MONTREAL 1975 Cold Case Solved After 48 Years — They Opened a Grave to Prove It

#ColdCaseSolved #ColdCase #DNA On the Saturday of Easter weekend, 1975, 16-year-old Sharron Prior left her house in Pointe-Saint-Charles, Montreal, to walk five blocks to a pizzeria where her friends were waiting. She had spent the afternoon painting eggs at the kitchen table. She never arrived. Three days later a beekeeper found her body fifteen miles away, across the river in Longueuil. Beside her in the snow was a man's shirt. Size 17 collar, thirty-four inch sleeves. It was not hers. Detectives concluded it had been used to tie her hands, and then it sat in an evidence box for forty-seven years. The case had a sketch, a shirt size, a shoe size and a tire track. What it did not have was one police force that owned all of it. Thirteen investigators came and went. More than a hundred suspects were cleared. Her mother, Yvonne Prior, spent forty-eight years refusing to let the file close. The man who left that shirt was an American truck driver named Franklin Maywood Romine, who fled to Canada on bond in 1974 and died in Montreal in 1982. No DNA database could ever have found him. What found him was the Y chromosome, which passes from father to son almost unchanged, and so does the surname. In May 2023, with a court order from a West Virginia judge, Canadian detectives stood in an Appalachian cemetery and opened his grave. This documentary covers who Sharron was, the attempted abduction on the same street thirty minutes earlier that nobody connected for forty-seven years, why splitting one crime across two police forces buried it, and how a shirt left behind in a field finally named a man who had been dead for four decades. 🔔 Subscribe to Cold Case Reckoning for in-depth documentaries on Canadian cases that remained unsolved for years, and the investigations that finally uncovered the truth. #ColdCase #Quebec #TrueCrime #ColdCaseSolved #DNA #SharronPrior #Montreal #GeneticGenealogy #ForensicScience #Documentary #Justice #Canada #ColdCaseReckoning 📚 REFERENCES & FURTHER READING CBC News — Longueuil police identify Franklin Romine after 48 years CBC News — How a new DNA technique cracked a case cold since 1975 WCHS Eyewitness News — The exhumation petition and Romine's West Virginia record CTV W5 — Finding Sharron's Killer Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia — State v. Romine, 272 S.E.2d 680 (1980) sharronprior.com — The Prior family's own account of March 29th, 1975