On a November night in 1987, in the mountain town of Flagstaff, Arizona, a 24-year-old college student was found outside her apartment stabbed 20 times. The wounds were grouped tight, all of them within a space smaller than a hand. There was blood on the ground that wasn’t hers. Somebody else bled at that scene.
Detectives collected it, sealed it up, and put it in a storage room. In 1987, no lab in Arizona could tell them whose it was. That blood sat in a box for 38 years. Her name was Ina Claire Langstaff. She was born on January 19th, 1963, in Phoenix. She’d grown up in the Phoenix area in the East Valley, attended high school in the Maricopa County School District, lived for a time in Georgia where she had family, and then moved back to Arizona to live with her brother and aunt before enrolling at Northern Arizona University in the fall of 1987.
She was a political science major with a minor in French, which meant evening language labs on the north side of campus and long hours in the library between classes. She was 24 years old, older than most first semester students, and 10 weeks into her classes when she was killed. She’d taken a different path to college than most of the 18-year-olds around her, but she was there, starting something new in a mountain town 150 miles from where she’d grown up.
Flagstaff sits at 7,000 ft in the Ponderosa pines of northern Arizona, about 150 miles north of Phoenix on Interstate 17, and about 80 miles south of the Grand Canyon. It’s a mountain town with long winters and a college feel. Yeah, if you’ve driven from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon, you’ve passed through it.
NAU brought about 12,000 students into a community of roughly 40,000 people. Ina lived in an apartment on Tucson Avenue in the Old Town neighborhood, a quiet area of older homes and small buildings about six blocks from campus. On the night of November 7th, 1987, someone attacked Ina outside her apartment. There was no robbery.
Her purse was untouched. There was no break-in. Nobody forced their way inside. Nothing was taken. Someone came to her building, attacked her, and left. The weapon was never found, and investigators couldn’t tell what kind of blade was used. Detectives from the Flagstaff Police Department responded immediately. They went door-to-door around Tucson Avenue, talking to residents, students, anyone who might have been nearby that night.
But in 1987, DNA testing was brand new. The FBI wouldn’t build CODIS, its national DNA database, for another 11 years. Nobody in Arizona could run DNA at that point. No state lab could do it. No private lab offered it. The blood and skin cells from the scene went into storage at the police department and stayed there.
The investigation ran hard through the winter of 1987 and into the spring of 1988. Detectives talked to everyone they could find, classmates at NAU, neighbors, people who knew Ina from Phoenix and Georgia, staff on campus. They tried to figure out what her last few weeks looked like, whether anything had changed, whether she’d met someone new, whether anyone had a reason to come to her apartment that night.
They looked at whether she’d had problems with anyone, whether anybody had been watching her or following her, or whether any of her relationships had turned bad recently. The Coconino County Sheriff’s Office and the Arizona Department of Public Safety pitched in with extra investigators. A tip line brought leads from across northern Arizona and as far south as Phoenix and Tucson.
They checked every name against criminal records. They looked for anyone with a history of violence against women anywhere in the area. They ran checks across several counties. They showed up at bars, restaurants, the NAU campus, the neighborhood around Tucson Avenue. Four detectives worked it full-time for months, pulling away from other cases to focus on Ena’s.
They checked alibis, work schedules, and vehicle records for every person who came up as a possibility. They looked at everyone from ex-boyfriends to strangers who’d been seen in the area. Nobody matched, and neighbors said they didn’t hear anything that night. Flagstaff in November is cold enough that people keep their windows shut and stay inside after dark.
The apartment was on a quiet residential block, and the attack happened without any witnesses. Every lead was run down and cleared. The evidence from the scene was there, sitting in storage at the police department, but nobody could test it. DNA work didn’t exist in Arizona in 1987. There was no state lab equipped to do it, and no private lab in the state offered the service either.
Detectives had the killer’s blood and skin cells sealed in an evidence bag and no way to read them. The science that would eventually solve the case hadn’t been invented yet. The case went cold before the end of 1988, but was never officially closed. Over the next 38 years, detectives kept pulling the file, rereading the original reports, and looking for something that might have been missed the first time around.
The department assigned a new detective to the case every few years as people retired or transferred out. At least five different detectives worked it between 1988 and 2024. Each one came to the same conclusion. The physical evidence was there, but the technology to read it wasn’t. The file got thicker with review notes over the decades, but the answer stayed the same.
Nobody was ever named as a suspect. No arrests were made. Iina’s case just sat there, waiting for somebody to figure out how to read what was in that evidence bag. In 2003, a detective formally requested the state crime lab to run DNA analysis on the evidence from the scene. The lab had a massive backlog of cases from across Arizona, and the request never got processed.
And it sat in a queue and was never completed. 7 years later, in 2010, another detective wrote in the case file that the evidence should be tested, but the department didn’t have the budget to send it to an outside private lab. Flagstaff has about 130 officers covering a growing city of more than 70,000 people. And cold case lab work costs thousands of dollars per submission.
Active cases with living suspects always took priority over decades-old evidence from unsolved murders. The blood from Iina’s crime scene stayed in storage for another 15 years after that request. Iina’s family waited. They never stopped pushing. County Attorney Ammon Barker would later say they’d waited nearly four decades for answers.
Authorities credited them publicly for keeping the pressure on. CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database, came online in 1998. The idea is simple. When someone gets convicted of a serious crime, the state takes their DNA and puts it in the system. From then on, if crime scene evidence from an unsolved case gets tested and uploaded, the system automatically checks it against every profile in the database.
If there’s a match, it spits it out. By the 2020s, CODIS had millions of profiles from every state in the country. But it only works if both sides are there. The criminal’s DNA and the crime scene DNA. You need both halves for the system to make a connection. In most cold cases, the problem is the killer’s DNA isn’t in the system. Maybe he was never caught for anything else.
In Aina’s case, it was the opposite. The killer’s DNA was already in CODIS. It had been there since the late 1990s. The answer was sitting in the database the whole time. Go Flagstaff just couldn’t get their evidence tested. The 2003 request never got done. The 2010 request never got funded. For 27 years, the match was right there with nobody on the other end to find it.
Three years after Aina’s murder, on a night in June 1990, a man knocked on the door of a woman’s apartment in Phoenix. He told her he needed to use her phone. She opened the door and let him in. Once inside, he punched her in the face and knocked her to the ground. He grabbed a barbecue fork from her kitchen counter and stabbed her repeatedly in the back and chest with it.
Then, he picked up a kitchen knife and cut her throat. The whole thing lasted minutes. The woman was alone in her apartment. She’d opened the door to a stranger who asked for help, and he tried to kill her with her own kitchen tools. She was still alive when he left. She dragged herself across the floor of her apartment, leaving a trail of blood through the hallway, out the front door, and down the corridor to a neighbor’s door.
She was bleeding from stab wounds in her back and chest and a cut across her throat. The neighbor opened the door and called 911. Paramedics got there fast and rushed her to a Phoenix trauma center. Surgeons worked on the stab wounds and repaired the cut to her throat. She needed blood transfusions and multiple surgeries over several days.
She was in the hospital for weeks. She came close to dying more than once during her recovery. But she made it. When she was well enough to talk to detectives, she told them exactly what happened and described the man who did it. She gave them enough to work with. Phoenix police found him and arrested him within days at a place on the west side of the city. He didn’t run.
He was still in Phoenix when they came for him. He was 27 years old. He’d been living in Phoenix doing construction work and odd jobs around the city. He had no prior convictions in Arizona, even though he’d been living in Flagstaff 3 years earlier when Aina was killed. Nobody connected him to the Flagstaff case.
Nobody in Phoenix had any reason to look at an unsolved stabbing 150 miles north. The two cities are in different counties with different police departments and different case files. There was no link. He was charged with burglary and attempted murder. Attempted, not murder, because the woman survived. If she died from the stab wounds or the throat wound, the charge would have been murder.
She didn’t die. She made it out of the apartment alive and that one fact changed the charge. He was convicted and sentenced to 21 years in the Arizona prison system. He spent most of his time at a state prison near Florence, about 65 miles southeast of Phoenix. While he was locked up, the state took his DNA. Arizona started collecting DNA from convicted felons in the mid-1990s and his profile went into CODIS after the database launched in 1998.
From that point on, his genetic information was sitting in a federal database waiting to be matched against crime scene evidence from anywhere in the country. All someone had to do was test the evidence from Flagstaff and upload it. Nobody did. Not for another 27 years. He served the full 21 years and got out.
But he didn’t stop. In 2010, he went back to prison for forgery and aggravated assault. See, he got out again. In 2018, he went back again for unlawful imprisonment and criminal trespass. He kept getting locked up for different things and kept getting released. Each conviction added to a record that stretched back decades.
His DNA stayed in CODIS through all of it. By the mid-2020s, he was living in Glendale, just west of Phoenix. He was 62 years old. He’d been in and out of prison for 35 years. His DNA had been in CODIS for more than 25 of them. The whole time, the evidence from Ina’s case sat in a storage room in Flagstaff untested. Both attacks looked the same.
A man showing up at a woman’s apartment and stabbing her in the chest and back at close range. Both victims were women in their 20s living alone. Ina’s case was in Flagstaff. The 1990 attack was in Phoenix, 150 miles south. Back then, two police departments didn’t share cases across county lines the way they do now.
There was no shared database, no system that flagged similar crimes in different cities. Phoenix detectives working a stabbing in 1990 had no reason to call Flagstaff about a stabbing from 3 years earlier. They were different departments in different counties with different filing systems. Nobody ever looked at the two cases side by side.
The woman who survived the 1990 attack is the reason Ina’s case was solved. Without her crawling out of that apartment with a slashed throat, finding a neighbor, and telling police who did it, his DNA would never have been in any database. She’s not named in any public reporting on Ina’s case, but the whole thing traces back to her.
Her survival put him in prison, and his prison sentence put his DNA in CODIS. Yet, when the Flagstaff evidence was finally tested 35 years later, his profile was already there waiting. His name was James Arthur Runnels Jr. He was born in 1963 in Arizona. He’d been living in Flagstaff in 1987 at the time of Ina’s murder. Records from that period put him in the area during the fall of that year.
Employment records and utility accounts confirmed he was in Coconino County when she was killed, living in the same small city where Ina was 10 weeks into her first semester. He left sometime before 1990 and moved south to Phoenix, where he attacked the woman 3 years later. After prison and the later convictions, he ended up in Glendale and lived there quietly for more than a decade.
Nobody from the Flagstaff Police Department ever came looking for him. His name had never come up in the investigation. In 2025, a new group of cold case detectives pulled the Flagstaff file one more time. They went through every item in the evidence box and found samples from the 1987 crime scene that had never been through modern DNA testing.
The evidence had been sitting in storage for nearly four decades. Some of it had broken down over the years, but the key samples were still intact. Nobody had ever run them through the kind of testing that was now available. They sent the samples to two labs. One was the state crime lab in Flagstaff. The other was Bode Technology, a private DNA firm in Virginia that specializes in pulling profiles from old evidence.
The department had to fight for the budget. Cold case lab work costs thousands of dollars, and a department of 130 officers doesn’t have unlimited funding. Yet, the detectives who pushed for it argued the evidence deserved one more try. They’d seen what modern DNA work could do with old cases around the country.
A supervisor approved the expense, and the samples went out. Bode ran the samples through methods designed for old, degraded material. The techniques had come a long way since 2003 and 2010, when the earlier requests had gone nowhere. DNA science in 2025 could pull genetic information from samples that would have been useless 10 or 15 years earlier.
This time, enough material had survived to build a profile. They pulled a male DNA profile strong enough to search through CODIS. For the first time in 38 years, Flagstaff had something to put into the database. The match came back within weeks. It was James Arthur Runnels Jr., convicted of the 1990 Phoenix attack, whose DNA had been in CODIS for more than 25 years.
He’d been living in Flagstaff in 1987 when Ena was killed. He’d attacked a woman in Phoenix in 1990 with the same kind of close-range stabbing. He’d been in and out of prison for 35 years on charges that included assault, forgery, unlawful imprisonment, and criminal trespass. After 38 years, the system finally connected him to Ena’s murder.
Flagstaff detectives spent weeks building their case after the CODIS hit. They pulled his records going back to the 1980s and confirmed he’d been in Coconino County during the fall of 1987. They reviewed every detail of the original crime scene alongside the 1990 Phoenix attack and documented the similarities between the two cases.
The Coconino County Attorney’s Office reviewed the evidence and agreed there was enough to take to a grand jury. Finally, on March 19th, 2026, a Coconino County Grand Jury indicted Runnels for first-degree murder nearly 39 years after the crime. Four days later, Flagstaff detectives drove down to Glendale and arrested him at his home on the west side of Phoenix.
They brought him back north to the county jail in Flagstaff. He was 62 years old. He pleaded not guilty at his first court appearance. A judge set bond at $1 million cash only. Coconino County Attorney Ammon Barker announced the arrest alongside the Flagstaff Police Department on March 24th. Inez’s family was there.
Barker spoke directly about what the case had meant to them. Inez’s family has waited nearly four decades for answers, he said. “Our office has worked diligently to follow the evidence and take this important step toward justice for Ms. Langstaff, her family, and our community. He faces life in prison if convicted.
The case is still pending in Coconino County. Investigators said they are looking into whether Runnels may be connected to other unsolved cases in Arizona during the years he was free between prison sentences. Inez Claire Langstaff was 24 years old. She was studying political science and French 10 weeks into her first semester at Northern Arizona University.
She’d moved up to Flagstaff from Phoenix to start college. She was stabbed 20 times outside her apartment on a cold November night and nobody was charged for 39 years. The woman who survived being stabbed with a barbecue fork and having her throat cut in a Phoenix apartment 3 years later is the reason the case was solved.
She crawled out, found a neighbor, and told police who did it. That put his DNA in a database. One woman survival solved another woman’s murder. If you enjoyed this case, go check out the other 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.
