Investigators used DNA to construct these composite images of a man they think was involved in the killing of a young US woman in 1992.

In 1992, a US woman's body was found dumped in a wooded area.

Whoever kidnapped, raped and stabbed Lisa Ziegert before leaving her body in a wooded area left a sliver of DNA on the middle school aide's corpse.

For a quarter of a century, that DNA was a dead-end as investigators scoured New England, Massachusetts, for Ziegert's killer, chasing down thousands of leads and looking at hundreds of possible suspects without success.

WWLP-22News/YouTube Lisa Ziegert, 24, was kidnapped, raped and murdered in 1992 in an unsolved homicide.

But a new process has given the cold case a fresh lead – and a "face to the crime".



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Investigators have used a technology called DNA phenotyping to paint a digital picture of Ziegert's killer, according to the Hampden District Attorney's Office.

Phenotyping uses DNA to make an educated guess about a person's ancestry, eye colour, hair colour, skin colour, freckling and face shape.

The "snapshot" picture of the suspect was produced by Parabon NanoLabs, based in Virginia.

According to the snapshot, ​Zieger's killer was likely a man of European descent with fair or very fair skin. He had brown or hazel eyes and brown or black hair. There's about a 40 per cent chance that he had freckles.

"For the first time in 24 years, we have a face to this crime," Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni said in a statement.

"The technology we have put to use is at the leading edge of the industry. No expense, effort, or means will be spared to bring the person(s) to justice who killed Lisa. We will never forget her."

The image depicts what the suspect would have looked like at age 25 and with an average body-mass index. Another image details what he would look like at age 50.

The process is the first break in Ziegert's killing in decades, but investigators say it is far from perfection.

Snapshot is inadmissible as evidence in court. It also can't take into account massive changes in a suspect's body-mass index and can't account for a different hair colour or scars.

Still, the company says it's being used in more and more municipalities to breathe new life into cases that were long cold.

Police in North Carolina used the technology to get a composite of the person who killed University of North Carolina student Faith Hedgepeth in her apartment in 2012, according to Parabon's Facebook page.

And authorities in Louisiana hope the technology helps them identify a badly decomposed body that was probably dumped near Lake Pontchartrain, according to CBS-affiliate WWL-TV.

The body was partly dismembered, missing both arms. The victim had a heart surgery scar and traces of blood-pressure medication in his blood.

In Ziegert's case, investigators had less genetic material to generate a lead on a suspect – the DNA on her body, along with DNA where her body was found four days after she disappeared.

But the technology has renewed hope on the cold case which shocked the town of Agawam over two decades ago.

Ziegert, who was 24, was a school aide who also moonlighted as a clerk at an Agawam card shop.

She was abducted sometime in the early evening hours of April 15, 1992. Investigators noticed signs of a struggle in the card shop's back room.

But Ziegert's purse and school materials were not touched. Nothing was missing from the store's cash register, and her car was still in the parking lot.

"For the first time in 24 years, we have a face to this crime," Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni said in a statement.

"The technology we have put to use is at the leading edge of the industry. No expense, effort, or means will be spared to bring the person(s) to justice who killed Lisa.

"We will never forget her."​