I am in the sun room, blogging, checking that the links on the “cases” page work (hat tip to Evie from the Whimsical Quill), and reading around the blogs. I need a break hence this “sum it up!” post.
Joe and I are teaming up to work on a 1975 old unsolved murder case from Canada so stay tuned for more information on that. We will be writing the post jointly and it will be posted on both our blogs. If the case interests you and you have a blog, please link to it or post about it. The case can be solved but we will need the public’s help so exposure on the web is key. Thanks in advance!
Peter Daou has some excellent posts up on blasphemy and while on that topic, I found this article from the AP: “Pakistan doctor arrested on blasphemy suspicion. He’s accused of throwing away a business card of a man who shares the name of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad.” Both are worth your time and reflection.
If you like forensics, there is a lot going on these days. The NC Criminal Blog from the Chetson Firm has a great article about DNA. In the Scientific American you can find an article about the severed head of King Henri IV! It has been identified from the jumbled remains in the mass graves in Paris’s Royal Basilica of Saint-Denis, the same Basilica where the heart of the Dauphin is. “A team of researchers used a host of scientific strategies to confirm the head’s owner, who was killed in 1610. And King Henri IV might not be the last head of state’s head to be identified, the researchers noted: “Similar methods could be used to identify all the other kings’ and queens’ skeletons lying in the mass grave of the basilica.”
The attorney for the convicted Georgia “stocking strangler” said last Monday that new DNA results prove his client’s innocence, while a district attorney vowed that he’d remain on death row given a preponderance of evidence tying him to the crimes. Carlton Gary may not be guilty of all charges and his lawyers fight to get the truth on the court room table. One thing that still has to wait before it can be placed on a court room table as evidence of truth are brain scans. In the Scientific American you can read that “the trouble is that different studies, using different methods, have drawn conclusions based on the activity of different brain regions. And all the studies so far have taken place in the artificial environment of the laboratory, using people who knew they were taking part in an experiment and who were following instructions to lie. None of the studies examined lie detection in real-world situations. No government agency has found that this method works; no independent bodies have tested the approach.”
Science will hopefully tell us what really happened to Amelia Earhart. The Guardian reports that this brave pilot went missing while attempting to fly around the equator. “Now an array of artefacts from the 1930s and bones found on the uninhabited Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro suggest that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, endured lingering deaths as castaways on a desert island and were eventually eaten by crabs.” Earhart’s family members have provided researchers with their DNA to compare to a variety of bones and artefacts found on the atoll. No word yet on how long the testing is going to take.
People who thought that they had escaped the law learned the hard way that in the end, they could not. The BBC reports that an unnamed 57-year-old man has been charged in connection with the 1973 murder of Eileen Doherty (19). Eileen was shot dead by gunmen who hijacked a taxi she was taking from south Belfast’s Ormeau Road to Andersonstown on 30 September 1973. A second man was arrested but later released.
The King County sheriff’s detectives (Seattle, WA) have arrested a 46-year-old man suspected in the 1983 slaying of Frank T. Kuony, Jr. “Kuony’s is was one of 193 homicide cases and missing person cases believed to be homicides that received another look from the Sheriff’s Office and being categorized by solvability. The work started in early 2009, made possible by a grant from the National Institute of Justice, part of the Justice Department. The grant covered pay for two detectives, an analyst and other investigation costs. All investigations, including the oldest case from 1942, have at least one binder packed with information. A small number, such as Kuony’s case, have the advantage of DNA evidence. Another case they’re trying to solve is the July 3, 1982 homicide of Anna Marie Sheehan.”
Last Tuesday, Lubbock Police (TX) named a suspect in a more than 16-year-old cold case! “Officials say DNA evidence linked 35-year-old Kerry Don Williams of Levelland to the homicide of 44-year-old Charlotte Diane Ivey.” New Hampshire Police in Hollis are reopening the case of Eddy Segall who went missing on June 15, 1977, after borrowing a car to drive to an exercise class in Merrimack. “Hollis police have reopened the case and are asking anyone with information, including historians, hunters and anyone familiar with the area, which is now a town forest, to get involved. Police, in particular, need to know where the trails were in the mid-1970s.”
My good friend Ralph Ristenbatt alerted me to this bloody article in theday.com: “Blood spatter evidence debated at Buck murder trial.” Connecticut is trying to find out whether Buck murdered his wife. “The case has baffled investigators from the beginning. Although Stonington police suspected that Buck killed his wife because he was infatuated with a younger woman, the medical examiner never changed her opinion that the manner of Mrs. Buck’s death, whom they said died from a head injury, could not be determined.” If you love forensics, this is a case to follow. Crime scene reconstruction did not give police the answers they were looking for, they did not find evidence of blood on or around the staircase, and a curtain they seized tested negative for human DNA. The Innocence Blog also has an article about blood spatter analysis.
UPDATE: Yesterday, Buck was found not guilty.
In other news, we have the first known conviction for a domain name theft! Read more here. And if you have a blog and write regularly, you may wish to contact the people over at legalweek.com. They are going to expand the number of contributors to their Legal Village and they just might be interested in posts you wrote!
Remember to browse around the cold cases posted here on DCC. You can search by case by clicking on the tab “cases” at the top of the website or, search by category and the categories are listed in the right margin. The faintest memory can help us to finally get the answers in an unsolved case.
Till the next Sum it Up!