Investigators say lab results and surveillance footage helped connect a Kentucky inmate to the death of Courtney Clinton.
VANCOUVER, Wash. — The murder case over Courtney Clinton’s death has come into focus through forensic and digital evidence that police say links Dariel Nunez-Montero to the Ford Edge where Clinton was found dead with an unharmed infant in November 2024.
That evidence matters because the early public record in the case was spare. For months, police had disclosed little more than the victim’s identity, the cause of death and the fact that a child survived the scene. Later reporting on search warrants and a probable cause affidavit added the backbone of the prosecution: surveillance images, location data, DNA findings, missing property and the long path that led detectives from Vancouver to a jail in Kentucky.
According to the affidavit described by Law&Crime, police found DNA from Nunez-Montero inside the Ford Edge that held Clinton’s body and her crying baby. The report said his DNA was recovered from the front passenger door area. KATU later reported that the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab matched the suspect to evidence taken from the passenger-side door handles. Investigators also recovered DNA from beneath Clinton’s fingernails, but public accounts reviewed so far do not say whether that material has been attributed to him. The scene itself suggested a close and violent encounter. A passerby who found the SUV told dispatchers he first thought the woman had been shot in the back of the head because there was so much blood, according to an earlier KATU report on a search warrant. Officers instead found a cut to Clinton’s neck, and the Clark County Medical Examiner later ruled her death a homicide caused by incised wounds of the neck.
Video and phone records added a timeline that prosecutors appear to view as equally important. Investigators said a doorbell camera captured Nunez-Montero leaving his apartment complex at 3:31 a.m. on Oct. 29, 2024, with a woman resembling Clinton and while carrying a baby carrier. Police said he was seen returning at 6:29 a.m. without Clinton. In between those times, Clinton allegedly sent a friend her location at 3:38 a.m., placing her near the Walnut Grove Apartments on Northeast 72nd Avenue, where police said Nunez-Montero lived. Clinton’s movements after that were unknown until Nov. 1, when her body was discovered in the SUV in the 300 block of North Blandford Drive. That three-day gap remains one of the clearest unanswered parts of the public case file. It is also the span detectives were trying to fill when they sought access to Clinton’s Facebook records in November 2024.
Investigators also traced signs that someone else may have handled Clinton’s property after she disappeared. The Ford Edge was registered to Enterprise, and records cited in coverage said Clinton was behind on payments. When the company called her phone on Oct. 30, someone who was not Clinton allegedly answered and said the phone had been found. Another item from the affidavit placed Clinton’s debit card at a 7-Eleven on Northeast Vancouver Mall Drive after she went missing. Police also said her phone was not recovered from the vehicle. Those details do not answer the full sequence of events, but they deepen the prosecution’s argument that this was not a death left immediately at the place where police later found the car. They point instead to a stretch of activity after Clinton’s last known contact that investigators believe is part of the homicide narrative.
The official investigation moved much more slowly in public than in private. Vancouver police said Clinton, a 31-year-old Portland resident, was found on Nov. 1, 2024, and that her infant child was alive and unhurt in the vehicle. Two weeks later, the department asked the public for help and said Clinton had last been in contact with friends and family during the week of Oct. 28. At that stage, officials were not naming a suspect. In April 2025, the city announced that its Major Crimes Unit had followed leads to Montgomery County, Kentucky, where Nunez-Montero was already jailed on unrelated charges. A Clark County Superior Court judge signed a felony warrant on April 11, 2025, and detectives served it on him there. That announcement was the first time police publicly tied a named suspect to Clinton’s death.
Only in 2026 did the case fully return to Washington. The Clark County Sheriff’s Office said deputies completed the extradition on April 1 and booked Nunez-Montero into the Clark County Jail. At an April 2 court appearance, KATU reported that he was given more time because he needed a translator to understand the proceedings. The station said he was due back on April 8. Those steps did not reveal new evidence, but they changed the status of the case from a warrant waiting across state lines to a defendant physically present in the county where prosecutors intend to try the case. Even so, several questions remain outside public reporting, including whether investigators have identified a motive, whether additional lab testing has strengthened or weakened the prosecution theory, and whether the defense disputes the timeline, the transfer of DNA, or the account built from surveillance and phone records.
The record that is public now shows a case built piece by piece: a bloodied SUV, an unharmed child, a medical examiner’s homicide ruling, months of investigative work, and a suspect brought back from Kentucky after police said DNA and video pointed to him. The next turn belongs to the court file, where prosecutors must now translate those pieces into proof before a jury.
Author note: Last updated April 9, 2026.