Trashed Evidence: How a Vanilla Coke Can Solved a 41-Year Colorado Cold Case

Trashed Evidence: How a Vanilla Coke Can Solved a 41-Year Colorado Cold Case

Police make an arrest 40 years after a woman is murdered in her Cherry Hills home. Sylvia Quail’s body was found in August of 1981. She had been sexually assaulted, stabbed, and shot. Kelly Worthman joins us from our 24-hour News studio tonight, CBSN. And Kelly, talk about not giving up on a case. We did learn more today about that suspect.

 He was arrested in Nebraska earlier this month after investigators were able to match DNA from a vanilla Coke can to evidence found at the scene decades ago. I can’t imagine as a father myself of a young woman about this age to have a morning like that. And I know he’s not here. And for me, that’s part of the hardest part of solving these 40-year-old cases is that some of the people that want answers, that need closure, they don’t get it because they’re gone.

 He took her life in her own living room, walked free for the next 40 years, got married, and raised kids. Sylvia Quail never got any of that. She stayed 34 forever. Here’s what makes this case strange. Investigators collected 140 pieces of evidence from her house within days of her death. That’s more physical evidence than almost any case in Colorado at that time.

 And it still took 41 years to name her killer. This wasn’t a case with nothing to go on. It was a case with too much evidence and no way to read it yet. What finally broke it open didn’t come from a lab test or a jailhouse confession. It came from a completely different kind of search. One that turned thousands of total strangers into unknowing witnesses.

 It changed how cold cases get solved in this country. Sylvia May Quail lived on South Ogden Street in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado. It was an affluent suburb south of Denver, home to just over 6,000 people, the kind of place named for a grove of cherry trees that once grew there. Sylvia was 34 years old.

 She worked as a secretary at an architecture firm, driven by a deep fascination with her uncle Wesley Quail’s architectural designs, but her real creative outlet was building wedding cakes for her own business, The Buttery, and spinning pottery pieces her sister still keeps in her home today. Sylvia was close to her family in a way that shaped her entire daily routine.

She lived near her parents on purpose so she could see them constantly. Every single morning, without exception, she had coffee with them. On the night of August 3rd, 1981, Sylvia talked to her younger sister on the phone. It was around 11 p.m. It was an ordinary call, the kind sisters have all the time, about nothing in particular.

 Neither of them knew it would be the last conversation they’d ever have. The next morning, when Sylvia didn’t show up for coffee, her father, William, didn’t wait around. He walked the short distance to her house. As he approached, he noticed something wrong before he even reached the door.

 Both the screen door and the front door of her home were standing wide open. He stepped inside. What he found broke something in him that never fully healed. Sylvia was lying on the living room floor, her clothing in complete disarray from a clearly violent struggle. A white towel had been placed over her face. His daughter, the woman who had coffee with him every single morning of her adult life, was gone.

William called the police immediately. But in the panic and horror of that moment before officers arrived, he did something a father does instinctively, and a detective never would. He moved the towel. He tried to cover her. Tried to give her some kind of dignity in the worst moment of both of their lives. When police got there, they had to ask him to help put everything back exactly the way he’d found it.

 Imagine being asked to recreate the exact scene you just uncovered just minutes after realizing your daughter was gone. When investigators took over the room, they didn’t find the chaotic hallmarks of a burglary gone wrong. What they found looked terrifyingly controlled, deliberate. The way the scene was arranged told them immediately that whoever did this had a plan.

 This wasn’t an accident that spiraled out of control. This was intentional from the first move. Sylvia spoke to her sister at 11 p.m. Her father found her body just before 8:00 a.m. Somewhere in those 9 hours, a shadow had entered her home through doors that should have been locked. Left behind absolutely no name or face for detectives in 1981 to hold on to and walked away.

 He left behind a family whose lives were permanently fractured and a living room full of physical evidence that no one yet knew how to read. Whoever did this had come prepared. prepared enough that Sylvia never had the chance to call for help, never had the chance to run, never had a fair shot at surviving the night. And somewhere out there, the man responsible was already walking away into the Colorado morning, carrying nothing with him but the certainty that no one would ever connect him to that house on South Ogden Street. He had no idea he would

get away with it for 41 years. and neither did the detective standing in that quiet living room, staring down at a mountain of physical evidence with absolutely no name to attach to any of it. The coroner’s report would later spell out exactly what Sylvia went through in her final minutes, and it read like an attack that never led up.

First, there was clear evidence of an intense physical struggle focused on her neck. Investigators found Marks proving her attacker had physically overpowered her before the assault escalated further. But strangulation alone didn’t kill her. The attack kept escalating. Sylvia suffered three severe sharp force injuries to her upper back.

 The trauma was immense. And the coroner ultimately ruled that the internal damage from those wounds was the primary cause of her passing. On top of everything else, her attacker used a third method, a final firearm discharge. The medical examiner listed this as a secondary factor, concluding that the earlier trauma had likely already taken her life before this final act occurred.

 Three separate methods: strangulation, stabbing, and a gunshot. This wasn’t someone who panicked and struck once. This was someone who kept going. Sylvia fought back. When investigators processed the scene, they noted her hands were covered in blood and her fingernails were broken. Near her body, they found a bloody knife. nearby.

 They also uncovered evidence indicating she had been severely compromised and assaulted before her life was taken. Blood wasn’t confined to the living room either. There was a pool of blood behind the front door. And inside her bedroom, a significant amount of blood was found on her pillow.

 Drops of blood were also found on the floor between the bed and the bedroom door, tracing a path that suggested the attack didn’t start where her body was found. It started somewhere else in the house and moved. Even if Sylvia had survived long enough to crawl to a phone, it wouldn’t have mattered. The phone line inside her home had been deliberately cut.

 Outside the house, the line running to the property had also been pulled down and severed. When detectives searched the area that morning, they found the wire lying directly across the hood of Sylvia’s 1974 Chevrolet Corvette parked near the garage. He hadn’t just cut a wire somewhere out of sight. He’d worked completely in the open right next to her car, taking a massive risk.

 Someone had made absolutely certain that no matter what happened inside, Sylvia would have no way to call for help. The way the killer actually got inside told an even stranger story. Investigators found a small hole cut into the corner of the screen on Sylvia’s bedroom window. That was where he tried to get in first.

 But something about that attempt didn’t work, so he moved on. He tried the bathroom window instead, and that’s where he finally succeeded. The screen from that window had been completely removed and was later discovered nearly 75 ft away from the house, tossed into a patch of tall weeds. There was also a small pry mark on the bottom of the wooden window frame.

 Evidence that he’d physically forced his way through. A random burglar looking for an easy target doesn’t try one window, fail, and then calmly move to a second window and force it open. Someone in a hurry, someone acting on impulse, gives up and leaves. This person didn’t leave. He adapted. Once inside, investigators believe he took his time.

 Items you’d expect to find on a bathroom counter, not scattered across the ground outside, were later found directly beneath the window he’d broken through, as if he’d knocked them out of his way without a second thought. Whatever he was doing in those first few minutes inside Sylvia’s home, he wasn’t rushing.

 Investigators in 1981 had detail after detail. They had blood trails leading from her bedroom into her living room. They had a weapon left behind at the scene. They had evidence of an assault, two separate forced entry attempts, and a clear sequence of events that moved from physical restraint to sharp force injuries and finally a firearm discharge.

 He had left behind critical biological material, fibers, and an entire timeline of cold, calculated decisions written into the architecture of the house itself. And still, standing in that room, detectives had no idea who he was, where he’d gone, or whether he would ever strike again. Every piece of evidence in that house told them the same thing.

 This man had planned, adapted, and executed without hesitation. That should have made him easier to find. Instead, it left them with a mountain of proof and not a single name to attach to it. The trail, despite everything it contained, was about to go completely cold, and it would stay that way for longer than anyone standing in that living room could have ever imagined.

 Investigators also collected a piece of evidence that would matter far more than anyone in that room could have guessed at the time. Underneath Sylvia’s body, spread out on the living room floor, was an orange area rug. Detectives bagged it along with everything else without knowing that this single piece of carpet was carrying biological material invisible to the naked eye.

 Material that current lab methods in 1981 had no way to isolate or read. It would sit in storage unremarkable among 140 other collected items, waiting for science to catch up to what was already sitting inside its fibers. Quick reminder before we keep going.

 It really helps this channel grow. Drop a comment and let us know where in the world you’re watching from. And if cold cases like this one are your thing, we’ve got more solved cases linked in the description below. Go check them out after this. Detectives went to work interviewing everyone who knew Sylvia. Co-workers, friends, neighbors on South Ogden Street, people she dated.

 One by one, names got checked and cleared. But one name from her past didn’t get the scrutiny it should have. A man who had a history with Sylvia was mentioned to the police. And for reasons that wouldn’t come to light for decades, that lead never got the follow through it deserved. At the time, nobody flagged it as a problem.

 It would take years before anyone realized what had been left on the table. With no suspect and no fingerprints, investigators leaned on the only thing they had, the evidence itself. That included the orange rug pulled from underneath Sylvia’s body, sitting in storage since the day of her murder. In 1983, two years after the crime, forensic technicians tested the rug using an alternate light source.

 It worked. They found foreign biological material hidden in the fibers, invisible to the naked eye. Material that had been there the entire time. For the first time since Sylvia’s death, investigators had something concrete tying an unknown person directly to the scene. That same year, the case took a turn nobody expected.

 A drifter named Ois Elwood Tulle confessed to killing Sylvia. Tulle didn’t just claim responsibility. He described specific details about her property, the trees and hedges surrounding her home. Details that sounded like they could only come from someone who’d actually been there. Investigators took his confession seriously enough to formally charge him with first-degree murder.

 For a moment, it looked like the case was finally closed, but Tulle came with a complicated history. He traveled and confessed to killings alongside his companion, Henry Lee Lucas. And between the two of them, they claimed responsibility for an almost unbelievable number of murders across the country.

 Some of those confessions turned out to be true. Many others didn’t hold up under scrutiny. Tulle had a documented pattern of inserting himself into cases that weren’t his. For 10 years, Sylvia’s case sat charged to a man who may or may not have actually done it. Then in 1993, DNA testing caught up to the claim. The biological material recovered from that rug back in 1983 was compared against Tulle’s DNA.

It didn’t match. Tulle hadn’t been at that house. He hadn’t killed Sylvia. Then district attorney Bob Gallagher dropped the charges completely. The case wasn’t solved. It had never been solved. For 10 years, a man who had nothing to do with Sylvia’s death had absorbed all of the investigative attention.

 While the person who actually killed her walked free, unquestioned, unbothered, living whatever life he wanted. Tulle, meanwhile, wasn’t innocent of everything. He had already been sentenced to death twice for other murders he did commit. sentences that were later commuted to life in prison. He went on to receive four more life sentences in other cases before he died in a Florida prison in 1996.

With tool eliminated, Sylvia’s case went back to square one. But at least now there was real biological evidence to work with. In 1995, the section of carpet was sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for further testing. It took five more years, but by 2000, technicians had developed a complete DNA profile of the Y unknown man who had left that material behind.

 It was entered into the FBI’s national database, waiting for a match against convicted offenders. Nothing came back. The killer’s DNA simply wasn’t in the system. The tool built to trap him was powerless against a man who had never been caught for anything serious enough to land his genetics in a federal database.

 So the profile sat, not deleted, not forgotten, just waiting inside a digital void that required the killer to get arrested again for the science to work. Year after year, detectives checked back to a blank screen. Investigators moved on to other cases, retired, and were replaced by new ones who inherited the same unanswered file.

 The rug, the towel, the knife, the underwear, all 140 pieces of evidence from that August morning stayed exactly where they had been logged, waiting on a technology gap nobody could close by simply trying harder. Two decades passed with that genetic profile sitting untouched in the dark, technically solvable, practically unreachable. What it would eventually take wasn’t another arrest, another confession, or another 20 years of hoping the same database might finally produce a match.

 It would take an entirely different kind of science. One that had nothing to do with searching a list of convicted criminals and everything to do with a digital drag net nobody investigating this case in 1981 could have ever imagined. In January 2020, 39 years after Sylvia’s murder, Cherry Hills Village Police started working with a company called United Data Connect.

 It was founded by Mitch Morrisy, a former Denver District Attorney who had turned his career toward a completely different kind of investigation. His team didn’t get involved because someone reopened Sylvia’s file out of nowhere. They got involved because they’ just helped solve a separate cold case in Jefferson County.

 and word reached the detectives still holding on to Sylvia’s unsolved murder that this method might finally work where 20 years of database searching hadn’t. The approach itself had nothing to do with matching a criminal database. Investigators uploaded the unknown DNA profile from that carpet, the same profile that had sat untouched since 2000, to two public genealogy websites, GED Match and Family Tree DNA.

 These weren’t law enforcement tools. They were the same sites regular people used to find longlost relatives and build out their family history. The unknown killer had never submitted his own DNA to either site. But somewhere out there, distant cousins of his had without any idea what that decision would eventually unlock. The genetic matches came back and investigators started building a family tree.

 It didn’t start small. It started with over 3,300 people, an entire web of relatives, second cousins, distant branches, and unrelated names connected only by fragments of shared DNA. Somewhere buried inside those 3,300 people was the answer to a murder that had gone unsolved for nearly four decades.

 Investigators had to work backward through that tree, tracing which branches connected to which families, cross-referencing ages, locations, and criminal histories, slowly eliminating thousands of people who had absolutely nothing to do with Sylvia’s death. Eventually, the tree narrowed to one name, David Dwayne Anderson. In 1981, he was 22 years old and living in Englewood, a town less than 2 miles from Sylvia’s home in Cherry Hills Village.

 That distance alone made him worth a closer look. But when investigators started digging into his background, they found something else. Anderson had a criminal record stretching from 1976 to 1988, made up almost entirely of burglaries. In June 1981, just two months before Sylvia’s murder, he was arrested twice. Then in October 1981, 2 months after the murder, he was arrested again, this time in Jefferson County, a charge that landed him a 3-year prison sentence.

 He had been active, close by, and repeatedly breaking into homes during the exact window surrounding Sylvia’s death. Investigators still needed one thing before they could move forward. his actual DNA collected directly, not just inferred from a family tree. In January 2021, an investigator traveled to Koad, Nebraska, where Anderson was now living.

This wasn’t a knock on the door. It was quiet surveillance, watching his routine, waiting for an opportunity that wouldn’t tip him off. Eventually, that opportunity came in the form of his own trash. The investigator retrieved bags Anderson had thrown out, and inside them was mail addressed directly to him, confirming whose trash this was.

 From those bags, roughly 15 items were pulled for potential DNA testing. A water bottle, a bottle of rum, a bottle of beer, and one can of vanilla Coke. That Coke can was the piece that mattered most. On January 29th, 2021, lab results confirmed that the DNA on that could match the DNA profile pulled from Sylvia’s crime scene 40 years earlier.

An ordinary piece of trash, something anyone might throw away without a second thought, had just closed a case that survived a false confession, a database that came up empty for 20 years, and two full generations of investigators who retired without ever learning the killer’s name.

 Anderson was arrested on February 10th, 2021 in Nebraska and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. Investigators sat him down for an interview. He denied knowing Sylvia Quail. He denied ever having been to her home. He claimed he had no idea how his DNA could possibly have ended up at the scene of her murder.

 But DNA doesn’t explain itself in an interview room. It sits there waiting for a courtroom, waiting for two sides to argue over what it actually means. Anderson wasn’t going to be able to deny the science forever. His own genetic material had already answered that question. What his defense would need instead was a different kind of argument entirely.

 Not whether his DNA was there, but why. And the story his defense team would eventually tell wouldn’t just challenge the evidence against him. It would reach back into Sylvia’s own past, into a relationship nobody had fully investigated 40 years earlier and very nearly convince a jury that the wrong man was on trial. In March 2022, David Anderson finally stood trial for Sylvia’s murder.

 On paper, it looked like an openand-shut case. His DNA matched the crime scene. His DNA matched the Coke can. The science was airtight. But after 5 days of deliberation, the jury couldn’t reach a verdict. The judge declared a mistrial. 40 years of waiting, a family tree of over 3,300 people, a quiet stakeout in Nebraska, and the case still almost slipped away in a courtroom.

 The reason it slipped came down to what Anderson’s defense argued. They didn’t try to deny the DNA. They couldn’t. Instead, they claimed that the interaction between them had been entirely mutual, attempting to explain away the presence of his biological profile at the scene. It was a claim with no supporting witness, no history between them on record anywhere, but it was enough to plant doubt.

 Then the defense went further. They pointed to a man from Sylvia’s past, her ex-boyfriend, Pete Roma. This was the same man whose history with Sylvia investigators had once passed over decades earlier. the loose thread nobody had fully pulled. The defense argued that Roma had severely mistreated and assaulted Sylvia years before her death and that Sylvia herself had told her family that if anything ever happened to her, Roma would be responsible.

 They told the jury that police had received a tip about Roma and failed to pursue it for roughly 12 years. And they pointed to something that sounded on its surface damning. Roma’s DNA had actually been found at the scene on a knife. For a moment, that detail alone could have unraveled everything. A second man’s DNA on a weapon inside Sylvia’s home.

 But it wasn’t the same knife. The bloody knife found near Sylvia’s body, the one used in the actual killing, carried no trace of Roma at all. His DNA was on a separate knife elsewhere in the house, nowhere near her wounds. and every single trace of foreign DNA recovered from Sylvia’s body itself. The DNA on her skin from the assault she suffered belonged to one person only, David Anderson.

 Not Roma, not anyone else, just Anderson. Prosecutors took the case back to trial. On June 30th, 2022, a second jury reached the verdict that the first one couldn’t guilty. On both counts of firstdegree murder, Anderson was sentenced on August 4th, 2022. That date wasn’t a coincidence anyone had planned.

 It was exactly 41 years to the day since William Quail had walked into his daughter’s home and found her body on the living room floor. Anderson received the maximum sentence allowed under the laws that existed back in 1981. Life in prison with the possibility of parole after 20 years. 20 years. Even now, even after everything, the man who ended Sylvia’s life at 34 could theoretically walk free again someday. That was the law in 1981.

 And Anderson would be judged by the rules that existed the year he committed the crime, not the rules that exist today. But there were two people who never got to see any of this. William Quail, the father who found his daughter’s body and tried to cover her with a towel before officers arrived, died in 1999.

 He spent the last 18 years of his life without ever learning who took Sylvia from him. Mary Quail, her mother, lived about a decade longer than William, and she died still waiting, too. Neither parent got to sit in that courtroom. Neither got to hear the word guilty. Neither got the chance to look at the man responsible and finally understand what happened during those nine hours between their daughter’s last phone call and the morning she didn’t show up for coffee.

Only Sylvia’s younger sister remained to carry all of it. The last person to speak to her, the one who picked up the phone at 11 p.m. on August 3rd, 1981, and had no idea it would be the final conversation of Sylvia’s life. She was the one who sat in that courtroom decades later and finally heard an answer her parents never got. 41 years.

A family tree of 3,300 strangers. A Coke can pulled from a Nebraska dumpster. A false confession that stole an entire decade. Two parents who died are still asking the same question their daughter’s murder left behind in 1981. A question that finally, quietly, got answered for the one member of their family who lived long enough to hear it.

Investigators passed over Pete Roma for 12 years, even after a family member flagged him. If you were on that jury, would his DNA on a different knife have been enough to make you doubt Anderson’s guilt? Let us know in the comments. David Anderson lived 40 years free, got married, raised kids while carrying this secret the entire time.

 Do you think people like him ever truly believe they got away with it? Or does the fear never really leave? And if Sylvia’s parents had to choose between knowing the truth but never seeing justice or seeing justice but never knowing the truth, which do you think they would have picked? Drop your answer below. If this case moved you the way it moved us, hit that like button.

 It genuinely helps get Sylvia’s story in front of more people who need to hear it. Drop a comment below with your thoughts on Pete Roma or on what finally cracked this case after 41 years. We read every single one. And if you want to be here for the next cold case we bring back into the light, make sure you’re subscribed with notifications on because justice like this doesn’t happen often, but when it does, we’ll be the ones telling you the whole story.