MEBANE, North Carolina — The remains of a child found under a billboard in North Carolina have been identified two decades later, and in a shocking twist, investigators have linked the boy's death to a separate cold case, 215 miles away in South Carolina.
Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood told news outlets Tuesday that the child was 10-year-old Robert "Bobby" Adam Whitt, who was born in Michigan and raised in Ohio.
Last year, the consultant who helped solve the Golden State Killer case, Barbara Rae-Venter, used DNA to determine the child was half-Asian and half-white. Online DNA ancestry services identified a possible relative.
That relative disclosed Bobby's name, saying family assumed his mother took him to South Korea. Based on that information, police determined an unidentified woman found in Spartanburg County, South Carolina, around the same time was Bobby's mother.
Investigators used DNA from the boy's skeletal remains and DNA from an Ancestry DNA kit and found out his mother was also murdered -- and never identified -- and the boy's father has confessed to killing them both.
The case has been on the mind of Det. Tim Horne for 20 years. All that time, he's kept a box of evidence under his desk
"So every time I turned or moved, I would hit my leg on it so I couldn't forget it," he said.
It's the case that nagged at him his whole career -- the bones of a child found under a billboard along I-85 about an hour outside of Raleigh.
When we last spoke to him back in October, Det. Horne had delayed his retirement until February in hopes of solving the case.
"This is literally a mystery on every level?" asked NBC Charlotte's Michelle Boudin.
"Yeah, but we've chipped away at it," Det. Horne said.
It's a mystery no more. Det. Horne always said new technology would be the key.
"In this particular case, we ran out of leads fairly early, and so we had to wait and let technology catch up and it did," he said.