VALLEJO — More than 36 years after 6-year-old Jeremy Stoner was sexually assaulted and strangled after disappearing from a relative’s Vallejo home, an Oregon resident has been arrested and charged with his murder.
Fred Mario Cain III, 69, was charged Sept. 18 with one count of murder in the Feb. 21, 1987 killing of Jeremy. Authorities say Cain is a former resident of Martinez with prior arrests on suspicion of rape, who was identified through a DNA match, prosecutors announced Friday.
Cain was arrested in Oregon and has been transferred to Solano County jail to face charges. The case was solved not through a cold DNA hit, but investigative work that led to Cain being identified as a person of interest and cleared the way for authorities to obtain a sample of his DNA, authorities said.
This new development comes 30 years after authorities were certain they’d identified Jeremy’s killer: a man named Shawn Melton who penned an autobiography that included graphic details of raping children. Melton appeared to know specific details about Jeremy’s death, but the case against him was dropped after a jury acquitted him of child molestation and hung on the murder charge in 1988.
Jeremy’s last confirmed sighting was at a relative’s Vallejo home on Feb. 21, 1987. His nude body was discovered days later on Sherman Island, and police say he had been sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed.
After Melton’s acquittal, the case went cold for decades. But last year, the Solano County District Attorney’s cold case unit decide to take a new look at the case. District Attorney Krishna Abrams released a statement praising the unit’s investigators for remaining “steadfast in their commitment to solving these horrific cases.”
Jeremy’s disappearance and killing rocked the local community, which flooded the police department with tips, ran search parties and held a candlelight vigil after his body was found.
“For four days, the citizens of Vallejo became part of the Stoner family,” then-Mayor Terry Curtola told the Oakland Tribune in 1987. “The citizens of Vallejo searched, cried and prayed for that family.”