Nearly 40 years after a woman’s body was found in a then-remote area of Davie, the man suspected in her murder has been identified by just a few small strands of evidence left behind.
A driver on Flamingo Road found the body of Marilyn Decker, 28, floating in a canal on the morning of Oct. 22, 1987.
She had been killed somewhere else at least a few days earlier before her body was left in the water in a plastic bag, according to a Fort Lauderdale News report from the time.
Davie Police announced Tuesday that recent DNA testing of several human hairs found inside and on Decker’s shirt and a towel found at the scene matched that of Donald Lawless, a man originally from Ohio who lived in Davie and other parts of Florida between the early 1980s through 1993. Though the Broward State Attorney’s Office determined there is enough evidence to charge him with Decker’s murder, Lawless died in Ohio in 1995.
Little information was reported about Decker and her case in the months and years following the discovery of her body. The Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office determined her cause of death was asphyxiation, but police had not yet identified any suspects, the Fort Lauderdale News reported on Oct. 24, 1987.
Decker was one of several women whose bodies were found discarded in canals in the mid-to-late 1980s around Davie, and all of their cases went cold. Lori Jane Kearsey was found floating in a canal on Feb. 18, 1984, near the 2600 block of Southwest 130th Avenue, just a few miles away from where Decker would be found. In 1985, the body of Carrie Weldgen was found in a canal on the northeast corner of Southwest 121st Avenue and Southwest 36th Court, about 2 miles away from where Kearsey was found a year earlier.
Within three years after Decker’s murder, detectives had identified multiple suspects, collecting and processing evidence, Davie Police said in a news release Tuesday, but they were met with “negative results.” The Florida Department of Law Enforcement joined Davie Police’s investigation in 1995.
They conducted interviews. They processed items that were found at the scene. Yet the efforts did not turn up any leads, and the case went untouched until 2021, the police department said.
Three organizations helped Davie Police in their investigation in recent years: The Vidocq Society in Philadelphia, an organization made up entirely of volunteers ranging from former law enforcement to prosecutors to chemists that assists law enforcement agencies on cold cases; Astrea Forensics in California, an organization considered experts in genetic profiling from human hairs; and a DNA technology company called Parabon, which has assisted Davie Police’s Cold Case Unit in other cases in recent years.
Astra Forensics’s testing of the hairs recovered from the scene showed several of them shared the same DNA from a man, the police department said. Then, CeCe Moore, chief genetic genealogist at Parabon, used that DNA to work for months to build a family tree, leading police to Lawless as their suspect. Moore and Parabon also helped solve an older Davie cold case in 2021 by identifying Carolyn Dunn Moudy as a Jane Doe whose body was found in December 1975.
Lawless was cremated after he died in Ohio 30 years ago, the news release said. He had an “extensive” criminal history going back to the 1940s. Davie Police confirmed Lawless was the suspect through DNA testing of a close relative of his that Parabon then compared.
Since Decker’s case has been solved, seven other cold cases in Davie from the 1980s remain.
