Investigators identify suspect in 56-year-old case, the world’s oldest to be cracked using genetic genealogy.
Victim Margaret "Peggy" Beck (left) and a 1961 photograph of newly identified suspect James Raymond Taylor(Colorado Bureau of Investigation)
JFK was a Berliner, MLK had a dream and The Great Escape was playing the big screen.
1963 feels a world away and yet, remarkably, investigators believe they have finally solved an appalling crime committed that summer.
16-year-old Margaret “Peggy” Beck was sexually assaulted and killed in her tent at a Girl Scouts summer camp near Deckers, Colorado, almost 57 years ago.
Yesterday, Jefferson County detectives announced that new DNA research shows James Raymond Taylor to be her killer. However, they don’t know where Taylor is – or even whether he’s still alive.
Investigators were able to identify Taylor through genetic genealogy, comparing DNA found at the scene with over a million samples in a public database. They narrowed the search by locating possible relatives of the suspect in the database, and think the case is the oldest in the world to be cracked using this method.
Investigator Elias Alberti said Thursday that Taylor’s family had cooperated, The Denver Post reports. They haven’t seen Taylor, who would now be 80 years old, since the 1970s. He was last known to be living in Las Vegas as long ago as 1976.
“We have spent several months searching for James Taylor, with no luck,” Alberti said. “We have no idea where he’s at.”
Both Taylor and Beck were living in Edgewater in the early 1960s, although detectives don’t know if they knew each other.
Beck, a student at Denver’s North High School who lived with her parents and three sisters, had been in the Girl Scouts since she was 9 years old. She was delighted to be chosen as a counselor at the Flying G Ranch Girl Scouts Camp, near Deckers, in the summer of 1963, Alberti said.
Taylor worked in the town as a TV repairman and was married at the time. According to Alberti, he perhaps knew of the scout camp from testing self-built HAM radios in the area.
Nobody saw or heard anything on the night of the murder. Beck was sleeping alone, as her tentmate was unwell and staying overnight in the camp’s infirmary. The tentmate found Beck’s body the following morning after Beck didn’t appear for breakfast.
No suspects were identified at the time, but police did collect scrapings from under the victim’s broken fingernails – a sign that she had desperately struggled with her attacker.
In 2007, this evidence was used to create a DNA profile, which was then submitted to a national database, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.
Following the creation of a more comprehensive DNA profile in June 2019, investigators worked with Denver-based United Data Collect to identify the suspect using genealogical research.
Jefferson County Sheriff Jeff Shrader read a statement yesterday from Beck’s three sisters, who are all still alive.
“Peggy was a beautiful young girl who loved life,” it read. “She was loving and protective of her family and we will cherish our memories of her forever.”
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