Investigators use DNA evidence to solve the 1987 rape and murder of a Cuyahoga Falls woman

Investigators have used DNA evidence to identify a suspect in the unsolved 1987 rape and murder of a Cuyahoga Falls woman.

They concluded that Thomas Collier Jordan was responsible for the murder of 33-year-old Janice Christensen, who was killed while jogging on a Hudson trail in August 1987.

Jordan died in Arizona in 2009 at the age of 83.

“The need for answers does not diminish with time,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said in a news release Thursday. “This case is another example of how BCI works with local law enforcement to breathe new life into cases that were once considered unsolvable.”

Yost’s Cold Case Unit worked with local police on the investigation. This was the first Summit County case investigated by the Cold Case Unit.

Unsolved: Looking back at unsolved murder cases in the Akron area and beyond

Christensen’s murder was among the first cases featured in Unresolved, a collaboration between the Beacon Journal and Ohio Mysteries that has examined unsolved murders and missing persons cases in the Akron area over the past three years.

Investigators identified Jordan by looking into a 1987 rape case that they believed might be related. The rape involved a 17-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted on a trail in Cuyahoga Falls four months before Christensen’s murder.

DNA evidence showed Jordan was responsible for both the teen’s rape and Christensen’s murder.

This story will be updated.

Stephanie Warsmith can be reached at [email protected]330-996-3705 and on X (formerly Twitter): @swarsmithabj.

This article originally appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal: DNA used to solve 1987 murder of Cuyahoga Falls woman