In the summer of 2019, a forensic scientist in a quiet Austin lab submitted a single sample to a genealogical database. The match came back in 72 hours. The suspect was already dead, buried for five years in a West Texas cemetery. But that did not mean he had escaped, because what investigators did next would become one of the most extraordinary final acts of justice in Texas cold case history.
To understand what was recovered, you have to understand what was lost. In 1981, Midland, Texas, was a town shaped by the oil boom, confident and close-knit. Families left screen doors unlocked, and neighbors left casseroles on doorsteps without knocking. Linda Garland was 23 that summer.
She worked the early shift at Midland Memorial Hospital as a nursing aide, a job that asked more than it gave back, and she did it without complaint. She had grown up in Midland, graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in 1976, and lived four blocks from her parents. Her younger sister Diane was her closest friend.
On Friday evenings, Linda drove her pale green 1978 Buick Skylark to the Piggly Wiggly on West Illinois Avenue, bought groceries for the week, and stopped at her parents’ house for dinner before heading home. She was saving money to take an LPN course at Midland College and had written the enrollment deadline on her kitchen calendar in red ink. She kept wildflowers on her windowsill. Her neighbor later told investigators that Linda waved every single time she pulled into the driveway.
On the evening of August 14, 1981, Linda left Midland Memorial at 4:30 p. m. Her supervisor watched her walk to the parking lot. That was the last time anyone connected to the hospital ever saw her.
At 7:15 that evening, Diane called her parents’ house, expecting Linda at the dinner table. She was not there. By 8:00, Diane called the apartment. No answer.
By 9:30, she was driving the route between the hospital and the Piggly Wiggly herself, looking for the pale green Skylark. She found it at 9:48 p. m. The car was parked on the gravel shoulder of West County Road 127, about two miles east of the hospital and three miles from Linda’s apartment, a stretch of road she had no reason to be on.
The driver’s door was unlocked. Her purse was on the passenger seat. The groceries from the Piggly Wiggly were still in the back seat, undisturbed: two cans of soup, a loaf of bread, a pint of milk, still cold. She was gone.
Midland County sheriff’s deputies arrived within twenty minutes. A search began, and volunteers walked the open scrubland the following morning. On the third day, a search dog led a deputy to a dry creek bed half a mile from the Skylark. Linda was found there.
She had been strangled. The medical examiner estimated she had died no more than two hours after leaving the hospital parking lot. The killer had taken her off that road in broad daylight and disappeared before anyone noticed. The lead investigator was Detective Sergeant Raymond Chalk of the Midland County Sheriff’s Office, a seventeen-year veteran known for the patience he brought to difficult cases.
He was 41 that August and had a daughter Linda’s age. He later said this was the case that stayed with him at three in the morning. In the first weeks, his team developed three suspects, each a male acquaintance who could place himself in the area that afternoon. Two were cleared by the end of September.
The third, a man named Earl Dean Putnham, 36, worked as a pump technician for an oil field services company and lived eight miles from the crime scene. He was interviewed twice. He was calm and cooperative. He had been at a company barbecue that afternoon with co-workers who confirmed his attendance until 6:00 p.
m. The timeline was close, but it was an alibi. There was one piece of physical evidence that Chalk preserved with particular care: a partial fingerprint lifted from the exterior of Linda’s driver’s side door handle. It was not Linda’s.
It was not high enough quality for the technology of 1981 to match conclusively, but it existed. It had been touched by someone. That print went into an evidence envelope, the envelope into a box, and the box into a storage room at the Midland County Sheriff’s Office. The years began to pass.
By 1987, the case had been transferred to cold case status. Chalk left the department in 1994 to work private security, but before he did, he asked a colleague to make sure the evidence box survived any future storage cleanouts. It did. The Garland family held on the way families do when the world moves on and they cannot.
Linda’s mother, Dorothy, attended the annual candlelight vigil every August, not just in the early years but every year. She brought a photograph of Linda in her nursing aide uniform and set it on a small folding table with a candle in front of it. She never stopped. In 2003, Diane told a local television reporter she still drove past that stretch of County Road 127 sometimes.
She did not know why. She just did. Earl Dean Putnham married in 1983, continued working in the oil fields, moved to Odessa in 1988 and then to Lubbock in the mid-nineties. He had a son.
He retired in 2009 and died of cardiac failure in February 2014 at age 68. He was buried in Slaton, Texas. His obituary described him as a devoted father and a man who loved fishing on Lake Tahoka. The evidence box in Midland County sat untouched.
In 2017, a newly appointed Midland County Sheriff, Daniel Reyes, initiated a systematic review of cold case evidence boxes, partly funded by a state grant and partly driven by his conviction that advances in forensic technology had outpaced the old case files in storage. He assigned two investigators to the effort. One of them, a former Texas Ranger named Cecilia Montoya, was given the Garland file in January 2018. She later described opening it as disorienting.
There were photographs, handwritten field notes, typed interview summaries on carbon paper. It was like reading a case from another country. She worked through the evidence inventory methodically. When she reached the notation about the partial fingerprint and the biological material recovered from under Linda’s fingernails, material collected by the 1981 medical examiner but never fully processed, she requested a full forensic audit.
The partial fingerprint was too degraded to be useful after 38 years. But the biological material was different. DNA technology in 1981 had not existed. By 1998, a profile had been developed but nothing to match it to.
But forensic genealogy, the method that uses public ancestry databases to trace unknown DNA to potential family members, had been available in a refined, reliable form since roughly 2018. Montoya submitted the profile to a certified forensic genealogy lab in Austin in May 2019. Seventy-two hours later, the lab returned a list of potential family connections. The closest match was a woman in Amarillo who shared a significant portion of the unknown contributor’s genetic material.
She was cooperative and provided a family tree. The investigators traced the branch, two generations back on a specific paternal line. A name appeared: Putnham. Earl Dean Putnham.
Deceased, February 2014. Investigators spent the next four months building the circumstantial architecture around that name. Court documents confirmed Putnham had driven an oil company truck on August 14, 1981, on a route that took him along the outskirts of Midland. His co-worker alibi placed him at the barbecue until 6:00 p.
m. , which left a window. The partial print on the door handle, though too degraded for conclusive identification, was not inconsistent with Putnham’s known ridge count from a 1991 arrest. Records showed his truck had been seen at a gas station on West County Road 117 that afternoon, less than two miles from where the Skylark was found.
Every thread pointed in the same direction, but DNA was the standard, and the only remaining source of Earl Dean Putnham’s DNA was in the ground at Slaton Cemetery. Sheriff Reyes applied for an exhumation order in October 2019. The request required approval from Putnham’s surviving son, who declined to cooperate, and from the district court, which evaluated the forensic evidence independently. The court granted the order in January 2020.
On the morning of February 6, 2020, thirty-eight years and six months after Linda Garland failed to come home from work, forensic technicians at Slaton Cemetery exhumed the remains of Earl Dean Putnham. A bone sample was extracted and sent to the Texas Department of Public Safety crime lab in Austin. The results came back in March. The DNA from Putnham’s remains was a match to the biological material recovered from Linda Garland at the time of her death in 1981.
The probability of a coincidental match was greater than one in one trillion. He had done it. He had carried it for thirty-three years while he lived an ordinary life in West Texas, fishing on Lake Tahoka, watching his son grow up, retiring, dying quietly of a failed heart. And now, because the evidence had survived and the science had caught up, and one investigator had opened a box and refused to put it back on the shelf, he could not hide any longer.
Sheriff Reyes held a press conference on April 9, 2020. He stood at a podium in front of the Midland County Courthouse and named Earl Dean Putnham publicly and formally as the man responsible for the murder of Linda Garland. He acknowledged the work of Montoya, Detective Chalk, who was then in his late seventies and living in retirement in Andrews, Texas, and the lab team in Austin. He said Linda Garland had not been forgotten.
Diane Garland stood to the right of the podium, her hands folded in front of her. She was 61. When reporters approached her afterward, she did not say much. She said they always knew someone new, they always knew someone new.
She said their mother, Dorothy, had died in 2011, nine years before this morning. She paused. Then she said, I’m going to tell her anyway. Earl Dean Putnham would face no trial and serve no sentence.
The law had no mechanism for reaching him across the boundary of his death. But his name is now permanently attached to what he did. The record exists. The forensic finding stands, and in Texas, a formal identification of a perpetrator in a closed case is entered into the public court record and the state’s crime database, permanently and irrevocably.
Linda Garland was 23 years old. She worked early mornings helping sick people in a Midland hospital because that was the kind of person she was. She kept wildflowers on her windowsill. She had written a deadline on her kitchen calendar in red ink.
She waved at her neighbor every single time she pulled into the driveway. She had a future that was entirely hers. It was taken from her on a gravel shoulder off County Road 127 on an August evening in 1981. And the man who took it lived free for 33 years before a box of preserved evidence and a science that did not yet exist on the day of her murder finally set his name.
Justice arrived late. But it arrived.