When relatives couldn’t reach 81-year-old Wilomeana “Violet” Filkins, they went to her apartment in upstate New York to check on her on August 19, 1994.
They found their beloved Filkins dead, bludgeoned to death in her living room in what appeared to be a robbery. An autopsy determined she had died from multiple blows to the back of her head, CBS 12 reported.
It was 1994, so the case was expected to be solved quickly with the help of DNA and forensic technology, but it took decades for Filkins’ family to get an explanation.
For three years, police had nothing to go on, until personal property belonging to Filkins was found behind a cemetery in a neighboring town. Police surmised that Filkins was robbed, and her white four-door Plymouth Reliant was stolen and used to dump her stolen property.
Again, the case went cold, but in 2019, police received a tip from a woman who said her ex-boyfriend, Jeremiah Guyette, had started crying when he mentioned robbing a woman and hitting her, NBC News reported. The ex-girlfriend remembered Guyette saying “that poor old woman.” She also recalled him saying “this can’t be true” and “I’m sure she’s fine.”
East Greenbush Police Detective Sgt. Michael Guadagnino and a New York State Police investigator attempted to interview Guyette on October 1, 2019, but said he became defensive and upset before refusing to speak with authorities and demanding an attorney.
The next morning, police discovered Guyette had taken his own life in the garage of his home in Rosendale, New York, some 70 miles south of where Filkins had been murdered 25 years earlier.
A family member later told police that after police approached Guyette, he called her panicking and saying he didn’t want to go to prison, NBC reported. That family member also told authorities that Guyette told her when he was younger that he had planned to rob a bank and steal a car in order to raise money to go to college.
This same relative had made arrangements for Guyette to speak with an attorney.
Police resubmitted physical evidence from the crime scene, including an unknown fingerprint found on a wooden coffee table, to see if anything matched Guyette. Three years later, following the COVID pandemic, police were finally able to determine that the fingerprint belonged to Guyette, Guadagnino told reporters earlier this week.
Guyette served in the Air Force, worked as a New York school bus driver, and also drove a bus for elderly people. He never had been considered a person of interest until his ex-girlfriend came forward.