Police wait for hot tips on cold cases
By BRAD W. GARY
Lewiston Tribune
Saturday, October 25, 2008 11:45 PM PDT
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| Barry Kough | The Lewiston Tribune, AP
Lewiston Police evidence officer Brian Birdsell keeps track of row after row of boxes full of evidence in the secure basement of the Lewiston Police Dept. |
LEWISTON (AP) — The black binders are loaded with notes, and visible to anyone who peeks inside Lt. Alan Johnson’s office.
Those neatly kept files, with both typed and hand-scrawled notes related to five unsolved murders, will remain in Johnson’s care until he walks out the door of the Lewiston Police Department for good.
He’s not the first officer to investigate the cases, but Johnson hopes to be the last. His department reopened a series of murder cases in 1997, continuing an already decades-old investigation into the deaths of Christina White, Kristin David, Steven R. Pearsall, Kristina D. Nelson and Jacqueline (Brandy) A. Miller from 1979 to 1982.
Investigators at the time believed all five cases involved the same ‘‘person of interest.’’ No arrest has ever been made.
‘‘You’re always hoping to find that one piece of evidence that either puts it over the top or identifies the criminal suspect, or provides closure to the family,’’ Johnson said.
They aren’t the only unsolved murders in Lewiston. And Johnson’s list isn’t the only one that has aged in the depths of detective offices around the region. As many as 19 suspected homicide cases, going back to 1961, remain unresolved in southeast Washington and north central Idaho.
Police suspect homicide in many of the cases, even when a person is still legally declared missing. Bodies of others have turned up years after the initial reports were made.
‘‘It’s really important that these folks are not forgotten,’’ said Nez Perce County Chief Deputy Bill Madison. He has two cases on his department’s evidence shelf.
Johnson admits the days in which new notes are added to his binders have winnowed. Working a two-decades-old murder case can often lead to dead ends, detectives say.
‘‘It’s true — 48 hours are the most critical hours in a homicide, witness interviews, that’s when the information is going to be at its best,’’ Johnson said.
But the boxes of evidence have swelled since he took on the investigation that began when 12-year-old White disappeared from the Asotin County Fair on April 28, 1979.
In June 1981, David, 22, was last seen riding her bicycle from Moscow to Lewiston. Her remains were found dismembered in the Snake River days later, and no killer has been found.
And in September 1982, Nelson, 21, Miller, 18, and Pearsall, 35, disappeared from the Lewiston Civic Theatre.
Nelson and Miller’s bodies turned up two years later at the bottom of a hillside near Kendrick. Pearsall has never been found, but police suspect him to be a victim in the case.
Witness memories fade over time, and family member addresses spiderweb across the country. Some interviews are now conducted by phone, Johnson said. Decades-old cases often don’t get the resources of a full-time detective, and often take years to work through.
That is why former Lewiston Police Chief Jack Baldwin made contact with a group of retired detectives in 1997. Then living in northern Idaho’s Kootenai County, the retired Los Angeles-area officers had formed a group to aid peace officers in their investigations.
Officers Without Legal Standing, as the group is called, looked over the Civic Theatre murders and White’s disappearance. It was the only such instance Johnson can remember his department sharing an investigation with an outside agency.
Tom Johnston, a retired lieutenant from Los Angeles County, was the lead on that investigation, Johnson said.
‘‘In his opinion, the investigations were looking at the right individual,’’ Johnson said. That individual is the ‘‘person of interest’’ in both cases, and the case of David, he said.
That person of interest has never been named publicly, Johnson said. While not officially classifying the man as a suspect, Johnson said there were inconsistencies in his statements to investigators.
‘‘That is why he has never been removed as a person of interest in our case,’’ Johnson said. ‘‘He was also one of the last individuals to be seen with Christina White.’’
He was later one of the last to be seen at the Civic Theatre before Nelson, Miller and Pearsall disappeared.
David’s case was eventually taken over by the FBI, Johnson said, primarily because of the jurisdictional issues regarding her disappearance and subsequent discovery.
Follow-up interviews suggested by the law enforcement group led to the use of cadaver dogs, and excavation of separate sites in Asotin and Clarkston. The city contracted with a geophysics expert to conduct ground-penetrating radar at a few locations.
‘‘There was never any physical evidence recovered at any of the sites,’’ Johnson said.
Their efforts left the murder investigation open for eight years. Investigative efforts continued intermittently until 2007.
The cases were reopened without much fanfare — the same as many investigations throughout the region. Unsolved cases are periodically reviewed by the region’s detectives in an effort to find any potential information.
Idaho County sheriff’s Capt. Skott Mealer brought in the help of the state police, FBI and even psychics in efforts to help detectives solve the murders of Lynn and C. Bruce Peeples. The Grangeville couple was found strangled in their burned home on April 1, 1994.
Mealer said he’s still collecting pieces of a puzzle that could one day lead to a resolution in the case.
‘‘There are victims out there, and we have an obligation to do our job,’’ Mealer said.
The Peeples homicide is routinely investigated, he said, as is the 1982 disappearance of 2-year-old Ricky Barnett, who was visiting his grandparents near Grangeville.
‘‘Every time we have something new we check it,’’ he said, noting calls do come in occasionally on both cases.
Sgt. Earl Aston also gets calls about missing persons. The Latah County Sheriff’s Office detective is trying to find Gayla Schaper, a 27-year-old who was last seen feeding her horses on Lenville Road, southeast of Moscow, in June 1979. Clothing was later discovered in a nearby meadow, but Schaper has never been found.
Whenever an unidentified person is discovered that could match Schaper, a description is sent to the sheriff’s office for review, he said.
‘‘Generally it happens less and less frequently,’’ Aston said. ‘‘It can go in spurts, you might get a few inquiries, or you might get a few pieces of information.’’
As time passes, the frequency of inquiries lessen. An inability to give closure to the families can also be difficult, Aston said.
‘‘You try to think what it would be like for you if you were in their shoes,’’ Aston said. ‘‘I think it would be extremely difficult. Hopefully it gets dulled by time, but I don’t know.’’
In Pullman, Police Chief Ted Weatherly said the investigation of a 2004 serial rapist has run cold. Police have collected DNA from three suspected rapes in the city, and a warrant has been issued using the DNA signature absent a name. A suspect has not been identified, but may if the DNA ever gets a hit on national databases.
While DNA has proved a useful tool for today’s homicide investigations, it might have to be ruled out in cases opened at a time when detectives never thought of collecting such evidence.
Prior to DNA’s commonplace role in investigations, many detectives didn’t seek it out as evidence that would be material to their case. Some evidence has been destroyed over the years, Johnson said, while other DNA evidence was just never collected.
‘‘At the time the evidence was processed, people didn’t know about DNA, and you can’t make up 15, 20 years later, and can’t anticipate what to do 15, 20 years later,’’ he said.
But departments do keep the evidence they have, Johnson said. Laws require police to maintain evidence in a murder until either the perpetrator has served his sentence, or dies.
Investigative reports into the Civic Theatre murders have swelled into three binders of reports and notes, each three inches thick. The David case consists of two such binders. Boxes of evidence from the crimes fill shelves in the department’s basement.
‘‘They are inactive,’’ Johnson said, a labeling that allows a case to be reopened but in which no current leads are being explored. When new information does come in, it typically passes over Johnson’s desk.
And new leads often aren’t publicized, in part to keep family members from building anticipation in the event detectives come up empty handed. Detectives say they also don’t want to ruin a criminal case, and note that same feeling of cracking a case often ebbs and flows among themselves.
‘‘You get that anticipation or that feeling that something’s going to happen, that’s going to clobber this,’’ Johnson said. ‘‘That doesn’t happen, so it goes back to inactive status. It’s disappointing, frustrating.’’
Still, investigations continue, but slowly. Johnson said those efforts will continue even after he leaves his office.
‘‘If and when I leave, somebody will inherit these books,’’ he said.
But he likes to think the murders will be solved before then.
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Information from: Lewiston Tribune, http://www.lmtribune.com
