US3 min(s) read
Published 17:24 02 Mar 2026 GMT
Federal authorities have solved the 30-year-old cold case of the abduction and murder of seven-year-old Morgan Violi, with the breakthrough coming from a single strand of hair.
On Thursday (February 26), Robert Scott Froberg, 61, was officially charged with kidnapping and strangling Morgan Violi to death nearly three decades ago.
The late victim was abducted on July 27, 1996, while playing outside her apartment building in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
Witnesses reported seeing a white man, later identified as Froberg, snatch Morgan and drive off in a stolen 1978 maroon Chevrolet van.
The van was discovered days later in Tennessee, but it wasn’t until a recent reexamination of old evidence that forensic experts linked Froberg to the crime.
Despite several leads, the suspect, who had previously escaped from an Alabama prison in 1996, which led him to steal the van used in the abduction, had remained unidentified for decades.
But the recent DNA breakthrough provided the final piece of the puzzle.
"Morgan Violi’s family never gave up on her, and neither did the Bowling Green community or its law enforcement community," US Attorney Kyle G Bumgarner said in a press release, cited by Daily Mail.
"For years, this community has feared that Morgan’s abductor lived silently among us and that one of our kids could be next.
"Investigators in the FBI and the Bowling Green Police Department have worked tirelessly to bring justice for Morgan.
"They applied new technology, reexamined old evidence, and never stopped searching for the truth," he added.
In a Facebook post, Morgan's older sister, Nikki Britt, shared her emotional relief.
“For 29 years we have refused to let her become a file on a shelf or a faded memory in someone else’s story,” she wrote.
"We have carried Morgan with us into interviews, into meetings, into late nights of research, into every tip call that made our hearts race and every disappointment that followed."
"We have advocated when it was exhausting. We have spoken when it would have been easier to go quiet. We have kept going when there were seasons that felt hopeless."
"Today, we learned that the man responsible for taking Morgan’s life has been identified. There are no words big enough for what that feels like," she continued.
"This did not happen overnight. It happened because investigators kept working. It happened because people cared enough to follow leads. It happened because our family refused to stop pushing forward."
"It happened because of a community that has stood beside us for nearly three decades. Every share. Every prayer. Every message. Every time someone said her name out loud ...it mattered," Britt added.
The suspect's confession comes after years of effort by the FBI and Bowling Green police to crack the case.
Although he has been incarcerated in Alabama since 1996 for unrelated crimes, his actions in 1996 have now brought him to face new charges.
If convicted, he faces a possible sentence of life in prison or the death penalty.
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