Arpana Jinaga’s 2008 Halloween Murder Remains Unsolved
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On November 3, 2008, Arpana Jinaga, 24, was found dead in her Valley View apartment on the 8900 block of Redmond-Woodinville Road in Redmond, Washington. It was later determined during the autopsy that she had been strangled to death: “asphyxia due to ligature strangulation.”
Arpana was last seen at a Halloween party in the apartment complex. Her apartment was decorated in a forest theme, and she was wearing a Little Red Riding Hood costume. It was one of four themed apartments in the complex that attendees would visit that night.
Investigators determined that she was likely murdered during the early hours of November 1, 2008.
Arpana grew up in Hyderabad, India. Her father, Dr. B. Jinaga, was a professor at the School of Information Technology at Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, and her mother, Nirmala Jinaga, stayed home to take care of Arpana and her younger sister. Arpana was creative, especially in art, design and writing. She also enjoyed gymnastics.
In the fall of 2007, she earned a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers University in New Jersey. She was then offered a job working for EMC as a software quality engineer, which she accepted.
Outside of work, Arpana volunteered at an animal shelter and the fire department. She had recently joined a motorcycle club and was very socially active.
She had only recently moved to the area before she was murdered, and the alarm was initially sounded after her father had been unable to contact her. She called her parents often, and the sudden loss of contact concerned them.
Her employer had also noticed her absence from work and felt it was out of character for her to not show up without contacting them.
Arpana's father asked a local friend to perform a welfare check, and they found the door frame damaged and Arpana dead inside her bedroom.
There were clear signs of a struggle at the crime scene, and the apartment was in a state of disarray. In addition, investigators found evidence that someone may have tried to remove or destroy forensic evidence. Arpana’s hands were covered in blue toilet-bowl cleaner, her bed covers and sheets were gone, bleach had been used on surfaces, and some items had been burned. Clothing, including her burned Halloween costume and other belongings were found in a dumpster, and both Arpana's digital camera and cell phone were never found.
DNA collection became an issue at the scene due to the number of profiles collected from the apartment and items recovered during the investigation.
King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said, “The killer had been savagely brutal.”
Nobody was charged with the murder until two years later, when Emanuel Fair, then 27, was charged. Fair had been at the same Halloween party where Arpana was last seen and had been staying at the apartment of one of Arpana's friends in the complex.
Investigators said they had linked Fair's DNA to several items connected to the crime scene and arrested him. The arrest was based on statistics generated by a software program called TrueAllele, which was used to analyse a DNA sample containing multiple types of DNA. At trial, it was argued that the analysis was not reliable evidence tying Fair to the murder, and the defence pointed an accusatory finger in the direction of the victim's neighbour, Cameron Johnson, whose DNA was found on a bottle of motor oil recovered from the dumpster.
According to an article in the Seattle Times, the neighbor was the last person to call the victim on the night she was killed, and even attempted to travel to Canada after the murder.
Johnson was investigated as a suspect but was never charged in connection with Arpana's murder.
Fair had a disturbing criminal history, including serving time in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of third-degree child rape of a 14-year-old in 2005. By 2008, he had been released from prison.
The first trial in 2017 ended in a hung jury. The second trial, in 2019, ended with Fair's acquittal. However, by this point, Fair had already spent almost ten years in pretrial detention.
In 2021, Fair filed a civil-rights lawsuit, in which he accused police and prosecutors of going after him for being a Black man with a criminal record and accused them of ignoring other potential suspects. In October 2026, a federal jury rejected Fair’s malicious-prosecution claim, siding with the City of Redmond and King County. This was a decision in his civil lawsuit and did not change his criminal acquittal.
The case remains unsolved to this day.