Patricia Barnes.Photo: Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office
The Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office said Douglas Keith Krohne was 33 at the time he fatally shot 61-year-old Patricia Barnes.
“There were a lot of branches and leaves from things that looked very out of place dumped with her body,” Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office detective Mike Grant told PEOPLE. “It wasn’t stuff that you would normally find just growing along the shoulder of any road in Kitsap County.”
It was one of the cigarette butts, as well as DNA found on her body and the sleeping bag, that would eventually link Krohne to the cold case slaying.
Kitsap County Sheriff’s Office
The linchpin for the evidence was the cigarette butt found at the scene, Grant said.
“Having evidence that links the deceased victim of a homicide to the scene where she was found was almost better than a confession,” he said. “Trying to explain why a cigarette butt with their DNA is in two counties away from where they live at the location where their body was found. It would be extremely difficult to try to explain that away. It’s almost irrefutable evidence.”
Police said Barnes was staying in shelters in the Seattle area after a fire in her apartment forced her to leave. A witness said they saw Barnes leaving with a man in the downtown Seattle area.
“[The witness] just saw their initial encounter and got the impression that may be they knew each other somehow,” said Grant. “There was a statement about this witness possibly going, but they said there wasn’t room. I assume that meant there wasn’t room in their vehicle.”
Grant said Barnes may have been killed elsewhere and then driven to the spot where she was dumped.
“My working theory was that she had likely been transported in the back of a truck,” he said. “I kind of picture in my mind’s eye that she was dragged out of the bed of a truck and maybe covered with this foliage or covered with this sleeping bag. The cigarette butts were probably amongst the items that were maybe in the bed of the truck or in the vehicle that transported her and just contemporaneously deposited with the non-native foliage. I didn’t picture a circumstance where somebody was standing there taking a break, smoking a cigarette after they had disposed of her body.”
Krohne may have intentionally tried to “confuse investigators to kind of slow the start,” Grant said.
“I would suspect that the homicide occurred elsewhere, and she was brought to Kitsap County just to kind of confuse investigators and disassociate geographically with the victim and the suspect,” he said.
After months of investigation, which included a composite sketch of the possible suspect, the case went cold.
“Random acts of violence, as far as homicide, are more difficult things,” says Grant. “So, it proved difficult.”
Her case was reopened in 2018 as part of the department’s renewed focus on working ‘cold cases,'" the sheriff’s office said in a press release.
Detectives submitted evidence found at the crime scene to private DNA labs for testing, which included “forensic grade genome sequencing and the use of forensic genealogy that involved searching genealogical databases for genetic relatives to the known profile.”
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In December 2021, Othram Labs gave detectives a potential suspect linked to the DNA.
“They told me that they had a first or second cousin that was corresponding with the DNA that had been submitted, which they said was extreme promising,” said Grant. “It was the week before Christmas, and they gave me the name Douglas Krohne. It was promising because Douglas Krohne had connections to the area in Seattle and Tacoma, and he had criminal history here. It wasn’t some random person who was living in Florida in the nineties.”
Grant said he also discovered that Krohne had an address in Arizona, and he died in 2016.
Grant said he was able to get a blood sample from the autopsy from the Pima County Medical Examiner in Arizona, which linked Krohne to the murder.
“[Investigators] had done an excellent job processing the scene and their attention to detail. It really paid off. If it wasn’t for the work that they had done, this would’ve easily gone unsolved,” he said.
source: people.com
