well that didn't work...maybe this will....the article appears again below and you can see her photo clicking on the link at the very bottom..
OSU students 1970 slaying solved
DNA evidence helps close case
By JOHN FUTTY The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS Something was wrong.
Nathan Katz sensed it when his wife didnt answer phone calls to their Columbus apartment on Sept. 29, 1970.
She was supposed to be home in case workers stopped by to fix some of the problems in their new town house.
Katz went home during his lunch hour and found the bedroom in disarray and the bathroom door locked.
When the apartment manager helped him open the door, they found a crime scene that shook the city.
Sharon Leichtman Katzs nude body was in the bathtub, binder twine wrapped around her neck.
Whoever raped and strangled the 21-year-old Ohio State student left behind plenty of physical evidence, but crime scene technology was primitive in 1970. Two years later, the crime was labeled a cold case.
Then, this month, Columbus police announced that DNA evidence had solved the 36-yearold crime.
The victims family never thought the crime would be solved, even after one of Sharon Katzs two sisters, Nori Hart, persuaded investigators to take a fresh look at the case in 2001.
Detective Ralph Taylor of the cold case unit was assigned to the reopened investigation.
The crime was haunting. Katzs body had been dumped in scalding water that blistered her skin.
Nathan Katz, who was 23 at the time and worked for the Ohio Department of Taxation, was considered a suspect. The couple had been married for nine months.
But there were dozens of others police were looking at as well.
The apartment complex was still under construction, with workers wandering in and out of buildings.
The couple were high school sweethearts from Dayton who married in December 1969. They moved to the apartment complex less than a month before the slaying.
Columbus police homicide detectives set up an office in a vacant apartment and spent weeks conducting interviews.
They focused on workers, interviewing more than 50.
The family pushed police to reopen the case in January 2001, after Hart read a newspaper story about Reynoldsburg police using DNA evidence to solve a 22-year-old homicide. In reopening the Sharon Katz case, the detective saw some promising leads and learned that the physical evidence still existed, including swabs from the body that were preserved in slides.
Those slides yielded DNA. Taylor sought and obtained DNA from Nathan Katz and a handful of other suspects, each of whom was cleared.
But the case file provided an intriguing name. Among those interviewed by detectives within days of the crime was a 21-yearold plumber named James Keifer, who was working in the complex on the day of the attack.
He denied any involvement.
A little more than a year after the killing, police encountered Keifer again.
He was arrested and confessed to attacking and nearly killing a 29-year-old housewife in her Columbus home on Jan. 7, 1972. The woman, whom Keifer knew from doing plumbing work in the house, had been choked unconscious, stripped naked and left for dead in the garage. Keifer pleaded guilty to assault with intent to kill and served three years in prison.
Police again interviewed Keifer about the Katz case, and he again denied committing the crime. A detective noted in his summary that Keifer should be considered a suspect in the 1970 slaying.
When I did focus on Keifer and got his history, I thought, This is him, Taylor said.
But in May 2002, Keifer died of an asthma attack at age 53. His family had cremated him, along with whatever DNA evidence police had hoped to gather.
Taylor located Keifers parents, who agreed to supply DNA. It was their samples, from cheek swabs, that police used to link Keifer to the crime.
Katz