Book alert about the case of Kathy Whorton

Kathy Wharton courtesy Debbie Wilson

Kathy’s sister Debbie Wilson is releasing a book called “Sweet Scent of Justice” to tell the story of her sister’s murder.

Police found her car abandoned near the then-Northeast Louisiana University, where she was a college student. Less than an hour later, an anonymous caller led authorities to her body. Kathy had been shot twice in her head. In the early 1980s, infamous serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Elwood Toole confessed to Whorton’s murder and hundreds more across the United States.

Morehouse Parish District Attorney Jerry Jones can’t forget the case, one originally closed shortly after the murder when two notorious serial killers, Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, confessed to the murder of Wilson and others across several states.

Jones said there was immediate suspicion that authorities in Monroe had closed the case too quickly, done partly because of immense public pressure to solve the Whorton case and two other female victims in Ouachita that were murdered in identical method.

After the case was officially solved, a growing intuition over two decades’ time to look harder at the her sister’s murder prompted Debbie to talk to two investigators in the case, Todd Cummings and Royce Toney.

From Officer.com: “There had been five or six original suspects at the time, and an anonymous 911 caller who originally reported finding the body. Over 20 years later, investigators identified and located the anonymous caller, as well as the other suspects. DNA was obtained from all of them and compared to the now-valuable crime scene evidence. No hits. No more suspects. But there was one last hope, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS). The DNA evidence from the Whorton case was submitted to CODIS, and the result was a positive match to career criminal Anthony Wilson.”

Jones explained that while all the evidence in the Whorton murder was mysteriously lost – in addition to a recorded autopsy – one shred of evidence from the victim’s undergarments was in storage. And the DNA from it matched the hair from Wilson when he was arrested for a petty crime and his DNA was put into the CODIS system. But with that, the story did not end. I look forward to dig into this book!