A cigarette tossed out during a traffic stop held DNA that helped identify a man accused of killing a 51-year-old Indiana man over 40 years ago, police said.

John Blaylock was found beaten to death in Griffith, Indiana, in 1981, but his killer was not known, according to police and the Chicago Tribune.

Detectives resumed the investigation in 2018 and started to examine blood from an unknown man found at the scene of Blaylock’s killing, Griffith police said in a Nov. 12 Facebook post.

The blood was sent to a lab with the hope that it could be linked to a potential suspect, but nothing was found in the national DNA database, police said.

Detectives outsourced the DNA identification to a company, police said. It determined two brothers were likely a match.

It was DNA found on a discarded cigarette by Burnham, Illinois, police that helped police determine which brother was the suspect, police and WGN reported.

The cigarette’s DNA did not match the DNA of the blood found at the Griffith crime scene, meaning it belonged to the suspect’s brother, police said. That left Gregory Thurson, who lived in Eugene, Oregon, as the suspect, according to police.

Thurson was arrested in Oregon on Oct. 29 and extradited back to Indiana, police said. He was charged with murder.

His attorney information was not listed.

Thurson is scheduled to appear in court Nov. 20.

Griffith is about a 30-mile drive southeast from Chicago.

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