Imagine a summer afternoon in 1984. The North Shaver Street neighborhood in Salsbury, North Carolina. Golden sunlight, the sound of lawnmowers echoing from neighboring houses, the quiet calm of a midJune afternoon. A 15year-old girl is home alone at her grandparents house. Her grandfather had just gone to the grocery store and her grandmother had gone to get her hair done.
Then her grandfather returned and saw the horror. That day was June 15, 1984. This is not a story about a stranger from the shadows or a premeditated crime. This is the story of a man working the dayshift at the Fredolay plant who saw the 15year-old girl home alone walked in and committed a brutal crime. For the next 35 years, the case went unsolved while her 13-year-old sister, who witnessed it all, grew up and was accused by the community for 35 years.
Her name was Rhysa Dawn Trexler. She was from Salsbury, Rowan County, North Carolina. Until the day the rape kit that had sat in storage for 35 years, an exhausted sister emailed a television show and a DNA technique that didn’t exist on the day she died finally gave the truth its rightful name. But let’s go back to where it all began.
In 1984, America was entering a summer of optimism. Reagan had just launched his reelection campaign with the slogan, “Morning in America.” Ghostbusters was breaking box office records week after week. In the living rooms of working-class families, the TV was airing the Los Angeles Olympics with their gold medals, a year when America believed its best days were still ahead.
In Salsbury, North Carolina, a town of 25,000 people located between Charlotte and Greensboro on Highway 85, where the Canon Mills textile plant had once been the state’s largest employer. The furniture factory was the local economic pride, and workingclass families lived in one-story wooden houses with front yards big enough for kids to run around in and neighbors close enough to know each other by name.
This was the kind of town where people grew up, got married, and stayed. The kind of town where everyone believed they knew each other well enough that nothing bad could happen. Risa Don Trexler was born on October 11th, 1968 in Rowan County and grew up on Bringing Ferry Road with her younger sister Jodie. The two sisters lived right next to their grandparents, Walter Walt Monroe’s house on North Shaver Street.
Close enough to run back and forth, close enough for screams from one side to carry to the other on a quiet afternoon. Risa attended Salsbury High School in 1984. She had just finished 9th grade and was preparing to enter 10th. Her best friend Beth Davis, at the time still Beth Hendris, described Risa as someone who wanted to go to college after graduation, was especially interested in psychology, loved children, and had a natural talent for making everyone around her feel comfortable.
She was a good student and always the one who could make the whole group laugh even when the mood was heavy. Beth said Rhysa always made her laugh. A few days after the school year ended on Friday, June 15th, 1984, Rhysa invited two friends, Paul Rogers and Jim, over to the house on Bringing Ferry Road to watch TV, make sandwiches, listen to music, the way Piedmont teens killed time on early summer afternoons when there was nothing special to do.
Her 13-year-old sister Jodie was also there in the house. In the middle of the 13-year-old stepped outside, looked over at her grandparents house, saw that both Grandpa Walt’s car and truck were gone from the yard, and concluded that Rhysa had gone with them. Nothing unusual since Rhysa often went over to her grandparents any time.
After about an hour away, Walt Monroe returned from the grocery store with bags in hand, walked into the house at 7:14, and found Risa in the spare bedroom. His screams echoed around the corner to the neighboring house. Jodie ran over and that was the moment her life changed forever. Grandpa Walt went to buy groceries.
Grandma went to get her hair done. That 1 hour was all the killer needed. And it was also all the time it took to turn an ordinary summer afternoon into something the Texler and Monroe families would never escape. When the Salsbury police arrived at the scene, they found 15-year-old Rhysa Dawn Trexler naked on the floor in the spare bedroom with 18 stab wounds concentrated on her upper chest, neck, and face.
The most severe stab wound completely severed her spinal cord. She was still wearing her bracelet, watch, and rings. Nothing had been taken. No drawers had been opened. Nothing had been disturbed except in the spare bedroom where she lay. Investigators noted this was not a robbery. 18 stab wounds were not the work of someone who wanted money and then fled.
There were no broken windows, no forced locks, no signs of forced entry. The attacker had entered through an open door. The front door was left unlocked as was the neighborhood custom or Rhysa had opened the door for him. All of this painted a picture that investigators initially believed.
The attacker knew the house, knew the family’s schedule, and had not come for money. No murder weapon was found at the scene, but the autopsy revealed a detail the attacker had not known. The blade of a kitchen knife had broken off and was still lodged in Reese’s right shoulder. The broken blade during the attack showed extreme force. The attacker had used so much power that it snapped the knife blade.
This was the only significant forensic detail about the weapon. The handle and the rest of the blade were never found. During the autopsy, the medical examiner confirmed that Rhysa had been sexually assaulted before her death and collected a rape kit according to North Carolina’s standard procedures, including semen samples from the victim’s body.
It was recorded in the autopsy report as direct biological evidence from the attacker. In 1984, there was no DNA forensics technology that could turn that sample into a specific person’s name. Modern DNA forensics techniques had not yet been applied to criminal investigations in the US until the mid 1980s and only became widespread in the early 1990s.
The sample was numbered, documented, packaged according to procedure and sent to the Salsbury Police Department’s evidence storage. Police began interviewing that same day, June 15th, and in the days that followed. Paul Rogers and Jim, the two friends who were the last to leave the house before the crime occurred, were interviewed multiple times.
Their alibis were checked in meticulous detail. No inconsistencies were found, and there was no evidence linking them to the scene. Both were gradually eliminated from the list of suspects. Neighbors in the North Shaver Street and Bringing Ferry Road area were questioned, who had seen what that afternoon, what strange cars were parked in front of the house, what strangers had passed by.
And from those interviews, multiple witnesses confirmed they had seen a black man running in the area around the time before Walt returned home. That information was recorded in the reports. During that process, police also seized a knife belonging to a person listed in the file as C. Blair, Curtis Edward Blair, who worked at the Fredo Lelay plant on Lee Street about two blocks south of the Monrose House and whose name came up in the investigation because witnesses had connected him to the area. The knife was sent to the
state crime lab for analysis. Result: No blood detected. With 1984 forensic technology, the lack of blood on the knife was enough to close the investigative lead on Blair. No one questioned whether he might have used a different knife. No one pursued the geographic connection between his workplace and the crime scene just two blocks away.
His name remained in the file, but was not marked as the primary suspect, and the investigation shifted in other directions. No forced entry, nothing taken. 18 stab wounds. The number was not that of someone who came to rob and encountered resistance, but of someone who came with a specific purpose. Investigators built a psychological profile that the attacker was familiar with the house or the victim, knew the grandparents would be absent, had not come for money, and that logic directed the investigation toward family acquaintances, especially toward
the only person present that afternoon without a clear alibi. Jodie, Reysa’s 13-year-old sister, she had just lost her sister, and before she could even understand what was happening, had become the focus of the investigation. In the years that followed, the Salsbury Police Department periodically reviewed the case.
The suspect list was run through new databases as they were built. People interviewed in 1984 were reconted. DNA from the rape kit was compared to Cotus as the federal database expanded in the 1990s and 2000s. There were no matches because the killer had no criminal record in North Carolina and his DNA profile was never entered into Cotus.
Jodie Trexler was 13 years old on June 15th, 1984. She was the first to run over when she heard her grandfather screaming. She was the first to see Risa covered in blood before the police arrived. In the days that followed, when investigators interviewed Jodie as she sat answering questions, 13 years old, having just lost her sister with no lawyer, no adult guiding her on what to say or not say, and no one explaining that those questions were not standard procedure, but part of a process in which she was becoming the central figure. There was not enough
evidence to charge her, but there was also no official statement clearing her. There was no press conference stating clearly that Jodi Trexler had been investigated and was not involved. Nothing specific was said to close the door on suspicion. And in a town of 25,000 where everyone knew each other’s names and kept tabs on one another, the absence of an official arrest was understood not as we haven’t found anyone, but as we know who, but don’t have enough evidence yet, and Jod was the closest. Suspicious looks began.
Friends stopped calling. Neighbors looked at her differently. No one said it outright. There was no need to say it outright in a town where people could read the meaning of silence, of distance, of conversations that stopped when she walked into the room. Jod grew up in Salsbury, got married, and continued living in that community.
There was no other choice, no way to prove her innocence, nothing concrete to fight against except rumors that had no shape but carried enough weight to change how people looked at her in the grocery store, at church, anywhere in the town she could not escape. She could not call a lawyer to defend herself against something that did not exist on paper, but existed everywhere in her real life.
It was the kind of sentence the legal system had no tools to resolve because no file had been opened, no indictment had been filed, nothing to appeal or refute. In 2010, when Facebook became a place to store and share community memories, the rumors that had existed for 26 years were digitized. Discussion pages about the Rhysa Trexler case appeared.
Jod’s name appeared in comments from people who knew nothing about the case except the wrong version from 1984. Once again, she became the focus of a trial without a courtroom. This time, not through looks in the supermarket, but through the screens of thousands of strangers. Jod was not arrested. She was not charged. She was not put on trial.
But for 35 years, she had to live out a sentence that a community had declared on its own. After the initial investigative efforts failed to produce an arrest, the Rhysa Trexler case gradually became a cold case. The file was stored at the Salsbury Police Department. The original investigators, including Sergeant Jim Hurley, who had properly collected the rape kit in 1984, retired one by one.
New officers read the file, noted leads that had not been pursued, but there were no starting points. The case name still appeared in annual periodic reviews. Someone would open the file, flip through the pages, shake their head, and close it. Reys’s mother, Vicky Oaks, lived through those years in the silence of someone who had lost a child with no answers and had to watch her remaining child being treated by the community as a suspect.
She did not speak much, did not appear on TV, and lived quietly. As each year passed, with no name and nothing to fill the empty space, her hope gradually shrank until she began to believe the answer would never come in her lifetime. But throughout all those years, one thing did not change. The rape kit collected in 1984 remained in the Salsbury Police Department’s evidence storage, properly preserved, neither destroyed nor lost.
In April 2018, The Doctor Phil’s show aired an episode titled Cold Case, I didn’t murder my 15-year-old sister. The false accusations and small town gossip haunt me. Jodie Trexler Lair, now in her 40s, sat in front of millions of viewers and told her story for the first time on a platform large enough.
She talked about June 15th, 1984, about 34 years living under the shadow of suspicion in the very town where she grew up, about conversations that stopped when she walked into the room, and about Facebook comments from people who knew nothing about the case except the wrong version from the beginning.
At the end of the show, she took a polygraph test in front of expert Jack Trimarco. The result, she was telling the truth, and now millions of people had witnessed it. But the Dr. Phil episode was not the only thing that brought the case back. Earlier, Rhysa’s best friend, Beth Davis, at the time, still Beth Hendricks, had created a social media page about the case in recent years to call for information and keep Reese’s name alive in the community’s memory.
That page combined with the Dr. Phil episode reached Sergeant investigator Travis Schulenberger of the Salsbury Police Department. He had heard about the Trexler case from the moment he joined the force and had always felt that the most important evidence in the case had never been properly tested with the right technology at the right time.
After watching the Doctor Phil episode and reading Beth Davis’s page, Schulenberger decided to review the file from page one. In June 2018, Schulenberger sent the DNA sample from the rape kit collected in 1984 to the North Carolina State Crime Lab. For the first time in the case’s history, that sample was tested with modern DNA technology after 34 years in storage.
The result was what Schulenberger had hoped for, but had not dared to be certain of. The lab successfully extracted DNA and built a complete male DNA profile from the semen sample, a full biological identity. the DNA of the person who had killed Rhysa Trexler. In November 2018, Schulenberger officially reviewed the entire case file.
Hundreds of pages accumulated since 1984. Interview reports, crime scene reports, initial lab results, the suspect list with names that had been eliminated and those that had not. He read every page, paying attention to things that readers in 1984 or 1994 or 2004 might have overlooked. He paid special attention to two things.
The report of a witness who saw a man running on North Shaver Street that afternoon, a lead that had been recorded but not pursued further due to insufficient specific identifying details, and the name C. Blair attached to the knife seized in 1984, whose lab results at the time showed no blood. Schulenberger checked the location of the Fredolay plant on Lee Street, where the 1984 file recorded that Blair had worked.
The distance from the plant to 714 North Shaver Street was two blocks. He could have walked from work to the Monroe’s house in a few minutes. The area where the witness saw the man running was exactly on the route from the Monroe house back toward Fredo Lelay. For the first time in the case’s history, those three things were placed side by side at the same time.
The name C Blair, the twob block distance, and the direction the man the witness saw was running. Schulenberger coordinated with the FBI, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, and decided to send the DNA profile to Paraban Nanolabs for genetic genealogy, the technique that the Golden State Killer case had just used to solve its case.
In 2018, Schulenberger believed this was the only remaining path that could put a name to the DNA profile. In March 2019, Schulenberger sent the DNA sample extracted from the seaman to Parabon Nanolabs, a company specializing in genetic genealogy based in Restston, Virginia, led by genealogologist CC Moore, who had worked on hundreds of cold cases since the technique was applied to criminal investigations in the US after the Golden State Killer case in 2018.
The core difference between Parabon and Kotus was that Parabon did not search criminal databases but uploaded the DNA to GED match, a public database where millions of people voluntarily uploaded their DNA to find ancestors and relatives. From there, genealogologists built family trees in reverse. From the DNA, they found distant relatives with partial DNA matches, built family trees for those people, and gradually narrowed down toward a suspect by combining genetic information with public records such as birth and death records, census records,
and genealogical documents. On April 8th, 2019, less than a month after sending the sample, the genetic genealogy report from Parabon returned a name. a black male approximately 40 years old at the time Risa was killed in 1984 who had lived and worked in Rowan County with a criminal record for assault with a dangerous weapon and who had served time.
Curtis Edward Blair Schulenberger immediately cross-referenced it with the original 1984 investigative file and found what he had sensed would be there. This was the sea Blair on the seized knife. the man who worked at the Fredo Lelay plant on Lee Street, two blocks from the scene, the name that had been in the file from the very first day and had never been pursued far enough because of a 1984 lab result that said there was no blood on the knife.
Shallenburgger and the FBI began verifying Curtis Blair’s full background. He was born and raised in Rowan County, worked at Fredo Lelay Salsbury at the time of the crime, had criminal records in multiple states, including assault with a dangerous weapon in New York and other arrests in California with served prison time. He left Salsbury after 1984 and moved to California, then died on August 6th, 2004 from acute cardiac arrest and congestive heart failure in San Diego County.
His body was brought back to Salsbury and buried at Memorial Park Cemetery, meaning DNA could not be obtained directly through any ordinary procedure, and the only way to confirm Parabon’s result was exumation. Schulenberger prepared a court petition to exume Curtis Edward Blair’s body with an affidavit presenting the full legal and scientific basis.
The judge read the affidavit, reviewed the entire basis, and signed the order. In June 2019, Curtis Blair’s body was exumed from Memorial Park Cemetery according to proper legal procedures. In a detail only possible in a small town where people knew each other and voluntarily did things no one asked them to, Liarly Funeral Home, a local establishment in Salsbury that had served the community for generations, volunteered its facilities so technicians could collect DNA samples from the body and care for the remains before rearial. The DNA
sample from Blair’s body and the DNA profile from the 1984 rape kit were sent to the NC State Crime Lab for STR analysis. Short tandem repeat, the method of comparing short repeating segments in the DNA sequence at multiple locations across the genome, the international standard for comparing two DNA samples and determining the likelihood they came from the same person.
On August 6th, 2019, the NC State Crime Lab sent its report to the Salsbury Police Department. Conclusion: The primary DNA contributor of the seaman in the rape kit collected from Risa Trexler’s body on June 15th, 1984 matched the DNA profile obtained from Curtis Edward Blair’s remains. Not a partial match, not close, but a full confirmation.
Curtis Blair was the person who had sexually assaulted and killed Risa Trexler. Blair, 40 years old when he killed Rhysa, worked the day shift at Fredo Lei. A familiar face in the North Shaver Street neighborhood, a man whom neighbors might have seen walking on the sidewalk everyday without ever thinking of his name when the press reported on the case because he was not an acquaintance, not a friend of the family, had no connection whatsoever to the Trexler or Monroe families, and did not appear in any version of the story that the Salsbury community had built
and circulated for 35 years. After June 15, 1984, Curtis Blair left Salsbury, lived in California, continued to have legal problems, grew older, while the Texler family waited, and Jod grew up under the shadow of suspicion. He lived another 20 years and died in 2004 from heart failure in San Diego County, California.
Never questioned again about that day. The Salsbury Police Department did not release Blair’s name at a press conference with the official reason that he was deceased and the case would never go to trial. It would not be fair to assign the name of a dead person without a full court process, without a jury, without a defense, without a verdict.
It was only when the Salsbury Post through its independent investigation found the court record of the petition to exume the body where the name Curtis Edward Blair was clearly written that the name was released to the community. There were no handcuffs, no Miranda rights, no scene that television could capture as proof of justice.
Only a standard administrative line in the file. Case cleared. The DNA confirmation accomplished one important thing. It proved who killed Risa and officially exonerated Jod completely. But it could not give back the 35 years Jod had lived in that community under the shadow of suspicion. It could not question the responsibility of a community that had convicted a 13-year-old child who had just lost her sister without any evidence.
On December 3rd, 2019, police chief Jerry Stokes and Sergeant Schulenberger stood before the press and announced that the Rhysa Don Trexler case had been solved and closed after 35 years. Schulenberger said that Jod herself was the key person in bringing the case back. That if she had not persisted for those 35 years, if she had not decided to email Dr.
Phil when there were no other options left, the case might never have been reinvestigated. Jodie Leair and her mother Vicky Oaks attended the press conference. Jod said to the press, “I just want to say how happy my family and I are. This has been a long road, something we didn’t think would happen for many years.
” Vicky Oaks told WBTV News, “So many nights lying in bed, wondering and wondering and wondering, and maybe now I can sleep.” That was not the statement of someone who had just found full justice, but of someone who had just been allowed to stop carrying something far too heavy for far too long. The name Curtis Edward Blair, after the Salsbury Post published it through court records, spread through the community and created a reaction clearly divided into two types.
Those who did not know him and had no memories attached to the name received the information as a distant event and those who remembered the familiar face in the Fredolay plant area, a regular dayshift man they might have nodded to when they passed. The shock was not the name itself but the fact that for 35 years an entire community had been looking in completely the wrong direction.
The Risa Trexler case became one of the first in North Carolina to successfully use investigative genetic genealogy to solve a cold case. CC Moore of Paraban Nanolabs later said it was one of the cases where the chain of evidence from the rape kit to exeation to DNA confirmation was the cleanest and most complete the company had ever handled.
with evidence properly preserved for 35 years. The Rhysa Trexler case leaves three specific lessons that any American can apply to real life. The first lesson is about evidence and procedure. Sergeant Jim Hurley collected the rape kit properly in 1984 without knowing how important it would become.
He simply did his job step by step without cutting corners or skipping anything because he thought it wasn’t necessary. The lesson here is not just for police. It is for everyone. The meticulousness in daily work, even when no one sees it and no one praises it, can create consequences we never anticipate.
The second lesson is about rumors and community responsibility. For 35 years, an entire community convicted a 13-year-old child, not because of evidence, but because of the absence of an official denial and because of the logic of small town gossip. If you live in a small community or even on social media where rumors spread faster than in any town, ask yourself before sharing, do I have real evidence or am I just repeating what someone else said? The third lesson is about the persistence of victims.
Jod did not give up even after 35 years with no results. She continued to speak out, continued to find ways, and that very persistence created the breakthrough. If you or a loved one are waiting for justice in an unsolved case, contact the investigating agency periodically. Ask about new DNA technologies that might apply to old evidence.
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Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
