Bob Cinnamon was a 15-year-old boy, eager to stay the night at his grandma Rosa's Southeast Portland apartment, and enjoy a warm glass of Ovaltine and dish of ice cream. But she convinced him by phone that it was too late to ride the bus, and urged him to visit her in the morning instead.
Cinnamon never got to see his 80-year-old grandmother again. Rosa Cinnamon was found beaten and strangled to death in the bedroom of her apartment the next morning, March 25, 1976.
For 33 years, her family questioned why anyone would want to hurt their grandmother, a church-going widow who doted on her grandchildren. On Tuesday, a Portland retired detective and state police forensic examiner gave them some long-awaited answers:
The very day convicted robber and burglar, Edward Delon Warren, was paroled for a Portland armed robbery and a Salem home-invasion robbery, he broke into Rosa Cinnamon's apartment. He kicked her back door in, and beat and strangled her.
The Portland Police Bureau's Cold Case Unit announced Tuesday it had tied Warren to the brutal murder through DNA recovered from the victim's fingernail scrapings -- in what state police described as the oldest homicide solved through a DNA match in its crime lab's history.
Three years after Cinnamon's death, Warren was arrested in the September 1979 double murders of two teenagers by the Chetco River, near Brookings. He was sentenced to two life-in-prison terms, and died in custody in 2003. He was 49.
The fiesty grandma had struggled with her attacker. Scrapings from beneath her right fingernails, obtained during her autopsy and kept in a paper bag for more than 30 years in the police property evidence warehouse, were resubmitted to the crime lab in 2007 by cold case investigator Robbie Thompson. The lab recorded a match to Warren in January 2008.
"This is kind of an unexpected surprise for us," said the victim's grandson, Bob Cinnamon, now 48. Though the accused won't ever be charged in the crime and is now dead, he added, "It's satisfying that we know the facts of what happened and who did it...It would be so much rougher for us if he was alive, and we'd have to go through a trial."
His older sister, Lorrie Strawn, 49, quipped, "Karma got him."
Portland Police Chief Rosie Sizer credited the marvel of modern technology, the persistence of cold case investigators and federal grant-funded retired detectives who have been assisting the bureau's Cold Case Homicide Unit for closing Cinnamon's case.
Retired Detective Mike Stahlman was assigned the case about five months ago, after the DNA hit was made in January 2008. "It's interesting to work this case backwards, when you have a name," he said.
He learned Warren had been paroled the morning of March 24, 1976, got a ride to Portland, and checked in as required with a parole officer that day at an office at Northeast Glisan and 73rd Avenue. Warren told his parole officer he planned to take classes at Portland Community College and was going to live at a residence hotel in North Portland.
Sometime that night, between Rosa's call to her grandson at 8:30 p.m. on March 24, 1976, and 9:20 a.m. March 25, 1976, when her son-in-law found her dead, Warren killed Rosa, police say.
Stahlman suspects the parolee had "some kind of pent-up desire" and was looking for a burglary to commit. His residence, it turned out, was just 441 feet from Rosa's door. A neighbor had heard a thump in the middle of the night.
"She apparently fought and clawed for the preservation of her life," Stahlman said.
It's that struggle that likely resulted in her attacker's DNA being left behind. The state medical examiner's office scraped under her fingers with a wooden stick for evidence.
Tissue scraped from beneath her right fingernail, which fell onto a paper that was folded up, packed away and kept in an envelope for more than three decades, provided the clue needed to break the case. State Police forensic scientist Heather Feaman said the fingernail scrapings of dirt and human tissue were well-preserved, largely because they were dry.
Stahlman traced Warren's criminal record, a lengthy and brutal one. He was convicted of a January 1972 armed robbery of a Portland convenience store. He escaped from prison the next year, broke into a Salem woman's home, tied her up at gunpoint and stole her car, before he was quickly recaptured. He was in prison from December 1973 through March 24, 1976, the day Rosa was killed, police say.
By September 1979, police say he fatally shot two teenagers along the Chetco River near Brookings after a dispute. He shot 19-year-old U.S. Coast Guardsman Ricky Dale Hemphill in the back twice, and took his girlfriend, 18-year-old Charla Toma, back to the woods where he left her dead from gunshot wounds. He confessed to the killings, and was serving life sentences when his DNA was entered into the state database in 1999. He died from respiratory problems at age 49.
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