For more than three decades, the brutal murder of a quiet, elderly widow in her own home remained a painful mystery for her family and a frustrating cold case for Portland, Oregon, police. Rosa Cinnamon, an 80-year-old grandmother and female, had moved to the city from Ohio and was living a peaceful life in Southeast Portland. That life was violently ended on March 24, 1976, leaving a void in her family and a question mark in police files for a generation.
On that Wednesday, a man broke into Rosa’s apartment, kicking in the door. Despite her age, she fought fiercely for her life, scratching her attacker in the struggle. Ultimately, she was overpowered, beaten, and strangled. Her body was discovered the next day, and while detectives collected evidence, including a boot print and crucial tissue samples from underneath her fingernails, the trail to a suspect quickly went cold.
The original detective on the case, Mel Walker, diligently preserved the evidence, a standard procedure at the time that would prove indispensable decades later.
The case remained unsolved, a lingering injustice as years turned into decades. Meanwhile, a violent criminal named Edward Delon Warren was building a disturbing record. Born in Brookings, Oregon, in 1953, Warren’s criminal career began in his late teens. In 1972, he was convicted of armed robbery in Portland and sent to prison. He later escaped, broke into a woman’s home in Salem, tied her up at gunpoint, and stole her car before being recaptured. In a tragic irony, Warren was paroled from prison on the very morning of March 24, 1976. He hitched a ride to Portland, checked in with his parole officer, and that same night, he murdered Rosa Cinnamon.
Warren’s violence did not end there. Three years later, in September 1979, he murdered two teenagers near the Chetco River, 19-year-old U.S. Coast Guard petty officer Ricky Dale Hemphill and 18-year-old Charla Toma. He was arrested for these killings on October 4, 1979, after a routine traffic stop led to him and another man fleeing into the woods. He was convicted for the double homicide and sentenced to death. This sentence was later commuted by the Oregon Supreme Court to two consecutive life terms.
While Warren sat in prison for the murders of Hemphill and Toma, Rosa Cinnamon's case file gathered dust. The break her family had long prayed for came from advancements in forensic science. In 1999, a state law required convicted felons to submit DNA samples, and Warren's was entered into a national database. He died in a Salem prison hospital from respiratory failure in 2003, having never been held accountable for Rosa’s death.
In 2004, an investigator with the Multnomah County District Attorney's office reopened the Cinnamon case. The fingernail scrapings so carefully preserved in 1976 were sent for modern DNA analysis. In 2009, the results came back: the DNA found under Rosa Cinnamon's fingernails was a match to Edward Delon Warren. After 33 years, the man who had stolen the final years of a grandmother's life was finally identified.
The resolution, while posthumous, brought a measure of closure. At the time, Rosa's murder became the oldest cold case in Oregon's history to be solved by DNA evidence. Portland police praised the original detectives for their foresight in preserving the evidence that made the identification possible. Though a conviction could never be secured, the DNA match definitively answered the question of who was responsible, ensuring that the quiet grandmother from Ohio and the violent end she met would not be forgotten.
