The police were called by her husband after he returned home and discovered her partially clothed body on the floor of the couple's bedroom closet.

[4] On November 22, 1987, Diane Cho, a 15-year-old high school student, was found in her family's apartment located on Gavilan Court in Chesterfield County, near Richmond.

Police established that Spencer had traveled from Richmond to Arlington during the period of her death to spend Thanksgiving with his mother, who lived about a mile from Tucker's home.

[5] Following the successful conviction of Spencer for the Tucker, Davis, and Hellams murders, his DNA was compared with samples collected at other crime scenes, including both open and apparently closed cases.

As a result of these investigations, it was determined that DNA evidence linked him to the 1984 murder of Carolyn Hamm, a crime for which David Vasquez had been convicted in early 1985.

While the standard of the DNA evidence was determined to be inconclusive, FBI investigators were sufficiently confident given the factual similarities to the more recent crimes to report the conclusion that Spencer most likely was responsible for the Hamm murder and others.

Vasquez was granted an unconditional pardon for her murder on January 4, 1989, having served five years of a 35-year prison sentence, and became the first American to be exonerated on the basis of exculpatory DNA evidence.

[7][8] The United States Court of Appeal affirmed in its judgment that the reliance on evidence based on new DNA technology in obtaining Spencer's conviction was sound.

[12] The murders and Spencer's conviction also formed the basis for an episode of the forensic science documentary series Medical Detectives, which aired on October 31, 1996.

[11] The investigation of the Southside murders and eventual conviction of Timothy Spencer form the subject matter of Chapter 11 of former FBI psychological profiler John Douglas' 1996 memoir Journey into Darkness.

Cornwell was in fact employed as a computer analyst within the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond at the time of Spencer's 1987 killings.