see a courtroom. Six days after the announcement, on May 20th, 2026, Wellness took down the Henry Leland House sign. Bob Hughes told CBC that removing it was more than courteous. It was the right thing to do. He told CFJC that the situation showed the perils of naming a building after someone, no matter how well-intentioned the gesture had been or how widely supported.
The naming had been intended to honor a man the community had grieved. “Now it meant something else, something the city could not have known back then. Leland had not been the person they had known,” Hughes said, “and had obviously committed a horrendous offense.” The building would remain nameless while ASK Wellness consulted with elders from the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc and the Skeetchestn Indian Band to select a new name.
“In due time,” Hughes said, “an appropriate name would be identified.” He said it was critical to cleanse the building of the trauma that name had left on it. The facility still stood, and the rooms still housed people. Only the name changed. A 35-year-old woman was killed behind a civic center on a quiet spring night in 1986.
The man who did it froze to death 21 years later alone on a Kamloops street and a province named a building after him in his memory. The sign stayed up for 17 long years. 40 years after the murder, the DNA finally took the sign down. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
