Smithfield police say a new method of retrieving DNA from evidence could generate a lead in a nearly two-year-old unsolved double homicide.

Police found 22-year-old former Smithfield High School football standout Kyonne Edwards and his girlfriend A’Shoneya Williams, 21, shot to death in their shared unit at Jersey Park Apartments in the early morning hours of July 18, 2023. Police say they believe a single gunman entered the apartment around 11:30 p.m. on July 17, fired several shots and fled on foot across West Main Street.

For the past 21 months, police have held onto a dropped suitcase, one of the few pieces of evidence recovered from the crime scene. Police say the gunman stole the suitcase out of Edwards’ and Williams’ home, carried it across the parking lot and dropped it in the front yard of a home across the street where police retrieved it.

“We sent it to our lab in Norfolk, the Department of Forensic Sciences,” Deputy Chief Chris Meier told the Smithfield Town Council at its April 28 public safety committee meeting.

But that inconclusive testing only examined “high-touch” areas such as the handle, Meier said. Police believe the gunman to have carried the suitcase under his or her arm.

Several months later, police saw a sales demonstration by M-Vac Systems, a company offering law enforcement agencies a more thorough testing method that uses a vacuum-based DNA collection device.

“We took this piece of evidence to them and they, for free, vacuumed the suitcase,” Meier said. “They gave us the filter, which we put into evidence.”

But testing that filter for DNA and comparing it with a state database of offenders whose DNA is on file isn’t a simple matter.

“It’s a newer technology,” Meier said. The state lab “does not have the technology to test this filter yet, so for us to get this filter tested, we had to go to a private lab.”

Meier said testing the filter will cost  $4,280 and – if Florida-based DNA Labs International is successful in creating a DNA profile that meets state and federal requirements – will require the Smithfield Police Department to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the lab and the Department of Forensic Science, which would then upload the profile to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, to search for a match with known offenders.

If the DNA profile isn’t an exact match to any known offenders, Meier said it would cost an additional roughly $7,000 to conduct extended genetic testing to potentially identify a relative of the gunman whose DNA is on file.

“We will exhaust the efforts we can to try to bring this case to closure,” Town Manager Michael Stallings said.

The Town Council expects to vote on the MOU and authorize funding at its May 6 meeting. Stallings said funding is available in the town’s existing budget to cover the expense.

“If it does bring about an arrest then I think it’s very important that we try to pursue this,” Mayor Mike Smith said. “This thing has been going on for quite some time and it’d be nice to put it behind us if at all possible.”

“For two lives that were lost in the manner they were … we owe it to the family and the loved ones of those to expend those monies to attempt to bring this matter to a conclusion,” said Councilman Steve Bowman, who retired as the town’s police chief in 2017.

Smithfield Police have had success using DNA to solve other cases. In 2012, when Bowman was chief, police identified the first of six suspects in an armed robbery at the former Farmers Bank on South Church Street using DNA from a sweaty ball cap one of them had left in a getaway car, according to the Times’ reporting that year. In another instance, Bowman said, police identified a suspect in a car wash break-in by testing blood spatters left behind. Among the most recent local examples of using DNA to break a cold case came last year when Virginia State Police named Alan Wade Wilmer Sr., a deceased Lancaster County man, as the likely killer in the 1987 double murder of 20-year-old David Knobling and 14-year-old Robin Edwards at the Ragged Island wildlife refuge in Isle of Wight County after police were able to posthumously obtain a genetic sample from Wilmer’s body to compare to DNA left at the crime scene.