Davie Police Give Missing Woman's Daughter Some Closure After 46 Years
MIAMI (CBSMiami) - For 45 years, no one knew what happened to Carolynn Dunn Moudy until now. Davie Police have announced, a body found in a canal just two days before Christmas in 1975 is her.
"Cause all these years I was just trying to search for her," Edna Moudy, her daughter said.
Moudy was just just a year old when her mom went missing and came out Tuesday to hear the news. It meant a lot to her as well as the police working this case for her to have some kind of closure. The Davie Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #100 arranged for bus fare to bring her in from out of state because she is not comfortable flying.
"I know that they're trying to work together and everything about my mom, I'm never going to forget my mom," she said.
Thanks to Davie Police, she now knows what happened, that her mom, Carolyn Dunn Moudy was murdered. She was originally from Indianola, Mississippi. Her body somehow ended up being discovered floating in a canal near 2600 SW 154th Avenue.
"You have to put in the work because these cases have been stored for so many years, and when you open up file there's a whole bunch of information that's completely unknown," Bertha Hurtado, Crime Scene Technician explained.
Davie Police began working this cold case in November of 2019, they learned of an unidentified woman buried at Wake Forest Lawn in Davie. They exhumed it, and later extracted DNA, which was sent to Parabon labs for a thorough DNA sequencing.
"So we're typically working with second, third, fourth cousins, and beyond, that what's makes it different than the earlier technology where you needed an exact match or an immediate family member," CeCe Moore, Parabon Chief Genetic Genealogist.
Parabon was initially developed to help adoptees find their parents, and uses voluntary DNA samples to trace relatives. They got a match.
"And it gave us a lead to where she was from it was very clear, what area she came from but it was less clear who she was," Moore said.
From the match, detectives worked to find family members, after testing, the results confirmed, Edna Moudy was Carolyn Moudy's daughter.
"She was my bestfriend, she's still my mom."
From here police say this is just the beginning of their case, now they know who their victim is, and they hope this story will be shared to potentially bring in tips for their investigation into who did this.
