Carmeline Renee Hibbs, 30, was found strangled and shoeless in a Kansas City parking lot on the night of December 19, 1987. A motorist discovered her body in a lot on Broadway; investigators collected biological evidence at the scene but the case went cold as forensic methods at the time could not identify a perpetrator.

Decades later the biological material was reexamined using advanced DNA profiling and entered into a database, producing a match to Lorenzo Gilyard. Police arrested Gilyard in April 2004 and charged him with multiple first-degree murders linked to a pattern of killings in the Kansas City area between 1977 and 1993. At a bench trial in March 2007 the judge found Gilyard guilty of six counts of first-degree murder, including Hibbs’s, and the judge later imposed life without parole.