Twenty-five years after grocery store manager Terrence Paquette was stabbed to death

Twenty-five years after grocery store manager Terrence Paquette was stabbed to death, police cracked the case using public DNA database websites and half-guzzled beer cans.

DNA from discarded beer cans has led to an arrest in the brutal 1996 murder of Florida convenience store manager Terrence Paquette. His body was found after being stabbed 73 times and his death left police baffled for a quarter-century — until online genealogy databases gave them a lead.

The “gruesome” crime scene had yielded blood “all over the store” that didn’t belong to the victim, but a DNA match remained elusive throughout the decades

Image: The crime scene on Feb. 3, 1996.

The case was reopened again in 2019. This time, officials had the convenience of modern technology on their side. In March 2021, a genetic genealogy expert they enlisted from Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement found some promising leads.

They took the sample from the lab, turned it into a data file, and uploaded it to two public genetic genealogy websites — Family Tree and GEDmatch.

The samples were a distant match to one couple who had three sons. Police focused on Kenneth Stough Jr. due to his employment history and proximity to the store. He was 28 years old at the time of Paquette’s death and had seemingly forged ahead living his life as usual

Image: Kenneth Stough Jr.

With a judge-approved surveillance request in hand, Stough’s car GPS was tracked in August 2021. Cans of beer that he threw into a dumpster in September were collected, bringing those DNA-riddled items to the Orange County Crime Scene Unit — where analysts made a match.

Sometimes you can’t run away from karma.