Pennsylvania State Police investigators say the family of Nashville area woman found murdered along Interstate-90 last fall, finally has closure.  She was fatally stabbed and her body burned.

The crime was discovered last November 10 when firefighters were called to douse a brush fire on the side of the highway.

Solving the case didn't lead to an arrest.  It turns out, the prime suspect state police developed here, Syracuse, NY truck driver Lamont Bland, was killed in an officer involved shooting in Indianapolis at the end of November, when police there say he was holding a woman in his truck cab and threatening to kill her.

Solving the case was a matter of connecting the dots.  Investigators started at ground zero, not knowing who the murdered woman found in the brush fire was, where she came from or who killed her.  But their work led them to Nashville. "The biggest take away from this investigation was nose to the grindstone," lead investigator Trooper Eric Conroe said.  "We pounded the pavement and really went out, interviewed dozens of individuals on the streets of Nashville."

They learned that the the victim was Michelle Lee Tayse of Nashville, and after many interviews, investigators began developing a prime suspect named Lamont.

When they returned to Erie, state police were contacted by a woman who claimed she was victimized too, and she provided a last name. "She said that Lamont Bland was an individual whom she ran into previously and had a bad encounter with him and so we started running down that avenue, and that's how we came across his incident in Indianapolis," Trooper Conroe said.

So they connected the dots to an officer involved shooting in Indianapolis.  Metro police responded on November 30 to a call for a woman's screams coming from a white semi truck.  When the man inside, now identified as Lamont Bland refused to release the woman he was holding in his truck, and come out, police battered their way in, fatally shooting Bland and taking the woman to safety.

Working back from cell phone GPS data, police say they are certain that the suspect who died in that white truck while threatening to harm another woman, was the man wanted in the Erie County homicide. "The family and us as well we're we're happy that we have closure knowing that the suspect is no longer out on the loose," Trooper Conroe said adding, "and the family was also very grateful that we had closure for this case altogether, and that they knew who their mother's killer was."

Trooper Conroe said it took months of work to begin to unravel this mystery and a lot of cooperation between multiple police departments.