Against All Odds: The 1977 Cold Case Everyone Abandoned Has Been Solved

Against All Odds: The 1977 Cold Case Everyone Abandoned Has Been Solved

Two Honolulu Homicide Detectives walked into a nursing home in Millcreek, Utah on January 21st, 2025 and arrested a 66-year-old man in his bed. They charged him with second-degree murder in the death of a 16-year-old girl. Her body had been on the second floor of her high school in Honolulu. That was 48 years ago. The girl was Dawn Momohara.

The man had been her classmate. His DNA was on a pair of her shorts in an evidence room since 1977, but nobody could read DNA back then. Dawn Takeyo Momohara was born in December 1960 in Honolulu. Her father, Takeyo Momohara, had been killed in an industrial accident at a quarry in Nanakuli 6 months before she was born.

He never saw her. Dawn grew up without him, raised by her mother, Mabel Hanayo Momohara, and her older sister, Faye, on the island of Oahu. By the spring of 1977, Dawn was 16 years old, a sophomore at McKinley High School in Honolulu. McKinley is one of the oldest public schools in Hawaii, located in the Moiliili neighborhood near the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

 The campus is sprawling with several buildings spread across the area. The English building sat on the ground floor, accessible from outside. Dawn’s circle of friends revolved around the McKinley theater group. They’d eat lunch fast in the cafeteria and spend the rest of their break in room W123, at the drama classroom on the ground floor of the English building, running improvisation games and doing skits.

A friend named Tam Anderson, a sophomore when she met Dawn, spent lunch periods in room W123 running improv games with her. She remembered those breaks as a good time, the whole group joking around together. Another friend, Lorna Soong, who met Dawn through her older sister, Faye, described her as quiet but Anderson said later that Dawn had been in the theater group for about a year when she was killed.

 On the night of Sunday, March 20th, 1977, sometime between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., a man was driving through the McKinley campus area with his girlfriend when he noticed something odd. A car was parked on the grass near the English building, the engine off, sitting quiet. A man was walking out from the ground floor steps of that building, moving toward the parked car.

 The witness noticed something felt wrong about it. He circled his car back around to get another look to see what was happening, but the vehicle and the man were already gone. They’d left in a hurry. He said the car was a two-door hardtop with louvered rear windows, maroon on the bottom and white vinyl on top, maybe a mid-1970s Pontiac LeMans or Buick Century.

 The man near the building was Asian, about 18 to 22, between 5’5″ and 5’7″, roughly 140 to 150 lb. The next morning, Monday, March 21st, a teacher at McKinley walked into the English building shortly after 7:30 a.m. before class started. The teacher found her on the second floor in one of the hallways.

 She was lying on her back, partially clothed. An orange cloth was tied tightly around her neck, cutting off her air. The autopsy showed she’d been strangled and sexually assaulted. Scrapings from the scene and from the autopsy contained sperm. There was biological evidence, physical proof of what had happened, but the technology to read it didn’t exist yet.

Scrapings and her clothing went into evidence storage, sealed and cataloged. DNA testing didn’t exist in 1977, so the biological evidence proved a sexual assault had occurred, but couldn’t tell investigators who committed it. The best technology available was blood typing, which could narrow suspects to a percentage of the population, but couldn’t identify an individual.

McKinley is a big school with more than a thousand students. The news spread across campus that Monday morning. When students in first period heard that a girl was dead in the English building, teachers who’d been in those classrooms Friday walked past police tape to rerouted classes. The building where Dawn and her friends ran improv games was now a crime scene.

 Her mother, Mabel, buried her. Faye lost her younger sister. The friends from the theater group lost their friend from room W123. Honolulu police worked the case hard through the spring of 1977. On March 28th, 1 week after the murder, investigators interviewed two brothers who had known her.

 Both had attended McKinley. The older brother had graduated the year before, in 1976, and was in the U.S. Army Reserve. He’d come back home to Honolulu after finishing school. He told detectives he’d met her at a school dance in late 1976. He said the last time he saw her was at the McKinley Carnival in February 1977, where they talked for about 15 minutes.

They talked about school, about what was going on in their lives. He seemed to remember her. His younger brother, William, said he and Dawn talked on the phone from time to time, but denied any kind of relationship with her. Both brothers cooperated with the investigation fully. Neither got arrested and and neither got ruled out.

 Detectives had no physical evidence linking either to the crime scene. The biological material was in storage, but in 1977, they couldn’t extract a genetic profile. All they had was what the witness said about the man and the car. The investigation continued through spring and summer of 1977. Honolulu PD pulled in additional resources from the Criminal Investigations Division.

 Tips came in from across Oahu, and detectives chased every name that came through the tip line. They matched the witness’s account against everyone they could find who might have been on campus that night. The suspect was described as Asian, young, small-framed. The car had maroon and white paint and louvered windows that should have stood out.

 Nobody matching both the man and the car showed up. By the end of 1977, the case file was thick with interviews and dead-end tips, but the investigation had gone nowhere. Evidence was in storage, interviews were in the file, and the man who killed Dawn had walked out of his March 28th interview and went on living for the next 48 years.

For decades, the Honolulu Police Department kept the case. Detectives changed, supervisors changed, but the file stayed in the cold case unit. CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA profiles from convicted offenders, didn’t launch until 1998, more than 20 years after the murder. And even then, CODIS only had profiles from people required to give DNA as part of a criminal conviction.

 States passed laws about this gradually, starting in the mid-1990s. Some states required it for felonies, some for all crimes. It rolled out unevenly across the country. If he’d never been convicted of a qualifying crime, his profile wouldn’t be there. He could be walking around free and nobody would know.

 CODIS only works if the profile is already in it. The years passed. Mabel outlived her daughter by decades, but she never stopped waiting for answers. She’d lost her husband in that quarry accident before her daughter was even born. She’d raised her girls alone after that. Now she’d lost her youngest to an unsolved murder with no closure and no answers.

Faye kept her sister’s memory alive. The theater group friends graduated and moved away to different cities. They started their own lives, got married, had kids, built careers, but they stayed in touch and talked about what happened to her. Dawn never graduated or left Hawaii, and she was only 16 when she died.

 The case sat in the cold case unit at Honolulu PD. Detectives inherited the file from other detectives over the years. A 16-year-old girl dead in her own school building and no arrest in sight. Every detective who inherited the file kept working it, running down old leads and checking for new ones as investigative methods evolved over the decades.

 In March 2019, 42 years after the murder, Detective Michael Ogawa picked up the file at the Honolulu Police Department’s headquarters on South Beretania Street. He read through it carefully, saw the original interviews from 1977, saw the witness account of the man and the car, and saw the evidence notes listing biological material still in storage.

 Ogawa was part of the Homicide Strategic Enforcement Detail, a unit within HPD that handled unsolved cases. These were cases nobody else was working, cases that had gone cold decades ago and needed fresh attention. Ogawa sent a formal request to the HPD Scientific Identification Section’s Forensic Biology Unit. He asked them to reprocess items from the crime scene using modern DNA technology.

 The items included her shorts and underwear. What was impossible in 1977 became routine by 2020. Technicians at the Forensic Biology Unit isolated the biological material on the clothing, separated the male DNA from the female, and ran the tests through their equipment. In May 2020, they had results.

 A DNA criminalist had recovered the partial profile of an unidentified male from the sperm on her shorts. It wasn’t a full profile, but it was enough to match against other samples and possibly identify a suspect. Detectives ran the profile through CODIS and got no match. They waited and ran it again as the database grew. Still, nothing came back.

 The profile sat in the HPD lab with no name attached to it. Most cold cases solved by DNA follow the same path. The crime scene profile goes to a specialized lab like Astrium to extract genetic markers for genealogy. The profile gets uploaded to consumer ancestry databases where distant relatives might have tested. Genealogists then build the family tree outward from those relatives, adding names and connections until they narrow it to one person.

That strategy has solved the Yarborough case, Edwards, and hundreds of others in the last few years. It’s become the standard way investigators break open old cases. The Momohara case was different. No ancestry databases, no genealogists. The break came when detectives went back to the 1977 suspect list. In September 2023, new information led detectives back to the two brothers interviewed 1 week after the murder.

 And the older brother had been 18 or 19 when she was killed. He’d graduated from McKinley in 1976, joined the Army Reserve, and come back to Honolulu. He knew her. He’d been at the carnival with her a month before she died. He was never eliminated as a suspect in the original investigation. With help from the FBI’s Honolulu field office and Homeland Security Investigations, Honolulu detectives tracked the younger brother to Chicago on the mainland.

They got a DNA sample secretly from one of his adult children. If the younger brother left the DNA on her shorts, his child’s profile would match the crime scene profile in a parent-child way. Children inherit specific DNA markers from their biological parents in predictable patterns. A parent’s genetic profile shows up in the child’s DNA in ways forensic analysts can identify.

 E- The FBI tested it and forwarded results to HPD. The comparison ruled out the younger brother. His child’s DNA didn’t match the way it would if the father left the evidence. But it showed something else. The child’s DNA showed a biological relationship with the unidentified male on file, not parent-child with the younger brother, but familial with someone close to him.

That pointed to the older brother. The older brother left Hawaii after the murder. He moved around the mainland for decades, never staying in one place for very long. He passed through several western states over the following years. By 2025, he was 66 years old and living in a nursing home in Millcreek, Utah, outside Salt Lake City.

 He was in poor health by then, his body failing from years of chronic conditions. In early January 2025, Honolulu detectives flew to Utah and coordinated with the Unified Police Department of Greater Salt Lake. They tracked his movements carefully, watching where he went, who he saw. They wanted a biological sample without alerting him.

 Same technique they’d used for the younger brother’s child in Chicago. Simple strategy, but it required patience and coordination. Get close enough to collect something he’d touched or discarded, bag it carefully, and send it to the lab. Something he wouldn’t miss, something ordinary.

 The sample went to the FBI for processing, then to HPD for comparison against the profile from her shorts in 2020. They were looking for an exact match. The results came back positive. It was a match. The DNA on her clothing belonged to the older brother. He was the same man who sat across from detectives on March 28th, 1977, in 7 days after the murder, answering questions about the school dance and when he last saw her.

His full name was Gideon Kapono Castro. Gideon Castro was arrested on the morning of January 21st, 2025, at the nursing home in Millcreek. Officers from the Unified Police Department came with the Honolulu detectives to make the arrest. They walked into his room and took him. He was charged with second-degree murder in the 1977 death of Dawn Momohara.

 He was 66 and in failing health, but the charge still stood. Under Hawaii law, there is no statute of limitations on murder. He’d been in the investigation from the very first week. He sat across from detectives 7 days after the murder, answered their questions about the school dance and the carnival, and walked out of the room.

They couldn’t prove anything because DNA technology hadn’t been invented and the biological evidence was unreadable. After the murder, Castro left Hawaii. He moved to the mainland and spent the next several decades living in different states, working and relocating without staying in any one place for long.

He passed through California, then other western states before eventually ending up in Utah. He had no criminal record that would have put his DNA in a law enforcement database. No felony convictions, no arrests that triggered DNA collection. He lived under his own name the entire time. That’s why CODIS never found him.

 For 48 years, the evidence contained the identity of her killer, and there was no system to attach a name. His DNA was in that evidence room, but there was nothing to compare it to. Honolulu PD held a press conference on January 22nd. Detective Ogawa, who filed the request to reprocess evidence in 2019, walked the media through the timeline.

 W- He explained how long everything took, what they did, and when. The biological material sat in storage for 42 years before anyone tested it for DNA. Once the profile came back in 2020, it took 3 more years to identify suspects and another year to confirm the match.

 4 years total from the DNA result to the arrest. Dawn’s friend, Tam Anderson, spoke to The Pinion, the McKinley student newspaper, after the arrest was announced. Anderson was in her mid-60s by then, living on the mainland, decades removed from the teenager she’d been in 1977. The rest of Dawn’s theater group friends had scattered across the country over the years, building careers, raising families, but they’d stayed in touch and they’d kept talking about the girl from room W123 at McKinley.

Another friend, um a woman named Kohler, who had known Dawn through the theater group, thanked the police department for never giving up. In February 2025, Castro appeared by video from a hospital bed at an extradition hearing in Salt Lake City. His attorney said Castro would return to Hawaii voluntarily to fight the charges.

 He waived his right to challenge extradition. Then, the prosecution stalled. In March 2025, Honolulu prosecutors told Utah they weren’t ready. They cited complications involving a material witness and concerns about the evidence. Judge John Nielsen ordered Castro released. He walked out of the Salt Lake County facility on March 19th, less than 2 months after his arrest.

 A Honolulu prosecutor wrote that this was a temporary setback and the office remained committed to prosecution. As of now, Castro hasn’t been formally charged in Hawaii. The arrest warrant from Utah still stands. Castro has denied the charges through his attorney and remains free on the mainland.

 The situation left her friends and family waiting again. They’d waited 48 years for an arrest. They’d seen his name on the news and heard the DNA evidence was solid. And then he walked out of jail 2 months later. The DNA match was on the record, solid and real. The evidence was there, but the system stalled. What happened next was up to Honolulu prosecutors, and nobody knew how long that would take.

Castro was 18 or 19 when she was killed and 66 when he was arrested. He was one of the first people detectives interviewed in 1977, and they couldn’t prove anything against him. It took 48 years and a DNA test that didn’t exist in 1977 to bring his name back.