Crime & Safety
Fingerprints and Technology Lead To Arrest Of 1978 Bryn Mawr Murder
KCSO detectives arrest 50-year-old Ronald Wayne MacDonald for murdering Arlene Roberts.
Cold case detectives from the King County Sheriff's Office arrested Ronald Wayne MacDonald, age 50, late Thursday afternoon in Reno, Nevada. MacDonald was charged with the 1978 homicide of Arlene Roberts, an 80 year-old widow, was found in her small trailer in the Lakeshore Manor Mobile Home Park, 11448 Rainier Ave South on October 28, 1978. Prosecutors asked for a bail of $2 million.
She lived alone, and had not been seen in several days so neighbors went to check on her.
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Roberts’ hands and feet were tied with nylon stockings and there was a gag in her mouth. She was naked from the waist down and a ligature was around her neck, fashioned, from a hair net. The cause of death was asphyxiation caused by strangulation. The trailer was ransacked.
The case went cold and was never solved.
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In 2010 detectives from the Sheriff's Office Cold Case Unit took another look at the case. Evidence collected at the time included latent fingerprints from the crime scene. Detectives realized that advances in AFIS technology now allowed prints to be entered into the system that previously may have not met the criteria for quality or detail.
AFIS technicians found matches to MacDonald on three items from the crime scene, including a bank statement and a Traveler’s Cheque.
Detectives looked into MacDonald’s background and found that he was living about seven blocks from the victim around the time of the crime. In addition, he
was booked into jail twice in 1978 on burglary charges. By 1979 he had moved to Florida and was arrested for burglary in 1979 and 1980. He subsequently served prison time in Florida and Washington.
MacDonald was arrested in Nevada in 1992 and in 2001. He currently resides in Reno, where he was interviewed by Sheriff's Office detectives last June.
“DNA gets all the attention,” said Sheriff Sue Rahr. “But other advances, including fingerprint identification via AFIS, solve crimes as well. It is very gratifying to finally solve the murder of an 80 year-old woman, thanks to AFIS and great detective work.
MacDonald was arrested booked into the county jail in Reno. He will face an extradition hearing in the near future.
