May 22 2023
The murder of Montreal teenager Sharron Prior has been solved, 48 years later. Biological tests have 100 per cent confirmed that Franklin Maywood Romine, born on April 2, 1946, was the killer that police had been trying to identify for nearly five decades.
montreal.ctvnews.ca
''Police will give an update of "capital importance" Tuesday on the unsolved murder of Sharron Prior, a teenage girl killed in Montreal in 1975.
The update follows the exhumation of a suspect's body earlier this month in West Virginia.
Franklin Maywood Romine, who died in 1982, was identified as the primary suspect after a new analysis technique uncovered his DNA on Prior's clothing.
"The chief inspector of the Major Crimes Division, Pierre Duquette, will unveil an element of capital importance in this investigation," according to a SPAL press release received Monday.''
''After committing a rape in West Virginia in 1974, Romine reportedly fled to Canada where he is believed to have abducted and murdered Prior.
Shortly after, he was arrested in Montreal on the West Virginia rape and extradited to the U.S''
Police exhumed the body of Franklin Maywood Romine of Putnam County, West Virginia after a Longueuil police (SPAL) investigation found a match with DNA from the 1975 killing of Sharron Prior in Montreal. SOURCE: Noovo
Sharron Prior vanished in 1975 while on her way to a restaurant in Pointe-St-Charles. Her body was found in Longueuil a few days later.
montrealgazette.com

''During their investigation, police learned the man, Franklin Maywood Romine, lived about 10 kilometres from Prior and that someone fitting his description in 1975 had tried to abduct another woman at knifepoint nearby.
A tire track left in the snow close to where Prior’s body was found matched a model of car that Romine bought just two blocks from where she lived.''