Human remains have been found in Pennsylvania in a search related to the disappearance of an 18-year-old Amish woman who was missing for 10 months, the prosecutor’s office said Wednesday.
Linda Stoltzfoos was last seen on June 21 walking home from church in the Bird-in-Hand area of Lancaster County.
Justo Smoker is charged with the kidnapping and murder of Stolzfoos. He was charged with kidnapping last summer and charged with murder in December, the Lancaster prosecutor said.
According to prison and court records, the 35-year-old smoker is being held without bail. A public defender listed as his representative was not immediately available on Wednesday evening after office hours.
The district attorney’s office said the remains were found in a rural area in the eastern part of the county, southeast of Harrisburg.
The coroner’s office will identify the remains and determine the cause and manner of death, he said.
“The Stoltzfoos family has been made aware of this update and is understandably still processing this information,” the OM said in a statement.
East Lampeter Township police, Lieutenant Matt Hess, told NBC’s “Dateline” last year after Stoltzfoos disappeared that there was no reason to believe the teen wanted to leave or take a trip, and that would be her character. do not benefit.
Authorities have said clothing believed to belong to Stolzfoos was found buried in the woods in a rural part of Ronks in July and Smoker’s vehicle was seen parked there two days after she was last seen.
Officials have said that “DNA attributable to Smoker” was found on one of the buried stockings.
Christopher Tallarico, the county’s chief public defender, argued in March that there was no evidence that Stoltzfoos ever got into Smoker’s car, eliciting testimony that her DNA was not found on samples taken from the car , The Associated Press reported.
Lampeter Township Detective Christopher Jones said the recovered DNA profiles were insufficient for testing.
When the prosecutors charged Smoker with murdering Stoltzfoos, “the prosecutors asserted that the passage of time, along with the complete cessation of all routine activities, led to the inevitable conclusion that Linda had died and that Smoker had caused her death”, said the prosecutor’s office.
In March, a district judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence to hold the trial for the murder charge, the prosecutor’s office said.
The Associated Press contributed.