Just two years after Sylvia Quayle was raped, shot and stabbed to death in her Cherry Hills Village home in 1981, a self-professed serial killer confessed to the crime, and local police closed the case.
But 12 years later, DNA proved the man’s confession false. Police reopened the investigation into Quayle’s killing, but the case sat cold until new DNA analysis in 2020 linked a 63-year-old Nebraskan to the 41-year-old crime.
David Dwayne Anderson’s murder trial is set to start Friday in Arapahoe County. He is charged with first-degree murder in the killing of Quayle, who was 34 when she died inside her home in the 3800 block of South Ogden Street in August 1981.
Her attacker apparently pried open a window and cut the home’s telephone line. He raped, stabbed and shot Quayle. Her father discovered her unclothed body the morning after the attack, which happened between 11 p.m. Aug. 3, 1981, and 8 a.m. the next day.
In 1983, Ottis Toole, already imprisoned on unrelated murder charges, confessed to killing Quayle and was charged in the Colorado case. He was sentenced to death in 1984 after he was convicted in the other case, but he was never tried in Colorado for Quayle’s death.
Toole and his partner, Henry Lucas, confessed to hundreds of murders across the United States in the early 1980s, and police closed hundreds of cases before a Texas newspaper in 1985 cast doubt on police methods and revealed the men were likely lying about committing the crimes. Authorities then discredited the majority of the confessions. Toole, who died in 1996, was ultimately convicted in six murder cases.
In 1993, DNA testing proved that Toole did not kill Quayle. The charges against him were dropped and the case reopened.
In 2000, a DNA profile was developed from evidence collected at the Cherry Hills Village crime scene, but the profile was never matched to anyone until police sought help from a private genetic genealogy company, which pinpointed Anderson as the top suspect in 2020.
Investigators secretly collected Anderson’s trash and pulled his DNA from a Vanilla Coke can in early 2021, according to an arrest affidavit. That DNA matched DNA taken from the crime scene, and showed that Anderson’s blood and semen had been collected from the crime scene, according to an affidavit.
Anderson was in Englewood at the time of the murder. Between 1981 and 1986, he was charged with burglarizing homes eight different times, the affidavit says. In at least one of those burglaries, he entered through a window.
He was arrested in February 2021. The murder trial, which will begin with jury selection Friday, is scheduled to go on for about a week-and-a-half before 18th Judicial District Court Judge Darren Vahle.
