Providing partial closure for one family’s decades-long emotional struggle, the Long Beach Police Department announced on Sunday that the Department’s Cold Case Unit had finally solved the 1972 murder of Helen Sullivan, a North Long Beach mother of three who was found sexually assaulted and stabbed to death in her home.
Thanks to several years of federal grant funding—which allowed LBPD to revisit unsolved cases in which biological evidence was collected but was unable to be tested due to technological limits of the time—Sullivan’s murderer was found to be a career criminal with a history of sex crimes who died in 1990.
Police said that the 40 year-old murder is the Department’s oldest cold case homicide solved to date.
Using modern DNA-testing methods paid for by grants from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), LBPD’s Cold Case Unit was able to identify a profile on the biological evidence recovered from the crime scene in the 6600 block of Olive Ave. and determined through the DNA data bank that it matched that of the now-deceased ex-con Emanuel Miller.
Police say that what adds to the senselessness of this brutal crime is that Miller had no known connections to Long Beach, though he was paroled in Los Angeles just prior to Sullivan’s murder. Investigators believe that Miller may have been drawn to Sullivan’s neighborhood because many of the homes were vacant to make room for the then-under-construction Artesia Freeway.
The Press-Telegram reports that the murder occurred while Sullivan’s husband was finishing up a graveyard shift at Shell Oil in Wilmington and the victim—who was a NutriLite and Amway saleswoman—was up working in the early morning hours of January 21, 1972. Her husband was the first to discover her death.
In 2008 and 2009, LBPD’s Cold Case Unit received NIJ funding and began sifting through the Department’s 900-plus unsolved cases, including Sullivan’s. But with the funding nearly gone and budget cuts hitting LBPD hard, this may be one of the last few cold cases the LBPD is able to solve.
“Without the support of the National Institute of Justice, the cost of reopening cold cases and testing the preserved DNA evidence would be prohibitive,” Police Chief Jim McDonnell said in a statement. “NIJ provides the funding that enables us to identify suspects in these cases, hold them accountable for their crimes, and most importantly, we hope that it enables us to bring some measure of peace to the families of the victims.”