The Killer Book of Cold Cases (25 page)

The seemingly random brutal murders of five people in California’s Bay Area in 1968 and 1969, and a series of taunting, cryptic notes sent by their killer, terrorized Northern California for years. The self-proclaimed “Zodiac Killer” sent local newspapers a three-part coded message explaining his motive for the killings in 1969 and, in a separate letter to the editor, suggested that his identity was buried within an elaborate cipher message. The decoded message did indeed reveal the killer’s twisted motive, but his identity remains a mystery.

The unsolved nature of the murders and the Zodiac Killer’s elaborate methods of communicating with the public and his pursuers still capture the imaginations of screenwriters, authors, true-crime buffs, forensic scientists, and, of course, law enforcement.

The murders did not fall under federal jurisdiction, so the FBI never opened an investigation. But a glance through the FBI’s public records on the case shows how local law-enforcement agencies called on the FBI’s expertise in handwriting analysis, cryptanalysis, and fingerprints to aid their investigations.

The FBI’s role in 1969, much as it is today, was to support local law-enforcement in their investigations. In the Zodiac Killer case, correspondence between law-enforcement agencies in Northern California and forensic experts at the FBI’s laboratory—in what was then called the Technical Evaluation Unit—shows efforts to analyze handwriting samples and lift latent fingerprints from the letters and envelopes sent by the purported killer. FBI cryptanalysts, or code-breakers, were also enlisted to unravel a complex cipher that used more than fifty shapes and symbols to represent the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Ultimately the code was made public and broken by two university professors.

In February 1957, an unidentified boy between the ages of four and six was found beaten and naked inside a cardboard box in Philadelphia. He was dubbed the “Boy in the Box” and also referred to as “America’s Unknown Child.” The emotionally charged case received loads of attention from the media, including a spot on
America’s Most Wanted
, but to this day, the case remains unsolved.

The body of Bob Crane, the star of the TV comedy
Hogan’s Heroes
, was discovered in a hotel room in Scottsdale, Arizona, on June 29, 1978. Crane had been bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never found (but was believed by police to be a camera tripod). The actor had allegedly called his friend John Henry Carpenter the night before to tell him their friendship was over. Crane was involved in the underground sex scene and had filmed his numerous escapades with the help of Carpenter, who was an audiovisual expert.

Police reportedly found blood smears in Carpenter’s car that matched Crane’s blood type, but no charges were filed against Carpenter for more than a decade. When he finally was charged in 1994, he was acquitted. Carpenter maintained his innocence until his death in 1998, and the case is now officially cold.

The fourth archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador, was killed by a shot to the heart on March 24, 1980, while celebrating Mass at a small chapel located in a hospital. It is believed, but never proven, that the assassins were members of Salvadoran death squads. During the funeral ceremony, a bomb exploded on the cathedral square and shots were fired. Many people were killed during the subsequent mass panic.

Dian Fossey was an American zoologist who observed and studied gorilla groups for eighteen years in Rwanda. She was brutally murdered in the bedroom of her cabin on December 26, 1985. Her skull had been split by a native panga, a type of machete that she had confiscated years earlier from poachers and hung as a decoration on the wall of her cabin. Fossey was found dead beside her bed, two meters from a hole that had been cut in the cabin wall on the day of her murder.

Amber Hagerman was the victim of an abduction and murder. On January 13, 1996, the nine-year-old was riding her bike near her grandparents’ home in Arlington, Texas. She was kidnapped soon thereafter. Four days later, a man walking his dog found her body in a creek bed. An autopsy revealed that her throat had been cut. Although a $75,000 reward was offered for information leading to Hagerman’s killer, the perpetrator was never found. Her murder would later inspire the creation of the AMBER Alert system, which provides alerts about child abduction emergencies.

She was a six-year-old girl who had competed in child beauty pageants and was made famous by her Christmastime murder and the subsequent media coverage. She was found dead in the basement of her parents’ home in Boulder, Colorado, on December 26, 1996, nearly eight hours after she was reported missing. The official cause of death was asphyxiation due to strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma. After several grand-jury hearings, the case is still unsolved. Her parents were the target of intense media coverage that suggested they were suspects, but authorities eventually confirmed that the couple had been cleared of any involvement.

When Serge Rubinstein was murdered in 1955, one NYPD detective commented, “It’s going to be hard to catch his killer. We have enough suspects to fill Yankee Stadium.” Indeed, Rubinstein played by his own nasty rules. The law and morality were for other people.

He was a thief and a con man and a sociopath with enough money to traffic with the upper crust of society, and he was a draft dodger, like so many of the ultra-wealthy. But when it came to fighting women, he was a real tough guy: he beat his first wife unconscious and ripped off her clothes.

But he kept the ugliness and violent tendencies hidden, and used his money to attract socialites who ordinarily would have assumed he was the coat-check boy. He dated several models at once, yet insisted on fidelity from all of them. He bugged their apartments to be sure they complied.

One day he was found strangled on the floor of his palatial Manhattan flat. Police first believed he’d been tortured for revenge or to extract business secrets. Then they started thinking it was a kidnapping gone wrong. The last person to see Rubinstein alive was one of his girlfriends, Estelle Gardner, but she had left his apartment around 1:30 a.m. Around 2:30 a.m., Rubinstein had called another girlfriend named Patricia Wray, but she declined his invitation to come over. The apartment was protected by heavy doors and iron bars, which meant a key had been used to gain entry. Rubinstein gave keys to his staff and girlfriends. All were questioned, and all were cleared.

Rubinstein’s life was depicted in a great 1956 film,
Death of a Scoundrel
, by a man who in life was also a scoundrel—actor George Sanders, who ultimately took his own life because he said it was a bore.

April Tinsley was abducted on a chilly Friday afternoon in 1988 while walking home from a friend’s house in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her body was found three days later about twenty miles away in a rural area dotted with Amish farms.

Despite an intensive search, police were unable to find her killer. Two years later, a message written in pencil or crayon appeared on a barn door not far from where April’s body had been discovered. The writer claimed responsibility for the murder.

Then, in spring 2004, four notes appeared at homes in the Fort Wayne area—several placed on bicycles that young girls had left in their yards—that also were believed to have been written by the killer. The notes, all on lined yellow paper, were placed inside plastic bags along with used condoms or Polaroid pictures of the killer’s body. Several of the notes referred to April Tinsley.

Since those 2004 notes, the killer has not been heard from. But he has left a trail of evidence that the FBI hopes to follow. The FBI investigators believe the case is “highly solvable,” and after twenty-one years, their desire to bring April Tinsley’s killer to justice is stronger than ever. Not so incidentally, anyone who provides information that leads to the arrest of April’s killer will be eligible for a $15,000 reward.

The reason why crimes go unsolved—and remain unsolved—has been touched upon in this book. But the subject merits more attention because it is an important one. Not all true-crime fans know how many investigations go wrong for one reason or another.

We are, of course, deluded by crime stories on TV and in the movies into believing that the most complex crimes can be solved in an hour or two. That simply is not true.

Investigations have demonstrated time and time again how wrong turns can be taken. Perhaps no case has shown this more forcefully than that of O.J. Simpson for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. The many mistakes made by investigators in the field and in the lab throughout that investigation may well have influenced the outcome of the trial. Perhaps the most pertinent commentary came from Simpson juror Carrie Bess: “As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Simpson would have been behind bars if the police work had been done properly.”

But the O.J. case was hardly the only one where lab mistakes have been made. Years ago, for example, I remember the lab in a California town identifying dog hair as human hair and routinely misidentifying fluids.

Independent analysis discovered how bad a lab can be while examining the Houston Police Department’s crime lab. That lab repeatedly tested DNA samples incorrectly and, in some cases,
made up results
without actually testing evidence. Investigative analysts also determined that the HPD performed incomplete serology work or did none at all in more than
four hundred
cases. Indeed, the investigation into the lab reversed the guilt of three men who had been convicted with erroneous information. Other prisoners also will most likely be exonerated once retests recommended by the investigation have been completed.

Another lab that has had big problems is the San Mateo County crime laboratory in California. Lab administrators didn’t have a business plan with operational goals and objectives, so the lab lacked focus and was unable to deliver what its varied client base required. Law-enforcement agencies didn’t submit evidence to the lab because they didn’t believe it would be processed in time.

This type of situation compromises criminal justice in two ways—criminals may be on the street longer, and innocent people may be jailed pending evaluation of evidence. Here are examples of other problems at the San Mateo lab:

• A suspect in a burglary case had to be released after being detained for forty-eight hours because evidence had not been analyzed in time to file charges.
  
• The police had identified a suspected murderer but could not arrest him because they did not have the lab results needed before charges could be filed. This police department waited for several months without receiving a status report about analysis of the evidence.
  
• An 11-year-old homicide was reopened because a lead developed regarding two suspects. When police asked the crime lab for the original crime-scene fingerprints, to attempt to match them to the new suspects, the police found that the crime lab had never processed the original prints.