AKRON, Ohio – A single mother’s cold case murder in Ohio has been solved with an arrest after nearly 29 years.
Rachael Johnson was 23 when she was raped, beaten, stabbed and set on fire on March 30, 1991. Her body was discovered on Wellar Avenue, in Akron’s Chapel Hill area, where she was found by a passerby. At the time of her death the woman’s daughter was three-years-old.
Akron police on Thursday booked Daniel Rees, 57, on the charge of murder.
Police said Rees was identified as a suspect in 2019 after Advance DNA LLC in Texas uploaded crime scene DNA, and their work ended up leading to the suspect.
Distant relatives of Rees had uploaded their DNA to the website, leading to an eventual match, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.
“That’s the key to the whole thing,” Detective James Pasheilich said. “That’s what broke the case.”
Cheryl Hester, director of genetic genealogy at the company, said Advance DNA was able to upload the unknown DNA profile to databases that could connect it to distant relatives. After matches were found, she said they reverse engineered a family tree and narrowed down who the suspect might be. In this case, the DNA only matched very distant relatives.
“In this case, it was difficult,” she said. “It took a lot of man hours for me to work on this.”
Detective Pasheilich told the paper Rees had been in the same area where Johnson was last seen and knew the family. But Rees was never mentioned in the case file, reported the Beacon Journal.
“He’s a ghost in the investigation,” Pasheilich said. “He’s never anywhere in it.”
Online records show Rees was arrested in a felony assault case in Summit County, which includes Akron, two years after the murder. He served a six-month jail sentence after pleading guilty to a reduced charge of improper handling of a firearm in a motor vehicle, a misdemeanor.
“The family, the daughter, the grandkids, we all deserve to know what happened and have closure,” her stepmom June Johnson told Fox 8 Cleveland in 2013 for a report on the unsolved case.
“When you lose your child, you have this empty hole in your heart, you know, and you think of her every day and when you look at her daughter and what would have been her grandkids, it’s so sad,” Johnson told the station.
