ROCKVILLE,
Md. (AP) — DNA technology and one
detective's determination have resulted in an arrest in a 10-year-old
missing-person case.
Pennsylvania
State Police have obtained a warrant for
Stephen Vanderbeek, 51, of Ramsey, N.J., on charges of killing his
wife,
Cynthia Vanderbeek, 47.
Sandy
DiFranco, sister of the victim, contacted
Montgomery County police in April 1995 after Stephen Vanderbeek arrived
without
his wife for a visit to Germantown, where the sisters' mother lived.
DiFranco
said she became suspicious immediately.
Montgomery
police said it wasn't initially clear who
should investigate the case because the location Cynthia Vanderbeek
disappeared
was not known.
But
Montgomery Detective Robert Nichols took up the
case himself and stayed on it even as he moved to other sections of the
department, said DiFranco from her home in West Palm Beach, Fla.
"Without
him, this case would have never been
solved," DiFranco told The Washington Post. "What I learned from this
was that when adults go missing, it tends to just go by the wayside. I
was
lucky because I had somebody who cared."
Nichols
pursued the case for the next nine years. In
2004, he visited The Doe Network, an Internet site devoted to
missing-person
cases, and saw an artist's reconstruction of the face of a woman whose
body had
been found in a wooded area of Fulton County, Pa., in 1995.
"It
resembled Cindy, so I contacted Sandy
DiFranco, gave her the Web site address and she concurred," Nichols
said.
A
DNA sample from Cynthia Vanderbeek's family matched
the unidentified remains.
Police
arrested Stephen Vanderbeek outside a bar in
Ramsey, N.J., on Thursday. He was held without bond in the Bergen
County Jail
in Hackensack, N.J., awaiting extradition to Pennsylvania, police said.
Nichols
called the moment he told DiFranco of the
arrest "one of the best phone calls I've been able to make in my
life."
"There
were 10 years worth of frustration and not
being able to find what I was looking for," Nichols said. "I got to
the point where all I wanted to do was find Cindy and give (her family)
some
answers. To be able to turn around and get an arrest warrant is icing
on the
cake."