DNA Breakthrough Solves Brockton Cold Cases, Exposes Late Suspect Robert Carey

For 35 years, Cherie Bishop and Donna Bell’s families lived with two brutal Brockton cases and no answer. On April 23, Plymouth County District Attorney Tim Cruz said advanced DNA work finally identified the man investigators believe was responsible: Robert Carey, a former Brockton resident who died of natural causes in June 2025 at age 64.

The cases that now sit at the center of the breakthrough were not from the 1980s but from 1991 and 1993. Bishop was 28 when she was found on June 25, 1991 in Mulberry Park, nude, sexually assaulted and strangled to death. Bell was attacked on April 4, 1993 while walking on Annis Avenue. Prosecutors said a man in a van threatened to strangle her with an electric wire, sexually assaulted her, and then reached for a sharp object before she escaped. Brockton police later found her at Ames and Interval streets with a cut to her right hand.

Investigators first linked the Bishop and Bell cases through DNA in 2016, when evidence from both crime scenes was uploaded to FBI CODIS. That connection kept the cases moving, but it did not yet put a name to the profile. In March 2023, the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office brought in Texas-based Othram Research, and further testing in 2025 helped genealogists build a family tree that pointed to Carey. Authorities said the final step was a statistical match between Carey and the sexual assault kits tied to Bishop and Bell.

Carey had lived within about a mile and a half of both crime scenes, a detail that gives the identification a grim geography. He had been staying at the Brockton Veterans Administration Medical Center when he died last June, which means prosecutors cannot file charges. The case is solved in the forensic sense, but there will be no courtroom reckoning.

For Bishop’s family, the answer carried the weight of decades. Linda Bishop said, “I’m 82-years old and really didn’t think it was ever gonna happen, and it did.” That relief now extends to both families, who spent more than three decades waiting for a name, a reason, and some measure of closure after two of Brockton’s most stubborn cold cases finally gave way to DNA.