By Janice Morse
The Cincinnati Enquirer

HAMILTON - Mildred Ruth Doench finally can rest in peace, Butler County Prosecutor Robin Piper said after securing a guilty verdict Thursday in Doench's three-decade-old slaying.

A Common Pleas Court jury convicted Donald L. Korn of aggravated murder after about 90 minutes of deliberations. Newly discovered evidence, including DNA samples, sent the case to trial after it had lain dormant since 1979.

Authorities said Doench, 72, was raped, fatally stabbed and left with an ax-like gardening tool embedded in her forehead. The retired Hayes Elementary School principal was slain in her Fairfield Township home on July 13, 1974, just down the road from a rental property where Korn had been her tenant in 1969-70.

On Thursday, Doench's son, Robert, of suburban Chicago, hustled his family into the courtroom just in time to hear the jury forewoman read the guilty verdict. While the Doench family thanked police and prosecutors, Korn's sister, Louise Amburgey - who had tearfully testified against her brother - buried her head in her hands. The Doenches declined comment, as did jurors. Korn said he plans an appeal.

Judge Patricia Oney sentenced Korn to life in prison. Under 1974 Ohio law, life sentences are eligible for parole. But Piper said Korn, now 59, will surely live out his remaining days behind bars.

Korn is being returned to an Indiana prison where he has been serving a sentence of 15-years-to-life for slitting a woman's throat, then raping and robbing her - a crime that happened six months after Doench was killed. While being questioned for the Indiana rape, Korn confessed to killing Doench, records show. In 1977, a three-judge panel found Korn guilty of the Doench murder. But two years later, an appeals court ruled police had violated Korn's rights in obtaining his confession.

"We worked on the case and brought it back to life," said Butler County Sheriff's Detective Frank Smith, who spent 41/2 years amassing 10,000 pages. "This verdict shows you can get a conviction, even when the case is old."

Piper said key pieces of evidence included Korn's sister's testimony that she heard him confess, two new witnesses who remembered seeing Korn's bronze El Camino near the Doench home on the evening she was killed, and DNA technology. Tests on samples from Doench's body found DNA patterns that matched Korn's - and one of every 24,500 men. Considering Butler County's population in the 1970s, only about 10 Butler County men would have shared that DNA pattern, Piper told jury.

E-mail jmorse@enquirer.com