SC SC - Candra Alston, 25, & Malaysia Boykin, 3, Columbia, 9 Jan 2011

Mother and daughter laid to rest; killer still on loose
By Stephen Hooker

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - Candra Alston and her three-year-old daughter were found dead in their apartment eight days ago.

[...]
Richland County Coroner Gary Watts says Candra and her three-year-old daughter, Malaysia Boykin, were murdered. "Murder" is the clinical term. The coroner expressed it another way. "I've been involved with death investigations for well over 30 years and handled thousands and thousands of cases, and this is one of the most horrific, brutal cases involving a child that I've seen," claimed Watts.

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SLED joins investigation into Columbia mother, daughter homicide
Posted: Jan 09, 2011 4:45 PM CST Updated: Jan 12, 2011 4:21 PM CST

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) - The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division is helping Columbia homicide investigators figure out who killed a Columbia mother and her 3-year-old daughter. The killing happened sometime between Thursday and Sunday at the Brook Pines apartment complex on Broad River Road.

[...]

Scott said officers went to an apartment on Brook Pines Drive around 10:00am Sunday after the victims' family had been unable to reach them since Thursday. When police entered the home, they found the woman and her child unresponsive.

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New details about slayings made public
January 23, 2012

[...]

Police say that a computer, an expensive Gucci purse and children’s clothing were missing from the home where the two died. They don’t believe that robbery was the motive, though, and say neither was sexually assaulted

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Young women murdered after posting to escort site, police say
Jan 25, 2012

A handful of grisly murders in at least two states have been found to have one striking fact in common: the victims, all young women, have posted on the website Backpage.com, a classified service which accepts ads for escort services.

In January last year, a young mother and her 3-year-old daughter were found dead in their apartment in Columbia, South Carolina, in what a coroner described as one of the most horrific murder cases involving a child he had ever seen.

As police released new details they hoped might help to find the killer of Candra Alston, 25, and her little girl Malaysia Boykin this week, they confirmed for the first time that they were exploring the possibility of a link to Backpage.com.

Detectives in Columbia, who said this week that a computer and other items were missing from Alston's apartment, have never revealed how she or her daughter were killed.

However, the fact that Alston had posted to Backpage.com brought to mind four more recent killings, several states away.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jan/25/grisly-murders-escort-site-backpage

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Revisiting cold case murder involving mother and daughter
Posted: Dec 21, 2012 3:16 PM CST Updated: Dec 31, 2012 3:57 PM CST

[...]
"You don't know what I'm going through," said Alston's grandmother.

Most of us will never know what the Alston family has experienced in the past two years.

"She was always my little girl," said Alston's stepfather Ray Lyerly. "Yeah, I spoiled her in certain ways. We wanted to give her the best life possible."

Police think the person who took that life away knew Candra and her daughter because there were no signs of forced entry at her Brook Pines apartment.

"It was one of the most gruesome crime scenes I've witnessed," said Columbia Police Sgt. Kevin Reese.

Snapshot™ Puts a Face on a Four-Year-Old Cold Case
Parabon NanoLabs' next-generation forensic DNA phenotyping service used to identify possible person-of-interest in murders of Candra Alston and her 3-year-old daughter.

15 January 2015

On 9 January 2015, the four-year anniversary of the unsolved double homicide of a young mother and child, Columbia, South Carolina Police Chief, Skip Holbrook, released a computer-generated image of a person-of-interest that resulted from information obtained through a new type of DNA analysis, called "DNA phenotyping," which predicts a person's physical appearance from a DNA sample.

Four years ago, 25-year-old Candra Alston and her 3-year-old daughter, Malaysia Boykin were murdered inside their Brook Pines Apartments. In the intervening years, after interviewing over 200 people and collecting DNA samples from 150 people, investigators of the Columbia Police Department (CPD) were no closer to finding a suspect and the Alston double murder was at risk of becoming another crime statistic in the annals of cold cases.

Determined to bring the perpetrator to justice, the CPD recently reprocessed DNA collected from the crime scene using a new service from Parabon NanoLabs called Snapshot™. With funding from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), the company has been developing Snapshot for nearly four years. Far different from traditional DNA analysis techniques, Snapshot gives crime solvers a completely new way to use DNA.

(cont. at the link)

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Cold Case: Father pleads for help in finding killer of daughter, granddaughter
By NOELLE PHILLIPS
nophillips@thestate.comJanuary 8, 2014

COLUMBIA, SC — Three years after losing his daughter and granddaughter in a brutal slaying, a Columbia man has taken his plea for new information to the public.

Carl Alston wrote an open letter on the eve of the anniversary of their deaths to express how much he misses them and to ask for help.

“My beautiful daughter and granddaughter are not here with me physically, but they are definitely in my heart and always on my mind,” Alston wrote. “I can’t get them off my mind.”

[...]

“I can’t fathom why someone would take my only child away from me, but I ask for your help,” he wrote. “If you know the person who murdered my Candra and her daughter Malaysia please help me. And to the murderer, if you are watching this, please turn yourself in so that I may find closure to this mystery.

“I am pleading with you Columbia to help me find the murderer because if they done it once, they may do it again. I would like to close this chapter of my life and move on.”

Tipsters can call Vinson at (803) 545-3602 or CrimeStoppers at (888) CRIME-SC.

Read more here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.c....html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us#storylink=cpy

DNA phenotyping, sounds extremely fascinating!

Thanks for posting bessie. Tagging.

The new DNA technology is fascinating, looking forward to seeing if it does help to narrow down a suspect.!
Crossing fingers that the cruel perp in this case is identified soon, if he/ she, could kill a mom and her very little girl, the perp could be capable of absolutely anything, imo.

Arrest made in this case. No details about the arrest, though. Press conference was supposed to have been held this afternoon. I will look for more information about it.

http://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article141650309.html

More information about arrest. Suspect was arrested in California, and is in jail in Riverside.

Causes of death also released for both. Mother was shot. Child was stabbed.

http://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article141735144.html

More information on how the arrest was finally made, as well as a bit of background about how he became a suspect.

https://wyff.relaymedia.com/amp/art...-killing-of-3-year-old-and-her-mother/9207880