An 85-year-old woman was beaten to death decades ago. Cops are finally reopening the case, as her daughter shares theory
Police in Washington County, Oregon are reopening an investigation into the brutal 1994 murder of an 85-year-old woman.
Veta Hardebeck was found dead outside her home on a rural Oregon farm in February 1994. Police originally believed the woman died from a medical condition or accident, but an autopsy later revealed she was murdered.
No one was ever arrested.
Now, local authorities are reopening the case after receiving a $14,000 grant from the Oregon Cold Case Investigators Association, the Washington County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
Investigators will use the funds to submit multiple items to a private lab for “advanced DNA testing and analysis,” the district attorney’s office said.
Hardebeck’s daughter, Caroline Ledbury, told local outlet KGW 8 that she found her mother “lying on the concrete.” Ledbury believes someone “severely beat her to a pulp,” but tried to make it look like an accident.
“There’s a kitchen window; they had knocked her through the kitchen window,” Ledbury said. “They knocked her so hard in the kitchen window that it broke the glass, and the glass had penetrated her skull and sticking up out of her skull.”
“Whoever murdered her laid her down, put her head on a hunk of wood, like she’d fallen back and hit her head on the wood is what it looked like,” she added. “Folded her arms like this and piled them full, these hunks of wood.”
Ledbury said her mother, while “always busy,” was too frail to have carried that much wood.
“My mom was 85 years old, had a wood stove,” she told KGW 8. “She’d carry one stick of wood in at a time to stock that stove. That’s all she could handle.”
Ledbury told KGW 8 she believes a family member killed Hardebeck after she refused to give them money. Now, the loving daughter says she’s worried that too much time has gone by and investigators will struggle to find her killer.
“It seems like so much of the stuff that you could prove is now gone,” she said. “It started fine out there. Everybody was really attentive; everybody was there every day for us trying to get us as many clues and everything, following every lead.”
Washington County District Attorney Kevin Barton says investigators are committed to solving all cases, no matter how old they are. The department also recently solved a 1988 cold case, with a husband eventually found guilty of murdering his wife.
“No matter how much time has passed, we want victims and perpetrators to know that we will continue to work to solve these cases,” Barton said in a statement.
