DNA match leads to arrest in 1983 Albuquerque motel killing

A towel, a strand of biological evidence and a decades-old cold case finally pointed Albuquerque investigators to Charlie Brown Jr. Police in Champaign arrested the 73-year-old on June 9, 2026, after DNA tied him to the 1983 killing of Agnes Tybo, and New Mexico prosecutors filed a first-degree murder complaint and warrant the day before. Detectives said a sample taken from Brown in Illinois could not be excluded as the source of genetic material found under Tybo’s fingernails, and the same testing linked him to the white cotton towel recovered with her belongings.

Tybo was found dead on November 11, 1983, in room 252 of the Sundowner Motel at 6101 Central Ave. NE. Albuquerque police said the room was in complete disarray and that the 71-year-old woman from Owyhee, Nevada, had been strangled. She had traveled to Albuquerque with her brother to meet family and attend the Indian National Finals Rodeo at Tingley Coliseum, a trip that ended in a motel room crime scene and a file that would sit unsolved for decades.

Investigators said Tybo’s purse was found in the bed of a large dump truck parked in the motel lot, while the towel later became one of the key pieces of evidence. At the time, witnesses reported seeing a suspect trying to enter motel rooms, and police circulated a composite sketch to the public and to tribal agencies. Even with that lead, the case went cold.

The break came in 2021, when an APD civilian reviewer reopened the file and sent evidence for advanced forensic testing. Albuquerque police said the resulting DNA profile matched Charlie Brown Jr. in the National DNA Index System. Detectives then traveled to Champaign, obtained a search warrant and collected a new DNA sample that connected Brown to the material recovered from the murder scene.

Tybo’s family said the long silence after her death was painful. Winona Manning and Jennifer Tybo described her as the person who held the family together, and relatives said they were devastated by how long the case remained open. APD’s broader cold-case effort, Duke City Case Files, launched in 2021 and featured Tybo’s killing as the first case on the department’s cold-case podcast. The former Sundowner Motel is now an apartment complex, but the evidence from room 252 has now carried the case from an abandoned file to an arrest in Illinois, with extradition proceedings next.