Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty and PA State Police
The Reading Eagle published a story on its front page in 1990 about a Pennsylvania mother who had been brutally murdered two years earlier—an article that would indirectly lead to the mother’s killer being identified 30 years later.
That woman, Anna Kane, was just 26 when she was strangled to death with a rope and her body abandoned in woodland near Hamburg, Pennsylvania, in October 1988. The paper’s story detailed her killing, and highlighted how cops were struggling to identify a suspect despite detecting a man’s DNA on her clothes and body.
A few days after publishing, the Eagle received a letter from a “concerned citizen.” Inside were “intricate” details about Kane’s slaying—details only her killer could know, cops said at the time and the Reading Eagle reported Thursday. Detectives knew the letter’s author was Kane’s killer, they just didn’t know who wrote it.