Authorities announced Monday that a DNA match has led to the identification of a suspect in the two Southern California women’s murders that occurred decades ago.
The first murder occurred in 1987 when Shannon Rose Lloyd, then 23 years old, was discovered dead in a Garden Grove, Orange County, bedroom she was renting.
According to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office, she had been sexually molested before being fatally strangled.
Then, in 2003, a crime lab established a connection between Lloyd’s demise and the 1989 murder of 27-year-old Renee Cuevas, whose body was discovered close to a marine base in the same county.
Both cases remained unsolved until 2021, when a genetic genealogy investigation team named Reuben J. Smith as a potential candidate.
A year after being detained in Las Vegas on suspicion of sexually abusing and attempting to kill a third woman, Smith, a Las Vegas resident, committed suicide in 1999 at the age of 39, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
The victim resisted and managed to flee, according to the authorities.
