LEDYARD, Conn. — An unidentified fugitive slain with her bank robber boyfriend and found in a shallow grave 50 years ago in Connecticut has finally been identified.

Linda Sue Childers, 24, of Louisville, Kentucky, was going by the alias Lorraine Stahl when she was fatally shot on New Year’s Eve 1970. When a tipster led Connecticut State Police investigators to the murdered couple’s remains four years later, authorities were able to identify the man but had no clue as to Childers’ identity.

That changed in January when DNA and genetic genealogy led to Childers’ sister and daughter, through whom Connecticut cold case detectives were able to positively identify Childers. The genetic testing was done by Texas-based Othram Inc.

“It is gratifying to have helped identify Linda and, most importantly, give her family some answers,” police officials said in a statement.

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According to court records, state police investigators received a tip in May 1974 about a double homicide that had taken place four years earlier at a home in Ledyard, Connecticut. Detectives who went to the home discovered two shallow graves behind the house.

In the graves were the bodies of a man and a woman. Both had been shot in the head.

The tipster, Joanne Rainello, had lived in the house with her common-law husband, Richard DeFreitas, at the time of the murders, records in DeFreitas’ case show.

Investigators in 1974 were able to use dental records to identify the dead man as Gustavous Lee Carmichael. Documents state that Carmichael, a serial bank robber, had escaped U.S. marshals’ custody in October 1970 while being transported from Massachusetts to Connecticut for a sentencing hearing.

It was while he was a fugitive that he apparently met Childers, though the circumstances of their meeting were unclear.

Carmichael robbed a New Jersey bank a few days before Christmas. On Dec. 28, 1970, Carmichael and his girlfriend, now known to be Childers, showed up at the A-frame home where DeFreitas and Rainello lived.

The pair was looking for a place to hide from authorities, court records state.

Like Carmichael, DeFreitas was a bank robber and thief who worked with two criminal partners, including a man named Donald Brant. Carmichael was able to supply Carmichael and Childers with stolen identification papers in the names of Dirk and Lorraine Stahl.

The fraudulent Stahls opened a checking account and rented a home in the nearby village of Noank, authorities said.

There was trouble, however.

“During the time that (Childers) was at DeFreitas’ Ledyard home, she expressed fears to Joanne Rainello about the life she was leading,” the court documents state. “(Childers) told her that she was nervous about using fictitious names and was afraid of being caught by the police and what she might say if she were apprehended.”

Rainello soon passed that information to DeFreitas, who began to harbor the same fear. He called Brant and the pair discussed the threat that the young woman posed.

“DeFreitas and Brant decided to kill both Gustavous Carmichael and his unidentified female companion because DeFreitas and Brant concluded they had too much at stake and that, in light of Carmichael’s feelings for his girlfriend, they could not kill her without killing him as well,” the records state.

The men lured the couple back to DeFreitas’ home on New Year’s Eve, at which point they killed and buried both. Rainello was not home at the time but later learned what had happened while she was gone.

DeFreitas and Brant were subsequently convicted of the murders. Both are now dead, authorities said.

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