Canadian police say they have solved one of the most significant mysteries in Quebec history, linking the 16 rape and murder of a 1975-year-old girl to a West Virginia man who died more than 40 years ago. Police in Longueuil, Quebec, say DNA evidence allows them to be 100 percent certain that Franklin Maywood Romine killed suburban Montreal teenager Sharon Prior, reports the British "Sky".

The body of Romine, who was born in 1946 in West Virginia's second largest city, Huntington, and died in 1982 at the age of 36 in Verdun, Montreal under mysterious circumstances, was exhumed from a West Virginia cemetery in early May to perform DNA tests that were needed to confirm his connection to the crime.

Longueuil police say DNA tests on Romine - who had a long criminal history - matched a sample found at the crime scene. It also matches the physical description of the suspect.

Prior's rape and murder remained unsolved after she disappeared on March 29, 1975, after leaving to meet friends at a pizzeria near her home in Montreal's Pointe-St-Charles neighborhood and never returning.

Her body was found three days later in a wooded area in Longueuil, on the south shore of Montreal. Prosecutors have investigated more than 100 suspects over the years, but have never arrested a single person. Yvonne Prior, the teenager's mother, now 80, still lives in Canada and has spent her life searching for her daughter's killer.

Franklin Maywood Romine's name was not linked to the investigation until last year. When Longueuil police began searching through his criminal records, they discovered Romine's extensive history of violence and attempts to evade law enforcement by moving between West Virginia and Canada.

Romine first tried to escape from a West Virginia prison in 1964 and later escaped in 1967, according to police records. Two years later, Romine already had a criminal record in Canada.

In 1974, he was arrested for burglarizing a home and raping a woman in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He was released on $2.500 bail two months later and fled to Canada, according to an Associated Press report at the time.

A few months after Prior's 1975 murder, Romine was arrested by Canadian border officials and extradited back to West Virginia, where he was sentenced to five to 10 years in prison for sexual assault in the Parkersburg case.

He died in Canada in 1982, shortly after being released from prison, although officials say they have been unable to find a death certificate detailing the circumstances that led to his death. His body was returned to his mother in West Virginia, where his family buried him in Pine Grove Cemetery, Putnam County, West Virginia.

When Romine's body was exhumed last month, local prosecutor Mark Sorsaia called the crime against the teenager "the worst element of the human race."