On November 30, 2010, Sherry Black, 64, was beaten and stabbed to death inside her bookstore, B&W Billiards and Books. No motive for the murder has ever been discovered.
An arrest was made over the weekend in a decade-old Utah cold case killing, thanks to DNA evidence, cops said. Adam Durborow, 29, was arrested as a suspect in the killing of Sherry Black, who was beaten and stabbed to death at her business in South Salt Lake.
Durborow was arrested without incident at his Orem home Saturday by Unified Police Department officers, Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera said. He was booked into Salt Lake County Jail Sunday for investigation of aggravated murder and aggravated burglary, according to a police affidavit. He is being held without bail.
He has not been charged by the district attorney and has not gone to court, the Unified Police Department told Inside Edition Digital. The police said that the district attorney will make a determination about possible charges after reviewing the case.
DNA was taken from Durborow on Oct. 7, according to police and submitted to the Utah Bureau of Forensic Services. A day later, it came back a match, according to arresting documents obtained by ABC 4 News.
“I do want to say that it’s taken several different individuals, detectives, agencies to be able to come here today, and say we’ve made an arrest,” Rivera said at a press conference on Saturday.
On Nov. 30, 2010, 64-year-old Black was beaten and stabbed to death inside her bookstore, B&W Billiards and Books. No motive for the murder has ever been discovered and until this weekend, investigators have never identified a suspect or person of interest, and the case went cold. The only physical piece of evidence investigators had was an Armani Exchange men’s belt found at the crime scene with a 36-38 inch waist and a sticker on the back of the buckle with the number “323,” as well as blood that was collected inside the store.
The DNA collected went through a national database, but had no match. But the Unified Police Department says it never gave up in investigating the case and new information and new clues came to surface over the years leading up to the arrest.
In 2017, the investigators say they tested the DNA with a phenotyping process thanks to the help of Virginia-based company Parabon-Nanolabs. Phenotyping predicts a person’s physical appearance and ancestry using genetic codes. Based on that information, researchers can predict skin color, hair color, eye color and facial structure using percentages.
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