Episode 24 Barbara 'Barbie' Blatnik
In the last episode of DNA: ID’s 2021 season, we examine the 1987 murder of Barbie Blatnik. The 17 year old girl was last seen being dropped off to visit her boyfriend at 2:30 a.m. on December 20th in their hometown of Garfield Heights, Ohio. Her body was found the next morning, miles away in Cuyahoga Falls. She had been raped and brutalized. Her case was plagued by too many suspects, jurisdictional confusion, and lost evidence. For more than 30 years, Barbie’s family had no answers to who killed her. Finally, forensic genealogy pointed them right back to the place where Barbie had last been seen, and a suspect whose name was never in the case file. And he had his own troubling disappearance in his family.
Photo credits to Cleveland Scene and the Charley Project
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