Do you know who murdered Lisa Fracassi? Lisa “Lika” Fracassi was a 37-year-old white woman living in Waikiki, and on November 3, 1994, she was found dead inside her apartment on Nahua Street in Honolulu after being strangled. In the days before she was discovered, she had last been seen in the early morning hours of October 31, 1994, out in the Waikiki area, and then she simply vanished into the normal churn of the neighborhood—another morning that should have led to another night, but didn’t.

Her body was discovered when a worker came by with towels at the apartment hotel, the kind of routine interruption that usually earns nothing more than a muffled hello through the door. Instead, there was silence, and a “do not disturb” sign that, according to reports, had been hanging there for days—long enough to feel wrong. Investigators would later describe a brutal scene: she had been strangled with a telephone cord, and law-enforcement sources said a sheet had been stuffed into her mouth. Detectives also recovered items left behind in the room, including a used condom and a cigarette butt, evidence that would sit for years like a locked drawer no one had the right key to open. 
For decades, the case lingered in that cold, frustrating space where a name is known but answers aren’t. In 2020, Honolulu investigators—working with the Hawaiʻi Department of the Attorney General—turned to modern forensic genetic genealogy and enlisted Parabon NanoLabs, with genealogist CeCe Moore helping develop leads from DNA evidence. The new work didn’t just point in a direction; it narrowed, tightened, and then snapped into place when police reexamined fingerprints from the scene alongside the DNA results. 
That renewed testing and comparison effort ultimately identified Cecil H. Trent as the primary—and, police said, likely only—suspect. Reports said investigators matched a fingerprint linked to him to one lifted from the telephone at the scene, and later comparisons connected DNA from the condom and cigarette butt to him through additional testing. But the resolution arrived with a hard limit: Trent had died in Honolulu in 2013, and authorities said he was never arrested in the case, leaving no charges, trial, or conviction—only the belated clarity of who police believed had been responsible.
