North Carolina inmate confesses to fatal 1989 hit-and-run while he was on prison work release

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Just four days after Christmas in 1989, 52-year-old mother Ruth Buchanan was crossing a street in Charlotte, North Carolina, after leaving a department store with a friend when she was hit by a driver who sped through a red light. 

"Her body landed on the opposite side of the intersection and that vehicle, according to witnesses, didn’t stop, didn’t render aid and continued to flee the scene," Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department Sgt. Gavin Jackson of the Major Crash Unit said in a video released by police Friday. 

Buchanan died in a hospital the next day. 

Decades after the case went cold and was reopened with the help of DNA technology, Buchanan's killer, Herbert Stanback, now 68, confessed to the 35-year-old crime.

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Although witnesses got a vehicle description and a license plate number, the Mercedes it was linked to turned out to have had its tag stolen and wasn't the car that hit Buchanan. 

Herbert Stanback confessed this year to driving away after hitting Ruth Buchanan with his car in 1989 while he was on work release from prison.  (Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department )

Three days later, on New Year’s Day 1990, investigators found a black Mitsubishi parked at a Comfort Inn with damage that matched the description of the suspect’s vehicle, Jackson said. 

Investigators confirmed it was the suspect's vehicle and found personal items, including a marijuana cigarette, inside. 

After a failed tip in the case in 2022, it was reopened, and DNA from the cigarette was tested and matched Herbert Stanback, who was already in custody at the Department of Adult Corrections in North Carolina on an unrelated charge. 

The stolen car Stanback allegedly drove when he hit Buchanan was found days after the crime at a motel in Charlotte.  (Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department; WSOC-TV)

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Records showed Stanback had been in custody at a Charlotte prison that no longer exists. 

In his second interview with investigators in March, Stanback made a "full confession," Jackson said. 

"Interestingly, he was incarcerated at Charlotte Correctional [at the time of the hit-and-run], but he was on a work-release program at the time — where they would leave in the morning and come back in the evening — and he was working at a hotel one or two blocks up the street," Jackson said. 

Stanback returned to the prison after hitting Buchanan and fleeing. 

"So, a once-in-a career type thing," Jackson said, "Very rewarding feeling, just to be able to notify the family of something like that. I was able to speak to Ruth’s son and be able to bring that kind of closure for the family. It’s certainly not a phone call that they would have been expecting.

Stanback made a "full confession" to police in March. (iStock)

"I think this stands as an example — of course, not every case is going to be solved this way — but you never know what is going to happen, 20, 25, 30 years down the line. And the fact that the scientific means have been able to obtain DNA and link it, not to a specific gene pool, but to a specific individual over three decades later is amazing. It really is."

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He added that witness information and initial reports from responding officers in 1989 were also crucial to solving Buchanan’s death. 

Stanback has pleaded guilty to felony hit-and-run resulting in serious injury or death, the Police Department said in a release. 

He was sentenced to two years in prison, which he will serve concurrently with a 22-year sentence he is already serving on an unrelated offense at the Scotland Correctional Institution in Laurinburg, North Carolina, the department and WSOC-TV reported.