DNA links 1986 Washington homicide to deceased Kamloops man

Carol Traicoff’s killing sat cold for nearly 40 years, until DNA gave Wenatchee investigators a name they could not prosecute. Police now believe Henry B. Leland, a Kamloops man who died in December 2007, killed the 35-year-old behind the Stanley Civic Center in Wenatchee on May 14, 1986.

Traicoff’s body was found in that spot, and Wenatchee police determined at the time that she had died in a homicidal assault. The evidence was real, but the technology was not. That left Traicoff’s family with a homicide and no suspect, while the file stayed open through decades of false starts and dead ends.

The break came when old evidence was reviewed again in 2023 and additional DNA from an unknown male was found. The material was then sent to Othram in July 2024 for forensic genetic genealogy testing. Results returned in December 2024 and pointed investigators toward a possible family lineage in the United States and Canada. Washington State Patrol later identified Henry B. Leland as the suspect on February 24 or February 25, 2025, depending on the report, after a DNA comparison to his sister, described in one account as his only known living biological relative.

Wenatchee police said there is no current evidence to suggest another suspect. They also said Traicoff and Leland were believed to have been alone when the killing occurred. In some accounts, investigators said the two had been seen together before her death, and one theory was that the encounter may have escalated from a conflict between two unhoused people. Police thanked Traicoff’s family for not giving up over the years and said the investigation was officially closed.

The case has an uneasy second life in Kamloops, where Henry Leland House, a 28-unit supportive housing facility at 506 St. Paul St., was named in 2009 for a man local officials believed had been kind and well known on the streets before dying of exposure in 2007. ASK Wellness Society executive officer Bob Hughes said the sign will be removed and called that “the right thing to do.” He also said he was seeking guidance from local First Nations because Leland was Indigenous.

Traicoff would be 75 now. Instead, her case ended with a name, a dead suspect, and no courtroom reckoning, the rare cold-case break that delivers an answer too late for justice to take its usual form.