Wenatchee police close 1986 Carol Traicoff homicide after DNA breakthrough

Carol Traicoff was 35 when someone left her behind the Stanley Center on North Wenatchee Avenue in May 1986, and Wenatchee detectives could not name a killer with the forensic tools they had then. Four decades later, that dead end turned into a closed file.

Wenatchee police said the homicide was officially closed on May 14, 2026, exactly 40 years to the day after Traicoff’s body was found. The case had sat unresolved for years because investigators at the time could not push the evidence far enough to identify a suspect, even though the death remained on the books.

The break came after Detective Sgt. R. Weatherman reopened the investigation in 2023 and started pulling the old evidence back into play. Wenatchee police and the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab revisited the archived material, with forensic scientist B. Wright helping move the case toward modern testing instead of the dead end it had been stuck in for decades.

In July 2024, investigators sent evidence to Othram for genetic genealogy analysis. That is the kind of forensic work that can build a family line from tiny traces of DNA and then connect the line to a real-world name, a method Othram says is built to help law enforcement break through cases that once seemed impossible to solve.

By December 2024, the testing had produced a family line that pointed investigators toward a suspect with ties to both the United States and Canada. Washington State Patrol later identified that suspect as Henry B. Leland of Kamloops, British Columbia, on February 25, 2025. Because Leland died in 2007, detectives turned to a relative comparison, using DNA from his sister, his only known living relative, to help confirm the identification.

Wenatchee police said that comparison supported the conclusion that Leland killed Traicoff and that they found no evidence of any other suspect. The investigation stretched across state and national borders before it came back to a single name, a single family line, and a single answer.

For Carol Traicoff, the scene behind the Stanley Center stayed frozen in 1986 until modern DNA finally did what old-school detective work could not. Forty years to the day, Wenatchee police say the mystery is over.