An elderly woman's remains are found in her apartment after an apparent robbery For decades, the brutal murder of 81-year-old Wilomeana 'Violet' Filkins in East Greenbush, NY, remained a painful mystery for her loved ones and a frustrating puzzle for law enforcement. A retired state Education Department employee, she was a woman who lived a quiet life, known for her love of gardening and her volunteer work. She had never married and lived alone in her ground-floor apartment at the Coventry Apartments.
On August 19, 1994, family members, concerned after not hearing
from her, made a devastating discovery. They found Violet's body in the living room of her apartment; an autopsy would later reveal she had died from several blows to the back of her head. Investigators believed she had been killed two days prior, on August 17, during a daytime robbery. Her 1989 Plymouth Reliant was still in the apartment complex's parking lot, but it was parked in a way that was unusual for her, leading police to suspect her killer had taken the car and later returned it. This theory gained more traction three years later when some of her stolen personal belongings were found on a rural road behind the Nassau-Schodack Cemetery.
For years, the case yielded no arrests, turning into a cold case that detectives persistently pursued. A significant breakthrough finally came in 2019, nearly 25 years after the murder. A tip from an ex-girlfriend of a man named Jeremiah J. Guyette brought him to the attention of investigators. She recounted a time in 2009 when Guyette had cried and confessed to robbing and hitting an old woman. This new lead prompted police to re-examine the evidence.
When investigators went to interview Guyette, who was 18 at the time of the murder and had briefly lived near Filkins, he became defensive and requested a lawyer. The very next day, on October 2, 2019, Jeremiah Guyette was found dead in his garage, having taken his own life. Following his death, investigators were able to obtain his fingerprints and DNA. A latent thumbprint that had been lifted from a coffee table in Violet's apartment in 1994 was resubmitted for analysis. Due to advancements in forensic technology, the print was definitively matched to Guyette. In January 2023, authorities publicly announced that Jeremiah J. Guyette was the individual responsible for the 1994 murder of Wilomeana Violet Filkins, finally bringing a long-awaited, albeit bittersweet, resolution to the case.
