LAPD cold case unit locates a suspect 35 years after murder

After 35 years, Los Angeles police say they’ve found a second suspect in an unsolved homicide. KPCC's Cheryl Devall says the man is now awaiting extradition from Olmstead, Minnesota.

The crime involved two teenagers who allegedly raped and suffocated 80-year-old Alice Lewis during a break-in at her Mar Vista home. Both suspects eluded arrest for the murder for more than three decades. Last year, authorities picked up one of them, Dennis Vasquez, on suspicion of an unrelated crime. They took a sample of his DNA that eventually linked him to evidence from the 1975 murder that police had placed in a statewide database. Fingerprint evidence led detectives to the second suspect, Kevin Shanahan, a convicted bank robber who was 15 years old when the Mar Vista murder took place. An LAPD detective told the Los Angeles Times that forensic technology has evolved since then – and that it’s resulted in the first known multi-defendant arrests in the history of the department’s cold-case unit.