In 1977, Harold Warren Jarrell was charged and convicted with abducting an 8-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio. He was released from prison in January 1982—eight months before he allegedly abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered Kelly Ann Prosser, another 8-year-old girl from Columbus.
But it wasn’t until this week that detectives solved Kelly Ann Prosser’s case through genetic genealogy, nearly 38 years after she vanished walking home from school on September 20, 1982.
Detectives collected evidence, including DNA, from the crime scene in 1982, pre-CODIS. The DNA was run through the database in 2014, but no matches were found. In March 2020, the Columbus Division of Police worked with Advance DNA, a forensic genetic genealogy company, to create a family tree of potential suspects from the 1982 DNA sample.
The results pointed investigators to a third cousin of Jarrell’s. Through further investigation and the cooperation of Jarrell’s family, detectives were able to pinpoint Harold Warren Jarrell, aka Warren Jarrell, as the alleged murderer. He died in Las Vegas in 1996 at the age of 67. The police confirmed there is no forensic evidence tying him to crimes in Columbus after the murder of Prosser.
Jarrell was not previously on the police’s radar for the murder of Prosser, so the DNA sample collected in 1982 and run through modern genetic genealogy techniques was truly the key to solving the nearly 40-year-old cold case. An anonymous Crime Stoppers tip in 2014 did mention Jarrell, but it used a variation and spelling of his name that did not lead detectives to him.
“All of these years of this case being open and numerous detectives working on it, it is satisfying to let the family know what happened to their little girl though it doesn’t bring her back. There are cases that stick with detectives forever and this is one of those for all of us,” said Detective Dana Croom, CPD Cold Case Unit.
Photo: Harold Warren Jarrell's 1977 mugshot. Credit: Columbus Division of Police