Suspect identified in 1976 murder of 16-year-old Carol Klaber

Kentucky authorities urged prosecutors to posthumously indict a man they identified as the killer of a 16-year-old girl found dumped in a roadside ditch almost 50 years ago.  

Officials with the Boone County Sheriff’s Office said DNA evidence shows Thomas W. Dunaway strangled and beat teenager Carol Sue Klaber to death in June 1976.

Dunaway, who had an extensive violent criminal history, will never see justice, however, since he died in 1990 at 33-years-old.

Despite his demise, sheriff officials asked prosecutors to put the case against him before a grand jury so he could be indicted posthumously.

The prosecutors declined, but noted that if he were still alive, they would have charged him.

“We want to take every opportunity that we can to hold Thomas Dunaway accountable for the crime spree that he was on,” Boone sheriff’s Det. Coy Cox said during a press conference.

Dunaway was also sentenced to prison time for the murder of 19-year-old Ronald Townsend that happened six months after Klaber’s death.

Cox said investigators informed Klaber’s older brother about the likely suspect.

“To watch him physically exhale and get that closure and then to verbalize it was a rewarding time for us,” he said.

The sheriff’s cold case unit reopened the case in 2017 and two detectives originally targeted two other suspects, but both were forensically ruled out, authorities said.

In September 2022, the detectives partnered with Othram Inc. for advanced forensic DNA testing. Evidence from the 1976 crime scene was sent to the Houston-based lab where high-tech sequencing was used to build a comprehensive DNA profile that helped lead to Dunaway, the sheriff’s office said.

Dunaway, who was 19 at the time of the slaying, also resembled a sketch of a possible suspect at the time and drove a car that Klaber was last seen getting into. He also lived right near Klaber, Det. Cox said.

Klaber was last seen getting into a car with a young man as they drove off, the Cincinnati Inquirer reported, citing a Cincinnati Post article from 1977. She was found dead the next day in Walton, Kentucky.

The slain girl was “popular with her classmates” at Dixie Heights High School where she was a junior and played the violin, the old newspaper article reported.

Dunaway enlisted in the Army days after Klaber’s body was discovered; the other murder he was convicted of was carried out after he went AWOL, according to investigators.

With Post wires