Earlier this month KVUE reported Austin police solved a cold case murder from 1978. After 32 years, the family of the murder victim was able to gather for the Christmas holidays and share the gift of closure.
Lella Moulder has to turn to pictures three decades old to rekindle Christmas memories of her mother Hazel Ivy.
"She was so good, and did not deserve to die that way," said Moulder.
In 1978, Ivy was 66 years old, wheelchair bound and living in a South Austin apartment when police say she was raped and murdered by Lester Ray Guy. He is 58 now, but was 26 at the time of the murder.
"It was just kind of like you are in a dream or something for the longest time," said Moulder.
The horrific crime affected Ivy's grandnieces as well.
"She was crippled and the things he had done to her, I had nightmares about her dying, I mean it was horrible," said Kitty Davidson, Ivy's grandniece.
"When you are the family of someone who has died like that, you have to live through it to understand what if feels like," said Karen Whitley, Ivy's grandniece.
Guy was questioned shortly after the crime, but police were unable to gather enough evidence to make a case against him or anyone else. So Ivy's family has had to endure the last 32 years without knowing who took her life.
"The hope just fades and fades and gets worse," said Whitley.
But investigators from the initial crime scene collected and kept key evidence that, with the help of today's DNA technology, eventually led investigators to guy.
"Thirty years ago things were so different, and that they did have the forethought to do something like that," said Whitley.
"When it finally came about all these years later it is like a miracle really," said Moulder. "It's like you are over the moon," she said.
Now Ivy's family looks forward to eventually having their day and court, where they can look Guy in the eye and ask why.
"To look him in the eye and ask him what kind of man he thinks he is," said Moulder.
"He took a loving, crippled woman and he hurt her, and I want to see him hurt and I want to tell him I want to see him hurt," said Davidson.
Guy, who is already serving a life sentence in Amarillo for a crime committed a year after Ivy's death, will be brought to Travis County -- perhaps in the next two weeks -- where his case will be presented to a grand jury. It could be the gift Ivy's family has waited for, for 32 years.
"It's the best Christmas ever," said Moulder.
