Twenty-five years after Laura Hunding was stabbed to death, a suspect has been identified and taken into custody. Cudellious Love was arrested on June 13, 2014 and charged with premeditated first degree murder, sexual assault and burglary.
At about 10:30 a.m. on the morning of July 17, 1989, 27-year-old Laura Hunding was found stabbed to death in her apartment at 4902 E. Willetta Street in Phoenix. Evidence at the crime scene indicated she had also been sexually assaulted. Despite an extensive investigation, all potential leads were exhausted and the case went cold.
In 2001, Detectives of the Phoenix Police Cold Case Squad reopened the case. Retired Detective Art Scott and retired Detective Bill Stuebe, currently a Maricopa County Attorney’s Office Investigator, conducted a meticulous review of the case file. Several pieces of evidence from the 1989 investigation were submitted to the lab for advanced forensic analysis, which was not available at the time of the murder. In 2012, Phoenix Police Detective J.J. Alberta followed up on this work, as part of a large National Institute of Justice “Solving Cold Cases with DNA” grant.
Two years later, in the spring of 2014, Detective Alberta was notified of a probative forensic DNA hit which pointed investigators to Cudellious Love. Additional investigation with critical assistance provided by experts from the Phoenix Crime Laboratory and the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) Administration ultimately led to Love’s arrest and the filing of criminal charges.