Ruth Buchanan had just left a department store in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a friend when she was hit and killed by a car in 1989. It was just two days before New Year’s Eve.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department
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Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department
For three decades, it has remained a mystery who drove the car that struck and killed 52-year-old Ruth Buchanan as she tried to cross the street in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Although police knew the license plate number and what it looked like, the car turned out to be stolen and the investigation stalled. The case would have remained cold indefinitely without modern DNA tools.
On Friday, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said suspect Herbert Stanback, 68, had been identified and charged in connection with the 1989 hit-and-run — adding that a major breakthrough came from using new DNA technology to reexamine evidence in the case.
“The fact that the scientific method can capture DNA and link it — not to a specific group of genes — but to a specific individual after more than three decades is amazing,” Sergeant Gavin Jackson of CMPD’s Major Accident Unit said in a video announcement.
A few days before New Year’s Eve 1989, around mid-afternoon, Buchanan and her friend had just left a department store in downtown Charlotte when Buchanan was struck by a car on the street, according to CMPD. press release.
Police added that the driver ran a red light and immediately fled the scene. Buchanan was taken to hospital, where she died the following day from her injuries.
Witnesses provided police with a detailed report of the vehicle, including its license plate number. Days later, officers responded to a call about a suspicious vehicle outside the Comfort Inn that matched the description of the vehicle involved in the collision. The car later turned out to be stolen from a local car dealership, and the case remains unsolved for the next 32 years.
Then, in 2022, law enforcement received an anonymous tip from someone who claimed to know the man who caused the hit-and-run. That proved to be false, but it prompted officers to reexamine the case.
Detectives sent evidence previously collected in the car to the police crime lab, where they compared DNA from the marijuana cigarette to a man who was at the time serving a 22-year sentence for another crime, police said.
Detectives learned that the driver, named Stanback, was working at a local hotel at the time of the hit-and-run accident under a work release program for inmates at the state prison.
In March, detectives met with Stanback in jail, where he confessed to the crime. He was formally charged in June. Jackson, the sheriff, said he later informed Buchanan’s son of the arrest.
“I was able to talk to Ruth’s son and bring that kind of closure to the family. It certainly wasn’t the call they were expecting,” Jackson said.
