26 years later, woman found in rural Missouri identified

ST. LOUIS -- Twenty-six years after a woman's body was found by hikers in a secluded area of northeast Missouri, authorities said Tuesday they have identified the victim. Now, the focus is bringing the killer to justice.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol said the victim was Cynthia L. Day of the East St. Louis, Illinois, area. She was 38 when she disappeared in August 1990.

Hikers found the decomposing remains Aug. 26, 1990, beneath a bluff near Highway 79 in Pike County, about 70 miles north of St. Louis.

Sheriff Stephen Korte said a patrol investigator taking a new look at the cold case was able to match fingerprints of the victim with those of Day.

Relatives of Day were informed Monday.

"They were happy," Korte said. "The big thing is we've got closure for the family, that they now know for sure what happened to their loved one."

Korte said police are investigating a "person of interest," but he declined to say more about the investigation.

At the time the body was discovered, police classified the woman's death as a homicide, the result of a blow to the head.

Patrol spokesman Al Nothum said a trooper received a call last month from an acquaintance of one of Day's daughters, who suspected the Pike County victim was Day.

"Sure enough she (the patrol investigator) found something that was overlooked until now," Nothum said. He declined to name the investigator.

In a 2012 story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Day's daughters said their mother lived with a boyfriend in a motel in the days prior to her death. The daughters blamed the man for Day's involvement in drugs and alcohol. She had told them she planned to leave him.

But they never saw their mother again. Soon after, the boyfriend disappeared.