car-1149997_1920

Police brought Agostina’s alleged femicide to Neuquén

by NewsPress articles

A commission of the local police force transferred Juan Carlos Monsalve from Viedma, accused of being the perpetrator of the femicide.

Agustín Martínez

LMCipolletti : 30.05.2021

This Sunday the second person arrested for the femicide of Agostina Gisfman was transferred from the town of Viedma to the capital of Neuquén. This is Juan Carlos Monsalve, accused of being the perpetrator of the femicide of the 22 year old girl from Cipole, who was murdered and then burnt in a rubbish dump in Centenario.

Agostina went to a meeting, which Gustavo Chianesse had arranged for her, at the roundabout at Rutas 151 and 22 in Cipolletti on Friday 14 May at 7pm.

To do so, she asked an acquaintance to take her to the agreed place and once there, she got into a dark vehicle. That was the last time Agostina Gisfman was seen alive.

Investigators believe that the young woman was killed with a stabbing weapon on board the vehicle, which evidence suggests was the Chevrolet Tracker van seized last week where human blood was found after a bluestar test.

The femicides then went to a rubbish dump in the town of Centenario, where they dumped the young woman’s body and burned it. It was found there the following day by a person passing through the area.

To date, two people have been arrested for Agostina’s femicide: Gustavo Chianese, already accused as a necessary participant, for being the one who handed over the girl when they agreed to meet; and Juan Carglos Monsalve, suspected of being the perpetrator, taking into account how the telephone antennas located him at the meeting place and the place where he was found.

These were reached as a result of key wiretaps that link them both to the planning of the young woman’s femicide, after Monsalve had a conflict with his wife as a result of the encounter he had had with Agostina in April. When he was unable to locate her in order to “kill her”, as the prosecutor’s office stated in its theory of the case, he asked Chianese to look for her.

It is even known that Monsalve had rented the Tracker on the same day of the femicide, hours before, that is, on Friday 14 May. The same dark vehicle was captured together with another lighter-coloured one by a camera in a house, near the area where the young woman’s body was dumped.

Monsalve had been arrested on 18 May in the town of San Javier, in Río Negro. Finally, this Sunday, his extradition was finalised and therefore, a commission of the Neuquén police travelled to the capital of the neighbouring province to bring Agostina’s alleged femicide to Neuquén. Now, the prosecutor’s office is expected to request a hearing for the formulation of charges in the framework of the case.

Read the original article
B9726946208Z.1_20210505190829_000GJHI2S868.1-0

Thomas Lesire trial: These clothes are examined with Bluestar reagent

by NewsNon classéPress articles

Assizes: trial of Thomas Lesire, accused of the murder of an octogenarian in Châtelet, begins

RTBF 03.05.2021

The neighbourhood investigation led the police to a suspect, Thomas Lesire, the son of a neighbour. The latter’s home was searched on 1 June 2019 at 05:00. The suspect was not present at the scene but the investigators found a T-shirt, shorts, a pair of shoes and various other items of clothing in the drum of a washing machine, which they seized.

These clothes are examined by the criminal investigation laboratory using the reagent “Bluestar”. The result is that they have been in contact with blood.

Assizes: trial of Thomas Lesire, accused of the murder of an octogenarian in Châtelet, begins
(Audio)

Read the original article here
hammer-802296_1920

Daval case: investigation and use of Bluestar

by NewsPress articlesReal Cases solved with BLUESTAR® FORENSICUncategorized

Daval trial: life sentence requested against Jonathann Daval accused of a "terrible" crime, relive the sixth morning of the trial

L’est Républicain : 21.11.2020

“When I am told that a young, healthy woman has disappeared while jogging, I take this case very seriously. I am already worried” Emmanuel Dupic then asks the investigators to do a more thorough hearing of Jonathann Daval. “A hearing that will be important because it allows us to have doubts. We will ask him to show us his wounds: we note traces on his body. Bites or scratches. These elements have strongly disturbed me. “

“That is why we will conduct, from Sunday, a search with many means, such as Bluestar, to reveal the traces of blood.”

Daval trial: life sentence requested against Jonathann Daval accused of a “terrible” crime, relive the sixth morning of the trial (Audio)

Read the original article
el-salvador-2379443_1920

Case of a missing youth: raids and investigation procedures continue

by NewsPress articlesReal Cases solved with BLUESTAR® FORENSIC

The procedure was carried out jointly with police personnel from the Forensic Science Department and the 43rd Central Police Station of Jhugua Ñaro and the Brigade.

Nantudi : 1 October 2020

Prosecutors Daisy Sánchez of the Itá Criminal Unit and Joel Cazal of the Specialised Anti-Kidnapping Unit, conducted a new raid in the investigation of the disappearance of young Dahiana Espinoza Colmán (20), since last Friday 18 September. They collected important data for the investigation.

“After performing the chemiluminescence test for blood with bluestar forensic reagents, a black leather boot, the key packets and the pen cutter were found inside the cab of the vehicle, which were lifted and will be sent to the laboratory for their further study”

The procedure was carried out jointly with the police personnel of the Forensic Science and 43rd Central Police Station of Jhugua Ñaro and the Brigade. (Audio)

Read the original article

Galveston AA group leader’s killer is still out there after 2 years

by NewsPress articles

Galveston AA group leader's killer is still out there after 2 years

ABC 13 : 29.06.2020 [United-States/Texas]

Donna Brown walked into the Alcoholics Anonymous building in Galveston to prepare for the meeting she planned to host that afternoon, and was murdered.

It was an AA volunteer who found Donna laying in the doorway. The 79 year-old was still alive. The volunteer called 911.

“She’s laying here motionless and there’s blood on the floor,” the caller told dispatch. The caller initially thought Donna had slipped and fallen. When paramedics arrived, Donna still had a faint pulse. EMTs loaded her into an ambulance and when they cut away Donna’s shirt, they realized she hadn’t fallen. She had been stabbed. In Ohio, Elizabeth Rogers got the call about her great-aunt.

“How anybody could stab somebody that many times and make them look like that? How somebody could do that – to put them through so much pain,” says Rogers. “She just looked grotesque. Such a beautiful woman and she looked so incredibly awful.”

Rogers bought a plane ticket to Texas and less than 24 hours later, she was standing in the ICU, saying goodbye to the woman she had been in awe of her whole life.

Donna had been the “cool aunt.” She was a Pan Am stewardess in the sixties, jet-setting all over the world. She never married and lived in West Palm Beach for most of her life. Rogers says Donna made money in stocks and investing well – progressive for a single woman at that time. But, about 20 years ago, Donna made a bad investment that changed her life, Rogers says.

“She lost all of her money. She, instead of filing bankruptcy, she just paid everything off and started over. She came out here and she pulled herself up by her straps,” Rogers says.

When Donna lost that money, she moved to Galveston and lived modestly.

“It’s such an amazing story of how you can make it work. She didn’t bring in a lot of money each month. Very little, actually,” Rogers says. “She didn’t care about the material things. Her focus was on helping people.”

That’s what brought Donna to Alcoholics Anonymous. She organized a “women only” group that met Sunday afternoons at 4 p.m. and women showed up week after week. They grew to depend on Donna.

Grainy surveillance video from an apartment complex across the street captured the last moments of Donna’s life. It’s never been seen by the public, until now.

The video shows 3:43 p.m. when Donna pulls up in her white hatchback. Two minutes later, you see her cross the street. She walks through the mint-green colored side door of the AA building on the corner of 33rd Street and Avenue P . After Donna walks in, you see the door open a second time.

“You see what appears to be a struggle in that doorway, ” says Detective Michelle Sollenberger with the Galveston Police Department. “Then, the door slams closed. And we know that Donna was found by her associate at the AA Hall right inside that doorway.”

Why would anyone want to kill Donna?

She was known as a feisty woman. Police say some fellow group members described her as “cantankerous.”

“Donna was known for running men out of the meeting hall for the women’s meeting on Sunday afternoon,” Sollenberger says. “Everybody said: if there was a man in that meeting hall, Donna would have run him off. She would have probably been hollering at him and telling him to get out of there. Unfortunately, this person has a very volatile temper and snapped.”

Donna isn’t the only one seen on that surveillance video. So is the killer, detectives think.

A person is seen entering the other side of the AA building, two hours before Donna showed up. He appears to be wearing black or dark jeans and has on a backpack.

This is what sets Donna’s unsolved murder apart from other cold cases. Detective Sollenberger thinks she has the murderer: she just needs more evidence to connect the dots.

“It’s so frustrating. It’s really so frustrating,” she says.

One man may be the key to solving this. We’ll call him Scott. That’s not his real name. He didn’t want to be identified, because the killer is still out there. Scott says he’s sure he was face-to-face with Donna’s killer hours before she was murdered.

In the surveillance video, you see Scott ride up to the AA hall on his bike, 26 minutes after the first man walked in. Scott parks and goes into the brick building.

“When I went inside, there was a gentleman that was passed out-not passed out, but he was laying on one of the benches inside,” Scott says. “My bag was next to him as was all my stuff. The bag was opened and all my stuff-everything had, you know-somebody had gone through my stuff.”

Scott says he and the man got into it.

“This gentleman sat up and said, ‘I went through all your stuff to make sure there wasn’t a bomb in it.’ And he just kind of did a little chuckle and it really got me hot, you know?” Scott says. “This guy is an intimidating guy, kind of a scary person. He’s a big guy. He’s young and probably twice my size and he’s fit. He (was) just really aggressive, very animated, very aggravated.”

Scott grabbed his bag and got out of there. Surveillance video shows him inside for a total of two minutes. You see him ride off on his bike 90 minutes before Donna arrived.

A couple days after her murder, Scott worked up the courage to tell police what had happened.

“He was able to identify the person as somebody he knew from the meetings. But, the nature of the AA program is to be anonymous, and so, a lot of the individuals don’t know each other,” Sollenberger says.

 

That made Sollenberger’s job harder but not impossible. She tracked down the person Scott says he thinks he spoke with in the AA building before Donna was attacked. Sollenberger had to figure out: was he the killer? Was he the man in the video wearing black pants and the backpack? We’re not naming him because he’s not a suspect. He’s a person of interest.

Two days after Donna’s murder, the man was arrested on an unrelated warrant. Police collected his clothes and shoes. CSI techs sprayed a special liquid called Bluestar on the man’s tennis shoes. The liquid glows blue under a blacklight if someone’s DNA is present. His shoes lit up. But, testing at the crime lab can’t confirm whose DNA is present.

“It was really frustrating because we thought that bloody shoe was going to be the missing piece of our puzzle.”

Sollenberger says the man with the blue shoe told her he had an alibi. He was at church about a mile from the AA hall when Donna was killed. But Sollenberger says the man told her he wasn’t there.

Weeks passed-and then, another break. A neighbor living near the AA building called police with new surveillance video from his Ring doorbell. It showed a man with dark pants and a backpack coming from the direction of the hall, five minutes after Donna was murdered.

Sollenberger released that video exclusively to ABC13, hoping someone sees it and can identify the man by name.

“I think that would be the linchpin in this case,” she says. “We’ve exhausted the forensics and we have essentially run out of leads because of the anonymity involved in some of the witnesses and people involved in the AA hall.”

A few months away from the second anniversary of Donna’s death, Elizabeth Rogers flew from Ohio to Texas again, to visit the AA building for the first time.

“It’s a little surreal. It’s good though. It’s really good,” Rogers told us. “It brings it all back. It makes me want to resolve this for her.”

Rogers met Scott, who says he thinks about that day every day.

“That could have been me. That very well could have been me,” he says.

Before he met Donna, Scott had been struggling to stay clean. Now, he has a job, he has a home, he has a life-he says it’s all thanks to Donna:

“God brought that lady to my life. That was not by mistake. That happened for a reason. She’s a hero to me. I don’t even know her. But she kept me praying and that’s what’s kept me alive.”

Since the pandemic hit, Sollenberger says she’s had more time to work on cold cases like Donna’s. But, interviewing people in person can be tough with a mask.

Coronavirus stopped AA meetings in Galveston for a while. Donna would have struggled with that.

“She was just the person who happened to be there. It would have been anyone who walked through that door,” Sollenberger says.

Someone knows who killed Donna Brown-knows why it happened and where the murder weapon is hidden.

“To believe the suspect didn’t tell somebody is a little farfetched. I think he had to have relayed this information to somebody at this point,” Sollenberger says.

Donna’s family is asking for your help. Because that’s what Donna stood for: she helped people who, in many cases, didn’t have anyone. Donna wouldn’t let them be forgotten.

“I’m going to keep at it,” Rogers says. “I’m going to keep at it no matter what it takes. No matter what it takes for this town. Because it has to be solved.”

If you have any information about Donna’s case, or, if you can identify the man by name wearing dark pants and the backpack in the Ring video, call Galveston police at

409-765-3702.

Galveston AA group leader’s killer is still out there after 2 years

Read the original article:
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
VK
Telegram
WhatsApp
Email
Print

He had tried to erase the trace of the victim’s blood

by NewsNon classéPress articles

The baby was beaten and tortured, recorded in bruises, scratches, burns and fractures from the brain down.

Photo: Jenny Rocio Angarita Galindo (Radio RCN)

Alerta Paisa : 03.02.2020

RCN Radio has learned that Oscar Eduardo Orjuela Pinzón, had tried to erase the trace of the victim’s blood, but the Public Prosecutor’s Office, with the Bluestar Forensic Reagent, managed to discover clothes, walls and places in the house that had traces of the crime.

The judge finally assured that it was the most difficult hearing he had had to preside over since he started his career in the judiciary and called for justice to be done with the “monster who disguised himself as a stepfather”

The judge finally assured that it was the most difficult hearing he had had to preside over since he started his career in the judiciary and called for justice to be done with the “monster who disguised himself as a stepfather”

He had tried to erase the trace of the victim’s blood

Read the original article
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
VK
Telegram
WhatsApp
Email
Print

Narumi case: investigators accuse the main suspect

by NewsPress articles

The Chilean ex-boyfriend of this Japanese student who disappeared in Besançon in 2016 fled to his country. The French justice has just revealed accusing elements on his responsibility.

Le Parisien, 

The Chilean ex-boyfriend of this Japanese student who disappeared in Besançon in 2016 fled to his country. The French justice has just revealed accusing elements on his responsibility.

Certainly, the key piece is missing: a body. But for the rest, the Narumi case is “a puzzle in which all the pieces have been reconstituted, and fit together perfectly,” in the words of the public prosecutor of Besançon, Etienne Manteaux.

This Thursday morning, the magistrate took the floor for a final press conference regarding the disappearance of this 21-year-old Japanese student on December 5, 2016. If one were to push the analogy to a game of cards that would be played between the French and Chilean authorities, one would slip that at the time the investigation is completed, Étienne Manteaux has shot down a game provided to obtain the extradition of Nicolas Zepeda Contreras, the main suspect in the murder of the young woman.

The request was sent this Thursday to the French Ministry of Justice, and will then pass through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which will forward it to its Chilean counterparts. In addition to a 27-page summary, the Chileans will have the entire investigation file, translated into Spanish, at their disposal, and could respond within a few months. Zepeda’s presence at the trial, which should be held with or without him, in 2020, will then be at stake. Everything leads us to believe that he premeditated his act
 
In the absence of an extradition agreement between the two countries, the possibility that he will be handed over to France rests solely on Chile’s “international courtesy”. And the least we can say is that, until now, the Chileans have not really shown it.
 
In his country, Zepeda has never been questioned in court. As for the possibility that he might be “denounced” by the French, in order to be judged in Santiago, the Chilean authorities dismissed it out of hand.

This attitude is difficult to understand, since the case, even without the weight of an autopsy, is overwhelming on paper. If the extradition request evacuates the prosecution for “kidnapping and sequestration”, focusing on the “murder”, it is because everything suggests that the young Chilean premeditated his act. With Narumi, he says he lived “19 months and 16 days” of a love affair that began in February 2015, when he was studying at the same university as her, the one in Tsukuba, not far from Tokyo. He dates the end of it to October 6, 2016.

A few weeks earlier, Narumi arrived in Besançon for a year. A student with a bright future, all her professors judge. The best proof of this is that she has a scholarship from the extremely selective Japanese government. “Her departure from Japan created an uncomfortable situation within our couple,” Zepeda will euphemize the only time he will speak, on his own initiative, on December 30, 2016, in front of the Chilean police.

Jealous of a French student

After the fact, in view of the expert assessments conducted by investigators of the PJ of Besançon, it will appear that 980 messages were exchanged between Narumi and Nicolas at this time. Only on September 5, 2016, day when their rupture seems to be precipitated, the two address 646 messages in three hours. He is bitter. Accuses Narumi of having “destroyed everything”.
 
On September 7, in a video posted on Dailymotion, the Chilean is this time threatening: “It must build trust. She has to pay”, he says in front of the camera, with a dark look in his eyes.
 
The previous autumn, he had introduced her to his family during a month’s vacation in Chile, and announced to his relatives that he wanted to make a life with her. But in this early October 2016, nothing goes anymore. The young Japanese woman obviously has another vision of her own future. “I am not in France, and you take me for an idiot,” Nicolas reproaches him. He wants as proof the male frequentations of the young woman, in particular a certain Arthur.

Narumi Kurosaki / Nicolas Zepeda Contreras./DR

PODCAST: Naomi, the unpunished crime

Pregnant with her presumed murderer?

As luck would have it, this young Frenchman has just returned from a year of study in Japan, in Tsukuba. He befriended Narumi in Franche-Comté and Zepeda rightly senses that a romance is brewing. He orders Narumi to delete Arthur from her Facebook contacts, along with two other friends. This one refuses. “I wanted to get married, to have a house, to have children with you…” says Zepeda.

On the other hand, Narumi reproaches him ” to spoil (his) studies in France “. Especially: “I will never forget that you put me pregnant”, she exposes to him, deploring that the Chilean does not help her financially on this point, which crystallized broad investigations. Because in view of the conversations, it is well in the present that speaks then Narumi, whose investigators tried, on the administrative level, as near the hospitals of the sector, to have confirmation of her pregnancy, without succeeding in it.

On October 8, a last exchange between the two young people ends with an “I love you” from the Chilean, which sounds like an epitaph.

“That’s the reason why we are going to conduct, starting on Sunday, a search with a lot of means, like Bluestar, to reveal the blood traces.”

Le Parisien : Narumi case: the investigators accuse the main suspect (Audio)

Read the original article
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
VK
Telegram
WhatsApp
Email
Print

Christine Wood’s DNA found in Brett Overby’s basement, court says

by NewsPress articles

CBC NEWS : 02.05.2019

Christine Wood’s blood was found on a weight bench, closet door and stairs in the basement of a Burrows Avenue home owned by Brett Overby, a Winnipeg jury heard on Thursday.

Jillian Taylor · CBC News

Forensic investigators collected a number of swabs from the house in March of 2017, which were sent for testing along with a DNA sample from Wood’s parents. Court heard the tests came back as a positive match to the 21-year-old who went missing in August 2016. Overby was charged with second-degree murder 10 months later. He has pleaded not guilty.

"It was my opinion at the time that something occurred that made blood fly through the air," testified Patrol Sgt. Brian Neumann on Thursday.

Neumann told the jury of nine men and three women that he and two other members of the forensic identification unit began searching Overby’s home on March 22, 2017.

He testified he found 54 small visible stains, which he said appeared to be blood drops, on one of the two closet doors.

Court previously heard there was a large hole between the doors, which was not there in March 2016, when Overby’s ex-girlfriend moved out.

Much of Neumann’s testimony focused on the use of Bluestar Forensic, a chemical solution sprayed on surfaces to detect blood not visible to the naked eye.

He told court he blacked out the basement windows and then used a camera, which exposed traces of blood and cleaning products in blue.

“It was my opinion at the time that some sort of cleaning had been done on the door,” said Neumann about three large bright blue smears on the doors and wall in between.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
VK
Telegram
WhatsApp
Email
Print

Read the original article here

Bluestar, the miracle product that solves many criminal investigations

by NewsPress articles

Bluestar, which was developed in a CNRS laboratory, has become an essential tool in complex investigations and a formidable weapon in the hands of the technical and scientific police.

Le Parisien : 01.04.2019 (France)

Summoned last Thursday before the investigating judge, Jean-Marc Reiser, the main suspect in the disappearance of Sophie Le Tan in September in Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin), fell from above. After nine hours of questioning, the magistrate presented him with a new piece of evidence: a saw discovered in his cellar by the police.

On the handle, the blood of Sophie Le Tan. A “damning element”, according to Gérard Welzer, the lawyer of Sophie Le Tan’s family. A discovery made possible by Bluestar. A product that “now equips the police in a hundred countries around the world,” said Jean-Marc Lefebvre-Despeaux, head of Bluestar Forensic, based in Monaco.

Created in 2003 by Loïc Blum, a researcher at the CNRS, the Bluestar quickly became a must-have for technical and forensic police services, replacing the Luminol. “The reaction of the Bluestar is much more intense and longer,” says Jean-Marc Lefebvre-Despeaux.

“When I was based in Seine-Saint-Denis, my team, which covered a quarter of the department, used it about ten times a year,” explains Christophe, head technician at PTS, who now trains the teams that go to crime scenes. “We use it in camouflaged blood crimes, when we think there may have been traces that have been cleaned up. “

Bluestar’s strength is that it illuminates blood despite the perpetrators’ efforts to clean it up. In the Reiser case, the Bluestar revealed a large amount of blood in the suspect’s bathroom. It is very difficult to achieve perfect cleaning,” says Jean-Marc Lefebvre-Despeaux. We will almost always find it: between a skirting board and the floor, in the tile joints…”. And sometimes years later.

While working in Seine-Saint-Denis, Christophe remembers, for example, finding traces of blood under a carpet that were ten years old. “Even on surfaces that a suspect thinks are impervious, on an object that he has cleaned perfectly, we can find it,” says the forensic technician.

This is the case with the saw found at Jean-Marc Reiser’s home, which had obviously been cleaned by the suspect. The same goes for the screwdriver discovered a few years ago by Christophe and his team in the context of a murder case. “We were looking for an object like an ice pick, which had been stuck in a man’s head. We came across a toolbox with a screwdriver. We sprayed it with Bluestar and it turned blue,” recalls Christophe. And yet, the suspect had cleaned everything up, you couldn’t see anything with the naked eye. “

But science has brought the murderer down. Will Jean-Marc Reiser suffer the same fate? Confronted with this new “damning” piece of evidence, he was “confused”, according to a source close to the case.

Daval trial: life sentence requested against Jonathann Daval accused of a “terrible” crime, relive the sixth morning of the trial (Audio)

Read the original article :
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
VK
Telegram
WhatsApp
Email
Print

Justice for the Lyon Sisters

by NewsPress articles

How a determined squad of detectives finally solved a notorious crime after 40 years

For decades, the disappearance of Sheila and Kate Lyon wasn’t just an enduring mystery; it was an unhealed regional trauma. On a March day in 1975, the sisters — daughters of a well-known Washington radio personality — had gone to Wheaton Plaza, a suburban Maryland shopping mall, on an innocent outing, and then vanished. They were never seen again, though the hunt for them was relentless and extensive. Police interviewed countless witnesses and followed hundreds of tips. Every stand of woods or weeds was searched. Storm sewers were explored, as was every vacant house for miles. The residents of a nearby nursing home were interviewed, one by one. Scuba divers groped through mud at the bottoms of ponds. Nothing was found. Nothing came of anything the police did.

I was a green 23-year-old reporter with the Baltimore News-American when the story broke. My job was to show up in the newsroom at 4 a.m. and phone every police barracks in the state, asking whether anything interesting had happened overnight.

When, on the morning of March 26, the desk officer in Wheaton told me about the missing children, I drove directly to the scene. This was a story that was sure to attract attention. Millions of families in the region lived in neighborhoods just like the Lyons’ in Kensington, Md., shooing their kids out the door in the morning and catching up with them at mealtimes, unconcerned about where they went. A story like this struck at suburbia’s idea of itself.

My first story ran two days after the girls vanished, under the headline “100 Searching Woods for 2 Missing Girls.” It had photos of 12-year-old Sheila, in blond pigtails and glasses, and 10-year-old Kate, with her blond hair cut in a cute bob. As days passed with no good news, the tale turned grimmer. In my newspaper the story was still on the front page at the end of the week: “Hope Fades in Search for Girls.” But in time, as nothing happened, the story moved off the front page and then out of the news completely, overtaken by fresh outrages.

 

As the decades passed I wrote thousands more stories, big ones and small ones. I raised five children of my own. I became a grandfather — of two little blond-haired girls, as a matter of fact. To me, the Lyon story was sad and beyond understanding. Few haunted me as this one did.

While today we can all too readily imagine the disappearance of a child, in 1975 it was shocking — and all the more so because it was two children. Imagining how or why it happened was difficult. The problem of controlling two alarmed children suggested more than one kidnapper, which raised the question, why? What would motivate two people or a group? A sex-trafficking ring? A circle of pedophiles? Just speculating about it conjured scenarios that made you ashamed to be human.

The case haunted the Montgomery County Police Department, too. It was a pebble in the department’s shoe. Generations of detectives had come and gone, and many had taken a crack at it. Periodically, a new team would start over, combing through the many boxes of yellowing evidence, hoping to find something missed. This is what cold case teams do. They embrace the tedium. They are the turners of last stones, laboring in a landscape beyond hope.

But just as the most recent team was preparing to give up, a ray of hope emerged. Detective Chris Homrock stumbled upon a file he had never seen before — the six-page transcript of a statement by an 18-year-old named Lloyd Lee Welch.

On April 1, 1975, Welch, a long-haired drifter with drug and alcohol problems, had contacted Montgomery County police to say that he had witnessed the Lyon sisters’ abduction. Officers had dismissed his elaborate, overly detailed account as a lie, an attempt to insinuate himself into the story, play the hero and collect a reward. But nearly 40 years later, the cold case squad wondered if he really had seen something. At the end of his statement, he had said that the kidnapper walked with a limp, as did the man the detectives, at the time, considered their top suspect. They found Welch in Delaware, at the tail end of a 33-year prison term for molesting a 10-year-old girl, a fact that further piqued their interest.

On Oct. 16, 2013, Detective Dave Davis traveled with Homrock and Montgomery Deputy State’s Attorney Pete Feeney to Dover, Del., to interview Welch, who stunned Dave with the first words out of his mouth. “I know why you’re here,” he said with a sly grin. “You’re here about those two missing kids.”

Related

Six black girls were brutally murdered in the early ’70s. Why was this case never solved?
Lloyd was nothing at all like the reticent man FBI analysts had led the detectives to expect. He appeared to enjoy talking for its own sake, and even though he knew Dave was working on the old Lyon case, he seemed indifferent to the risk. He talked like a man addicted to talk, free-associating, and Dave, who had worried about how to get him going, just sat back and listened.

In that first session, Lloyd denied any involvement with the Lyon girls’ disappearance. “I didn’t kill anybody,” he told Dave. “I didn’t rape anybody. I didn’t do nothin’ to those girls. I mean, I really don’t have much to tell.”

But he went on talking. And after a full day of interrogation, he let slip something that caught the detectives’ attention. The squad had been working on the assumption that Lloyd had witnessed — or possibly assisted in — the girls’ abduction by a pedophile named Ray Mileski. Wrapping up the session, Dave made a final stab at getting Lloyd to reveal something.

“All right, I think they’re, we’re pretty much done,” he said. “But what I wanted to ask — your opinion only — what do you think [Mileski] did to those girls?”

“Personally?” Lloyd asked.

“Yeah, I’m asking you for an opinion.”

“Well, my opinion is that he killed ’em and raped ’em; he killed ’em and he probably burned ’em. I don’t know.”

In the adjacent room, Chris and Pete looked at each other. “Who says ‘burned them’?” asked Pete.

In subsequent sessions with Davis and Homrock, and later also detectives Katie Leggett and Mark Janney, Welch lied elaborately and repeatedly about his connection to the Lyon case. He eventually admitted that he had helped kidnap the girls but insisted that the crime had been planned and carried out by others in his family — first naming a cousin, then an uncle, then his father, who he said had abused him sexually as a child.

In the summer of 2014, the squad began an extensive probe of the entire Welch clan. What the detectives found shocked them. The clan had two branches, one in Hyattsville, Md., and the other five hours southwest, on a secluded hilltop in Thaxton, Va., a place the locals called Taylor’s Mountain. Here the family’s Appalachian roots were extant, even though some members had gradually moved into more modern communities in and around Bedford, the nearest town. While its environs were markedly different, the branch in Maryland clearly belonged to the same tree.

The family’s mountain-hollow ways — suspicion of outsiders, an unruly contempt for authority of any kind, stubborn poverty, a knee-jerk resort to violence — set it perpetually at odds with mainstream suburbia. Most shocking were its sexual practices. Incest was notorious in the families of the hollers of Appalachia, where isolation and privation eroded social taboos. The practice came north with the family to Hyattsville. Here, where suburban families took child-rearing seriously, some adults in Lloyd’s immediate family exploited their offspring and ignored barriers to incest. It was not uncommon for Welch children to experiment sexually with siblings and cousins. If the Lyon sisters had fallen into this cesspool, as Lloyd claimed and the detectives now suspected, then some of the family might have known — and even helped.

At this point, Lloyd was claiming that the chief culprit had been his Uncle Dick, who he said had planned the girls’ kidnapping and then presided over their gang rape, murder and dismemberment. Wiry, flinty and truculent, Dick Welch was nearly 70 but seemed older. In addition to heart trouble, he faced a frightening array of accusations. Various family members had accused him of ugly and violent behavior toward them in the past.

Dick denied it all; he said little, and what he did say was simple and consistent. Indeed, he behaved like someone wrongly accused, bewildered and frustrated by wounding falsehoods. He was summoned to appear before a grand jury in February 2015. When the prosecutor asked him whether he’d had any involvement in the Lyon case, Dick was succinct and firm.

“God as my witness, no.”

“Did you transport one or both of these girls — Sheila and Kate Lyon — from Wheaton Plaza to your residence?”

“No, I didn’t. I’ve never been there.”

“Did you have sexual contact with either Sheila or Kate Lyon?”

“God as my witness, no.”

“Do you have knowledge of any of these things that I’ve talked about?”

“No, but I wish I did.” He had earlier said that he wished he could help the detectives solve the mystery.

“Do you have any explanation why people would say that you did?”

“I don’t know why I’m getting accused, them saying I did this, I done that. I haven’t.”

Pat, Dick’s wife, would eventually be charged with organizing family efforts to stonewall the investigation. Lloyd’s cousin Teddy Welch, the first family member he named as the girls’ kidnapper — though Teddy was only 11 in March 1975 — had run off as a boy to live with a middle-aged man. Two other cousins, Henry Parker and his sister, Connie Parker Akers, still lived near the family homestead on Taylor’s Mountain. Both would prove to be helpful, if reluctant, witnesses to the strange burning of a bloody duffel bag in a bonfire on Taylor’s Mountain, delivered there by Lloyd. Each of these family members and many others told ugly stories of being either victims or witnesses to inter-family sexual assaults.

loyd had emerged from this culture as both victim and predator. After years of wandering and imprisonment, he had strayed far from the family’s grip, but the peculiar values and behavior he had learned (and endured) had not played well in society at large.

By early 2015, the detectives had formed a much fuller picture of Lloyd in 1975. They could look past the sad, pasty, wily, shackled old man who met them in the interview room and see teenage Lloyd: lean, dirty, mean and high. In ordinary times, this might have made him stand out, but in the late 1960s, many teenage boys were growing their hair long, dressing shabbily, infrequently bathing, and experimenting with drugs. For most, this period was a fling. But for Lloyd it was no pose. He really was poor, desperate, dirty and up for anything.

By 1975 the hippie movement had faded, but Lloyd hadn’t changed. He was then part of a class of shaggy vagabonds thumbing their way around the country on back roads, camping in the woods outside suburbia.

Like Lloyd and his girlfriend, Helen, many were heavy drug users. They still proclaimed the fading mantras of the hippie moment — free love, mind-expanding drugs and the all-encompassing “If it feels good, do it” — but few had considered what such a credo might mean to a man like Lloyd Welch.

At 18 he was already an outlaw, stranded on the fringes of a prosperous world beyond his grasp. Shopping malls then were suburbia’s gleaming showcases, lined with high-end stores stocked with goods Lloyd could not afford. And while he was not the sort to reflect on such things, he must have resented the plenitude, all the comforts of money, family and community that he lacked. As Lloyd himself had put it, “I was an angry person when I was young.” And if he felt scorn, or rage, how better to strike back than to stalk the very thing the mall’s privileged customers most prized? The pretty little girls he saw there, to whom he was perversely attracted, represented everything he was denied. Might a man like this have abducted and killed the Lyon sisters?

The detectives came to realize that you had to forget the narrative. The way to read Lloyd was to look past his stories to their details.

Lloyd continued spinning one story after the next to explain what had happened to Sheila and Kate, always placing the blame for the crime on others. But gradually — often inadvertently — he revealed more and more about himself and the crime.

The detectives came to realize that you had to forget the narrative. The way to read Lloyd was to look past his stories to their details. Running through many of his versions were certain particulars that recurred: stalking girls in the mall, an offer to get high, a station wagon, a crying girl in the back seat, a basement hangout accessed from the backyard, rape, drugged girls, a pool room, an ax, the girls “chopped up” and “burned,” an Army green duffel bag, a bonfire. As if in an ever-churning blender, these stubborn nubs kept surfacing. The more they surfaced, the more they began to look true.

On a Monday in May 2015, Dave Davis went looking for the place where Lloyd said Dick had killed and dismembered Kate before stuffing her remains in a duffel bag and ordering Lloyd to take it to Taylor’s Mountain and burn it. It was a secluded spot under a bridge near his uncle’s old home in Hyattsville. Dick went there to fish and drink and smoke. It was his “comfort area.” Lloyd was “90 percent” sure about it.

Dick’s old house had been razed to make room for a new district court building. But Dave knew where it had been, and he went there first.

Right away, Lloyd’s story didn’t add up. The house was the last place you would choose to bring two little girls who were the object of a bicounty manhunt. Even back in the 1970s, before the new courthouse, the address had been a stone’s throw from the city’s police headquarters. There were officers coming and going all the time.

Lloyd had said that there were railroad tracks behind the house and that the bridge over the Anacostia River was a short distance from the front door. But the tracks were in front of the house, not behind, and across Rhode Island Avenue. The river, which was more like a creek, was not even close. The map showed it four blocks east. The layout was nothing like the one Lloyd had described.

Dave next sought out Buchanan Street, which Lloyd had also mentioned and where members of the Welch family had once lived. It was not far away, running southeast from Baltimore Avenue down to the river basin. Dave drove along that route to a dead end that looked down to the water. To the left was a rail bridge that angled across it.

Dave climbed the low fence and walked down to the water. This was clearly the place Lloyd had described, but it was no secluded haven; the angle of the bridge exposed it to views from neighborhoods all around. With all the dealerships and parking lots in the vicinity, it would have been well lit at night. It was like being onstage in a theater-in-the-round. Another Lloyd Welch curveball.

Dave had begun to lose hope of ever sorting out what had happened to the girls. But as he drove back up Buchanan, staring him right in the face across busy Baltimore Avenue was a house he recognized from snapshots in the file. It was the house where Lloyd’s father, Lee, and his wife, Edna, had lived, 4714 Baltimore Ave., a two-story, white-clapboard duplex with pale blue trim and an uneven front porch. This was the address Lloyd had given when he’d made his original false statement. Lloyd had described seeing his uncle pull out of a driveway with the Lyon sisters in his car, heading toward the river — this now made more sense. The location fit Lloyd’s description perfectly, once you saw that it was not his uncle’s house but his father’s.

It struck Dave with the force of revelation. Just as Lloyd always moved himself off-center in his stories, so he had moved this house. The detective pulled over, crossed Baltimore Avenue, and knocked on the front door.

A friendly Hispanic woman who spoke almost no English answered. Dave managed to make himself understood enough to say that he wanted to look at the basement. She showed him that there was no way to enter it through the house. You had to go outside, down the porch, and along the driveway to the backyard, where steps led down to a padlocked door. In every scenario Lloyd had spun, there was a basement hangout, a place where the girls had been kept. He had placed it first in Teddy’s older friend’s home, then in his uncle Dick’s, but in both it was a room that could be entered only by walking around the house to the rear. Once Dave understood how Lloyd’s mind worked, he knew, without question, this had to be the place.

Dave jiggled the latch, and the door opened. He stepped into a dark, low-ceilinged stone dungeon heaped with old furniture. It was so hauntingly familiar it raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck. This was the place. He knew it. It was exactly where one would stash two stolen, frightened, drugged little girls — two rooms completely cut off from the house above. You could do whatever you wished in this space without being seen or heard.

Dave returned the next day with a forensics team. They cleared away some of the old furniture and started squirting Bluestar spray, a blood-detection agent that bonds with even the slightest trace of hemoglobin and glows brightly under a blue light. The floors and walls of the outer room revealed nothing much. Then they cleared debris from the back room and sprayed some more. It lit up from floor to ceiling. It lit up like a murder scene. Someone or something had been slaughtered in this room.

And then Dave knew. All uncertainty vanished. He was even more certain because he had not been led there by Lloyd; he had found it himself. He had extracted it from Lloyd’s stories, bit by bit.

Aglow in blue light, the room announced itself as the place where Sheila and Kate Lyon, lured from Wheaton Plaza, had been drugged, raped and imprisoned, and where at least one of them had been killed and dismembered. Before he had switched the location to a bridge, Lloyd had talked a lot about a basement hangout, his Uncle Dickie’s sanctuary, a place with a locked door, where Dick went to smoke and drink. But it wasn’t Dickie’s basement. It was the basement of Lee’s house, where Lloyd had been living, the space where Lloyd hung out, smoked dope, drank and “partied.” It was his.

Not long after Dave Davis found the likely murder scene, the case against Lloyd was solid enough to charge him with the crime. Whatever illusions he may have had about winning his long-running game with the Lyon Squad were dashed. On Sept. 12, 2017, he pleaded guilty to two counts of felony murder in a Bedford courtroom. Though he still denied that he had raped or killed the sisters, his admission fell well within the confines of a Virginia legal doctrine defining as murder a killing “in the commission of abduction with intent to defile.” He was indicted in the commonwealth because the case against him was stronger there, his cousins having corroborated his final story of driving human remains to Taylor’s Mountain. Lloyd had also several times voiced his fear of execution, so he was considered more likely to accept a guilty plea in Virginia, a death-penalty state — a calculation that proved correct.

The plea spared him from death row, but he would almost certainly never leave prison. His sentence was 48 years. He was 60 years old, and he had, from first to last, talked himself into this outcome.

Although details about their fate — how precisely Lloyd had enticed the girls and what had happened to Sheila — and who exactly was involved remained unsolved, Lloyd’s plea answered my deepest questions: Who would commit such a crime? And why? But I wanted to meet Lloyd Welch. I wanted to size him up for myself, and I also wanted to close the book on the mystery that had been with me my entire professional life. I wrote him a letter requesting an interview and was surprised when he wrote back immediately, saying he would agree to be interviewed if I put $5,000 in his prison account and met certain other terms. I would not meet any of them but offered to discuss them in person.

Sitting directly across from Lloyd felt familiar; I had watched him on video in the interview room for more than 70 hours. He looked thinner than I expected, with a pale pink complexion, and his watery slate-blue eyes were magnified behind his glasses. He was cordial but all business. If I was expecting to look evil in the eye, I was disappointed. What I found was an unimpressive, scheming man, capable of charm but only to the extent that it served his interest, someone natively bright but deeply ignorant and cocky beyond all reason.

If I was expecting to look evil in the eye, I was disappointed. What I found was an unimpressive, scheming man, capable of charm but only to the extent that it served his interest.

He displayed his usual poor sense of situation, believing he had a lot more leverage over me than he did. The terms he repeated were ridiculous, but I heard him out. Then I asked the questions I most wanted him to answer.

“Why did you keep talking to the detectives?”

Lloyd said he had no choice. He said his repeated requests for a lawyer were ignored. Prison authorities told him that he had to continue meeting with the detectives. None of this was borne out by the videos I had watched. His participation throughout had appeared completely voluntary.

Dave Davis had asked me to convey a message. I was to assure Lloyd that his prison account would never be empty if he revealed where the girls’ bodies were. It wasn’t an official offer, but the Montgomery County police had spent millions on the investigation and still didn’t have that answer.

“I have told them all I know,” Lloyd insisted. “Just because a person pleads guilty to something doesn’t mean they are guilty of it. I did not murder or kidnap them girls.”

Who did?

His Uncle Dick was responsible.

“How do you think I would take two little girls out of the mall, kicking and screaming?” he asked. “Who would be able to do something like that? A man with a uniform.” (Dick had worked as a security guard.) He didn’t understand why Dick had not been charged. He said he was afraid of his uncle, as he had been in 1975.

While insisting on his innocence, Lloyd nevertheless seemed a little proud of whatever role he had played in the crime. I told him of my early coverage of the story, and of all the years I had wondered about it. He noted that it had taken the Montgomery County police almost 40 years to link him to the case. “I’ll bet it seemed like the perfect crime, didn’t it?” he boasted.

He complained about being treated as a rapist and child-murderer in the prison. Someone, he said, might still “put a shank” in his back. Then he said he had enjoyed the interview sessions because they got him out of the prison, and he got to eat something better than prison fare. “That’s one of the reasons I kept talking to them,” he said, contradicting what he’d said minutes earlier. He insisted that he had told the detectives the truth throughout, only sparingly. “I was also trying to protect myself.”

By the end of our appointed hour, I saw no strong reason to talk with him further. I had seen him invent and reinvent his version of the story so often that I saw no point in inviting him to do the same with me. But when I wrote back to him a few days later to reject his deal, I added that if he changed his mind about the payment and wanted to talk with me more, I’d come back and listen.

I got another letter from him promptly. “I received your letter and I am very disappointed in this. So let me say this to you so you can understand what I am saying to you. First the documentary you are doing, you may not use any pictures of me or Helen and you may not use my name in anyway at all. … Now, as for your book, I do not give you any permission to use my or any pictures of me or Helen in any way. You do not have my approval or authorization to use anything about the Welch’s name. You may not use any of the interview sessions that you have of me.”

He continued, “Sorry we did not come to some kind of a understanding. … If you want to come see me then you will have to put $300 on my commissary’s books before you can talk to me again. My time is money now.” I noticed that, despite his tone, the price had dropped considerably.

Mark Bowden is an award-winning journalist and author. This article is adapted from his most recent book, “The Last Stone: A Masterpiece of Criminal Interrogation,” published this month by Atlantic Monthly Press.

Credits: Story by Mark Bowden

Read the original article :

Subscribe to our newsletter

BLUESPRAY
Click Here
BLUESTAR MAGNUM
Click Here
BLUESTAR TRAINING
Click Here

Year

[archives_year]

Country

Tags
Argentina (3) Begium (1) Brazil (1) Canada (1) Chile (1) Colombia (1) Costa Rica (1) France (21) Francia (1) India (1) Israël (1) Mauritius (1) Morocco (1) Perú (2) Porto Rico (1) South Africa (2) United States (12)
Archives

Photographing bloodstains

July 7, 2016

Photographing bloodstains: Bluestar reagent FORENSICS 4 AFRICA 07.07.2016 (Nick Olivier) In the late summer of 2012, police officers in a small Midwestern town were called

Read the article