After a nearly five-year investigation, Durham police have charged Raven Abaroa, 30, with the 2005 stabbing death of his wife Janet in their Durham rental home. Janet Abaroa, who was 25 at the time, was pregnant with the couple’s second child when she was killed April 26, 2005.
According to a Durham police news release, Raven Abaroa was arrested at his Montpelier, Idaho, home without incident. He is being held in the Caribou County, Idaho, jail and is awaiting extradition to North Carolina.
Raven Abaroa, who was married to the victim for almost five years, has long been a “person of interest” in the case, but police continued their investigation. At the time of Janet Abaroa’s murder, Raven Abaroa said he had driven from Durham to Morrisville, N.C., to play in a soccer game. He said when he returned home at 11 p.m., he found his wife and she was dead. Their then-6-month-old son, Kaiden, was also inside the home but wasn’t harmed in the attack.
Police worked with the N.C. State Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to continue to probe the case, according to the news release. The case had been assigned to four different homicide investigators at the Durham Police Department during the five-year investigation.
Two months before Janet Abaroa’s murder, Raven Abaroa was charged with embezzling thousands of dollars from his employer at the time, Eurosport in Hillsborough. He later admitted the crime and was ordered to pay back $10,000. He then moved to Utah, where he met and later married another woman.
During the course of the case, Durham police continued to publicize the cold case and even profiled the homicide on the Fox 50 show NC Wanted. Last spring, that woman, Vanessa Pond, came forward to police and spoke with CBS affiliate WRAL, describing violent and controlling behavior starting on the day she married him.
