A 79-year-old Colorado man, Larry Dean Brown, has been indicted over the 1981 strangulation murder of a Braniff Airlines flight attendant in Texas, after investigators secretly obtained a DNA sample from rubbish he had discarded. The genetic match is reported to have linked him to evidence from the decades-old crime scene, breathing new life into a case that had gone cold for 44 years.

Investigators reportedly compared DNA collected covertly from Brown's trash against material recovered from the original 1981 investigation, resulting in a match that led to his indictment. Details of the original case, including the victim's identity and the exact circumstances of her death, stem from the 1981 killing of the Braniff flight attendant, with the case having remained unsolved for over four decades until this breakthrough in forensic genetic testing.