Arrest made in three cold-case slayings

The Pima County Sheriff’s Department arrested a suspect Saturday in the 2000 slaying of Linda Watson and the subsequent killings of her mother and a neighbor.

Watson’s ex-husband, 46-year-old David Duane Watson, was arrested without incident at his local home at about 6:30 p.m., Chief Deputy Chris Nanos announced at a news conference Saturday night.

Watson was the prime suspect all along, but it took investigators DNA technology, multiple tips over the years and 15 years of investigation to finally make the case, Nanos said.

Linda Watson was a 35-year-old mother involved in a custody battle with the ex-husband over their 4-year-old daughter when she disappeared from her north Tucson home on Aug. 21, 2000.

Sheriff’s detectives discovered the door to Watson’s home in the 2600 block of West Curtis Road open, a shattered coffee cup and traces of her blood.

Three years later, Linda Watson’s mother, Marilyn Cox, 63, and her friend and neighbor, Renee Farnsworth, 53, were gunned down in the driveway of the same home. Cox had moved into the home after her daughter disappeared. She had fought for the right to visit with her granddaughter and was returning home after dropping the child off following her first unsupervised visitation when she and Farnsworth were shot to death on May 7, 2003, Nanos said.

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After that, the child was raised by her father and a stepmother, who have since divorced. The daughter is now 19 years old.

Officials declared Linda Watson dead in 2006, but her body wasn’t found until 2012 when remains discovered in a desert area were identified as hers through DNA.

In 2007, the sheriff’s department’s cold-case unit definitely linked the three homicides and said information in the case was “snowballing.” They said then that the suspect “had made some mistakes” they were capitalizing on. But no arrest was made.

David Watson is due in court Sunday morning on suspicion of three counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Linda Watson, Cox and Farnsworth.

All three homicides stemmed from the custody dispute, Nanos said.