DNA review solves 24-year-old New Windsor homicide, suspect dead

Nancy Smith’s killing sat in the cold-case file for 24 years, but a single strand of hair and a multistate DNA review finally gave New Windsor police the name they had been chasing. The catch is brutal: the man they linked to the 2001 homicide, Robert Young, was already dead, so the case ends with an answer, not a courtroom.

Smith was 32 when her parents found her dead inside her New Windsor home on Provost Drive on Dec. 5, 2001. She had missed work at Horton Hospital, and when her parents went to check on her, they found the scene that would haunt the town for decades.

The break came when investigators resubmitted a single hair collected from Smith’s clothing at the crime scene for advanced DNA testing in early 2023. Police said that sample was run against more than 65 DNA samples before the forensic work produced a lead on Young, who was living in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. From there, detectives with the New Windsor Police Department, the FBI Hudson Valley Safe Streets Task Force, New York State Police and the State Police Forensic Investigation Center in Albany kept working the case across New York, Connecticut, Florida and South Carolina.

Police said the investigation pulled in more than 40 investigators, close to 1,000 leads and more than 500 interviews. It also stayed alive in the public eye. In December 2024, officials offered a $35,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction. By the 24th anniversary of Smith’s death in December 2025, that reward had climbed to $50,000.

Young denied involvement when investigators spoke with him, but authorities later learned he had been found dead by local officials, who ruled his death a suicide. That means no criminal charges will be filed, and the motive in Smith’s killing remains unknown. Even so, police said the genetic work, along with the old-fashioned legwork that followed it, finally solved a homicide that had resisted every earlier push.

Investigators also said Young had lived in Dutchess County and was connected to the local music scene at The Chance theater in Poughkeepsie, a detail that helped explain how he knew Smith. For Smith’s family, the identification brought a painful kind of closure. Barbara Stofle said publicly that she never thought the day would come, and Smith’s parents both died in 2024 without learning who killed their daughter.

After 24 years, Nancy Smith’s case is no longer unknown. The killer’s name is on it now, even if the law never gets its turn.