A 66-year-old Oregon man was arrested Tuesday in the 1994 murder of his elderly neighbor, finally marking a potential breakthrough in the decades-old cold case.
Randall Joseph Gall was arrested at his Gaston home in connection with the killing of Veta Hardebeck, the Washington County District Attorney's Office said. Gall, who lived on neighboring property at the time of Hardebeck's death, has been charged with second-degree murder and was booked into the Washington County Jail without bail.
Hardebeck was found dead outside her home on a rural Oregon farm in February 1994. Police originally believed she died from a medical condition or accident, but an autopsy later revealed she was murdered. No one was ever arrested.
However, recent advances in forensic DNA technology ultimately led investigators to Gall, prosecutors said. The Washington County Sheriff's Office reopened the cold case last July after receiving a $14,000 grant from the Oregon Cold Case Investigators Association.
Detectives with the department's Cold Case Unit partnered with forensic experts to reexamine evidence collected from the original crime scene, which identified Gall as a suspect and led to his arrest.
“We are grateful to the Brothers Car Collection and the Oregon Cold Case Investigators Association for providing critical grant dollars to support advanced DNA testing and analysis,” Washington County DA Kevin Barton said in a statement Tuesday. “Using today’s science to solve yesterday’s crimes helps ensure we bring justice to victims, their families, and our community.”
The arrest could bring long-awaited answers for Hardebeck's family. In an interview with local outlet KGW 8 last July, her daughter, Caroline Ledbury, recalled finding her mother "lying on the concrete" the day she was killed.
Ledbury said she believes someone "severely beat her to a pulp" before staging the scene to look like an accident. At the time of the interview, she also said she suspected a family member was responsible, believing Hardebeck was killed after refusing to give them money.
“There's a kitchen window; they had knocked her through the kitchen window,” Ledbury recalled. “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 remembered her mother as a devoted gardener who was “always busy,” filling her time with the flowers and gardens she loved.
