The Babysitter/Snow Killer

[sdreid]

Now we have another DNA "match" but it's against a totally different man who has no known connection to the first.

[sdreid]

And different police jurisdictions fighting with each other.

[sdreid]

A fork in the dead end I suppose.

[sdreid]

I'm not sure if conflicting suspects is much better than no suspect.

[sdreid]

I'm not sure what happened with the dog hair evidence.

[sdreid]

Supposedly it was found on all the 4 core victims.

[sdreid]

I'm not sure what happened with the dog hair evidence.

I believe the dog breed was identified.

[RivkahChaya]

My gawd? why don't I even know about this? I guess I was only 10/11 when it was in the news, and I was in Russia part of the time. The rest of the time, it was probably overshadowed in the New York papers by the trial of Patty Hearst, and the Son of Sam murders, and after that, the Atlanta child murders. Still, I'm really surprised I never ran across it in any reading of unsolved murders. Wow. I've got a list of stuff to do until Shabbes, but I'll be looking this up on Saturday night. At least until I get too creeped out.

[RivkahChaya]

I love this comment from one of the recent articles I found, regarding the new suspect:

He's your typical grandpa," says Parma Heights Police Sergeant Wayne Mockler. "You wouldn't look twice.

Did anyone else in the US (who's old enough) watch Michael Moore's show TV Nation? After it had been a running joke for a while that any time a serial killer is arrested, all the neighbors say what a nice, normal guy he was, the crew of TV Nation rented a house in a nice, quiet suburb, and then pulled all the curtains and blinds, and started doing things like running power tools at 3am. They escalated over several weeks: they painted half the garage door red, and stopped. They left several huge bags out every trash day; they had several 50-gallon drums delivered, taken inside the house, then picked up a week later; they left a mattress with a huge, reddish-brown stain in the center, out with the trash one day; and then brought in a small back hoe, and dug a huge hole in the front yard. A couple of days later, they filled it in, and covered it with sod (which in the US is natural turf you can lay down in your yard, instead of spreading grass seed and waiting for it to grow).

Then, people from the show went and interviewed the neighbors, who all claimed they had not noticed anything unusual happening at the house.

Made me laugh.

[sdreid]

The case was on Unsolved Mysteries or some similar program but I don't recall when it played.

[sdreid]

I see on Wiki that John Wayne Gacy has been added to their suspect list.

[sdreid]

Gacy has become a convenient scapegoat in more than one case.

[sdreid]

We had a boy here named Richard Griener, 13, who disappeared and was presumed murdered in January of 1972. I don't know if there has been any investigation into either Gacy or the Babysitter for a possible tie-in.

[sdreid]

Kenneth Hanson's legal team, to no avail, also tried to implicate Gacy for the Chicago 1955 Matinée Murders.

[RivkahChaya]

From what I understand, Gacy went sniveling and crying to the death chamber, and Illinois, where he was executed, was really not a state that liked to execute-- the Death Penalty was outlawed in 2011. If Gacy had information to trade for a life sentence, I think he would have. Henry Lee Lucas managed to stay off Death Row by confessing to a list of crimes he didn't even really commit, and he not only stayed off Death Row, he got something of a royal treatment.

It's true that Gacy was humiliated by the exposure, and the press coverage of his crimes-- he seemed more upset about being thought of as gay, though, than being thought of as a killer. But he really didn't want to die, and as I understand it, pursued all his appeals. He even tried pretending he had multiple personalities. He pled insanity at trial, lost, then filed an appeal based on "inadequacy of counsel," because he wasn't insane, and his lawyer shouldn't have used that plea.