A woman was murdered and left naked on the riverbed in 1988. The police just named her killer

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More than three decades after the body of a murdered Washington woman was found in a riverbed, investigators have used DNA technology to identify her suspected killer.

Tracy Whitney was 18 years old when she disappeared on August 28, 1988, after leaving a Burger King restaurant following an argument with friends.

The next day, fishermen found her naked body in a gravel bed right where the Puyallup and White Rivers converge.

Tracy suffered multiple blunt force injuries and is believed to have been sexually assaulted. Her cause of death was asphyxia due to strangulation and probably asphyxia. A murder was determined and police took DNA swabs from her body.

Despite countless interviews with everyone who knew or dated Tracy, Pierce County investigators were unable to link anyone to her murder.

In 2005, the suspect’s DNA found in her body was sent to a federal database, but no matches could be found and the case was dropped.

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Then, in 2022, with the help of a grant from the Washington state attorney general’s office, a cold case detective sergeant submitted the DNA to a genetic genealogy lab — and received a match.

John Guillot Jr. has been identified as a suspect, according to a news release from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office.

However, he died in 2022 at the age of 65, just eight months before he was identified. Investigators matched the suspect’s DNA to his biological son to confirm that Guillot Jr. was indeed their suspect.

“If John G. Jr. had been alive today, law enforcement would have had probable cause to make an arrest,” said Pierce County Sheriff’s Detective Lindsay Kirkegaard. “By our standards, he was the suspect and he would have been arrested for the crime.”

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Guillot Jr. was questioned in connection with the death of his girlfriend in 2010 and the death of his wife in 2020, although he was never arrested or charged in the death of either, according to documents obtained by KING5.

There are no known connections between Tracy and Guillot Jr. and investigators believe this was a case of kidnapping, rape and murder by a stranger, according to the news release.

In an interview with KING5 News, Tracy’s father, Ronald Whitney, noted the importance of advances in DNA technology and genetic genealogy, and how significant developments in other cases provided hope for his daughter’s case.

“When the Golden State Killer was caught, I said, ‘This is it, this is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for,'” he said, referring to how DNA helped track down the Golden State Killer years to grab.

For years, Tracy’s family hoped for answers about her murder. But that hope faded with each passing year without news.

“I came to the conclusion that the only way we could find out what happened or who murdered my daughter was to walk through the front door of the police station,” her father said.

Whitney remembers Tracy as a happy girl who always had a twinkle in her eye. He said the pain of losing his daughter has not faded.

“It’s something that never leaves your mind, every day, I don’t think the grief will ever go away,” he said. “It’s the first thing I think about in the morning, it’s the last thing I think about at night.”

The case is now officially closed and is classified as “exceptionally resolved – perpetrator dead,” according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department.

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While the identification of a suspect in Tracy’s murder brings some closure, the family continues to wrestle with the idea that they will never find out exactly what happened.

“In my head I imagined that we would go to trial and I would sit in the courtroom, look him in the eyes and watch him be sentenced to death or life in prison,” Robin Whitney said.

“It’s kind of an empty feeling because now we know who did it. We know some background information about him, but we will never find out the true story of what actually happened.”