THE chilling murder of a student in the 1990s holds a number of eerie similarities with another horror nearby case.

In 1995, the body of Arkansas native Melissa Witt was discovered naked in the Ozarks, some 50 miles from where she was kidnapped.

Her murder remains unsolved to this day, although a private investigator has told The U.S. Sun how the case has chilling similarities with another gruesome killing at around the same time.

In December 1998, 19-year-old Melissa Trotter was kidnapped after she was last seen leaving her community college in Conroe, Texas.

Her body was found a month later in a forested area some 70 miles away.

In this case, her killer was identified – Larry Swearingen.

Swearingen was described at his subsequent trial as a sociopath with a criminal history of violence against women.

He was handed the death penalty and spent two decades on death row before being executed by lethal injection in August 2019.

Swearingen went to his grave insisting he was innocent, and his last words were reported to be: “Lord forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”

LaDonna Humphrey, a private investigator from Arkansas, has spent years studying the Melissa Witt case, producing books and an Amazon documentary on the unsolved murder.

She told The U.S. Sun how the number of similarities between the murders of the two victims, as well as circumstantial evidence, meant Swearingen came to be seen as a suspect in Witt’s killing as well as Trotter’s.

“Those two cases are almost identical, and because the prime suspect had been in the Arkansas area just days before Melissa Witt’s murder, it’s hard to say for sure that he wasn’t involved,” she said.

“We can’t connect him to Fort Smith, but we do know that afterwards he went on to commit another murder – Melissa Trotter.

“He killed the 19-year-old after kidnapping her from a parking lot. She was loved by her community, active in her church.”

LaDonna also described how Swearingen’s MO also eerily matched with the murder of Melissa Witt.

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“He strangled Melissa Trotter and left her body an hour away in a national forest, exactly what happened to Melissa Witt,” she said.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to completely rule Swearingen out, unless we’re able to say definitively it wasn’t him, it was this other suspect.”

LaDonna added: “I don’t believe in coincidences, and there are so many factors in the two cases that make you take pause.

“I spent the first four to five years of my investigations trying to place Swearingen in Fort Smith at the time of Melissa Witt’s murder and I wasn’t able to do it.

“Neither were investigators. It will be very difficult to say for sure he wasn’t involved.”

LaDonna also believes Swearingen took many secrets about the case to the grave with him.

“He definitely knew more, and the Trotter and Witt cases were almost identical,” she explained.

“I also believe that he killed other women. But being able to prove it at this stage is really difficult.”

Before his death, LaDonna had been trying to secure an interview with Swearingen to discuss the disappearance of Melissa Witt.

As part of her research, she spoke to many people who had known Swearingen, including former partners.

“I did a deep dive into Swearingen’s life, I talked to ex-wives, relatives, people who had seen and worked with him because he was on death row,” she said.

“They all said that he was a very calculating, manipulative liar, who was responsible for many more crimes than he’ll ever be charged with.”