Once, they sent me a letter written by a retired lieutenant of the California police. The details in the letter were supposed to help clarify the chronology of the cold case investigation. The information on the timeline was useful, but what stuck in my head was done by the lieutenant aside, a complaint about disorganization and missed opportunities, about the tendency of the police to go alone and not share what they know.
“Controlling policemen is like grazing cats,” the lieutenant wrote. “Like blind pigs, they sometimes find an acorn, but more often they just tear the ground and muddy the water.”
The muddy waters are, of course, the plague of unsolved cases, and the darkness thickens from any of many sources, and not just from unorganized and uncommunicative policemen. Well-meaning advisers can flood phones with misleading information. One incorrect detail, for example, that the suspect was in custody when he was actually on vacation, can ruin the case for years.
Robert Keppel is a former homicide detective who helped detain Ted Bundy. In Keppel’s Riverman about Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer, he says they had the name Bundy as a possible suspect for several days after the abduction of two women from Lake Sammamish on July 14, 1974, but Bundy was arrested only a year later and a dozen victims later. Keppel points out that it’s not uncommon for a killer’s name to be buried in files somewhere during the first two weeks of a murder investigation.
I thought about Keppel’s observation in the light of three high-profile “cold cases” that recently experienced obvious breakouts. Two of these cases are not only ten years old, but are also related to the abductions of children, during which the bodies were never found, which makes them especially difficult to investigate. In these two cases, it is not clear whether theories of the police and the prosecutor's office are true, but in both cases the name of the suspect was in police report files filed forty and thirty-six years ago, respectively, within a few days after the crime.
The third case is not so old, the bodies were found, and strong evidence connects the suspect, who is in prison awaiting trial, with crimes. But, having read about this case, I was surprised why the name of this person was not noted earlier, after the first murder. He was in a relatively small group of people whom the police would clearly be interested in tracking down and interrogating.
If they talked to him and took an extra step, looking into his past, the young student might still be alive.
First case: Sisters of Lyon, 1975
Sheila Lyon, 12 years old, and her sister Katherine, 10 years old, disappeared on Tuesday, March 25, 1975, while traveling to a local mall near their home in a suburb of Washington, DC. It was the girls' spring break and their plans. were restrained and ordinary: see Easter decorations, eat pizza and maybe go shopping a bit. Late in the morning, they went on a half-mile walk to the mall, receiving strict instructions from their mother to return home at four in the evening. No one else saw them.
The disappearance of the Lyon sisters was one of the most disturbing and widely publicized undisclosed cases in the District of Columbia. Looking back, we can assume that this case was hindered from the very beginning by one of the most common problems, which mislead investigations, especially high-profile ones: vivid distracting maneuverability.
Almost immediately, the witnesses stepped forward and told the police that they saw two girls talking at the entrance to the mall with an unknown old man in a brown suit. He looked from 50 to 60 years old, and in his hands he held a briefcase with a tape recorder. The Lyon sisters, along with the other children, seemed to speak into the microphone at the request of the man.
A man with a tape recorder quickly became the main suspect of the police, especially after reports appeared that a similar person in other local shopping centers approached the children and asked them to record an answering machine message.
A week after the sisters disappeared, a large-scale investigation began when Lloyd Welch, 18, stepped forward and told the shopping center security guard that he was there that day and saw the girls get in the car with the man and drive away. Detectives interrogated Welch; something in his story aroused such interest in them that they decided to test it with a lie detector. He failed. Welch was a useless carnival worker at the time. He was often homeless. It is easy to imagine what an impression Welch made on the detectives. How can this tousled, hitchhiking punk deal with the abduction of two schoolgirls in broad daylight? The man with the tape recorder was older, better dressed, and looked as if he had a well-honed trick. He was definitely their man. The Welch page has been turned. The investigation continued.
Age may have been a factor that contributed to the fact that