Cold Case Research Resources for Unidentified, Missing, and Cold Homicide Cases

Silvia Pettem

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780367778538
• eBook ISBN: 9781466570535
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Forensic Science
• Index: Law

Cases in which all investigative leads appear to be exhausted are frustrating for both investigators and victims families. Cold cases can range from those only a few months old to others that go back for decades. Presenting profiles and actual case histories, Cold Case Research: Resources for Unidentified, Missing and Cold Homicide Cases illustrat

Tools and Techniques

I

Challenges and Checklist

1

In 1964, Mick Jagger and his British rock band, the Rolling Stones, wowed American audiences on the Ed Sullivan Show with the group’s new hit song, “Time Is On My Side.” The Stones were singing about a lost love, but the premise was the same—time can be an ally—especially when working cold cases, due to advances in technology as well as new information that often is revealed when relationships, loyalties, and associations change.

Changing relationships, for instance, can bring forward new witnesses. But witnesses age, and cold case investigators—who also age and retire and never have enough time in the day—are challenged with shortened windows of opportunity in which to solve the cases that have new leads, as well as go after missing gaps from the past proactively. Today’s cold case investigators have found that they need to be Internet savvy and make the best use of the rapidly changing research methodologies of the twenty-first century, but they also have to be time travelers and open the door to the past. If their cold cases go back a decade or more, they know that it helps to learn, or relearn, the nearly forgotten skill sets and methodology of classical historical researchers.

Much has been written elsewhere about prioritizing cold cases, as well as the collection and preservation of physical evidence, which are not the subject of this book. Instead, the purpose of Cold Case Research: Resources for Unidentified, Missing, and Cold Homicide Cases is to provide cold case investigators with research resources that will save them time and money, along with examples of practices and strategies that work.

Use the checklist at the end of this chapter to put at your fingertips the very latest (as well as the traditional) research tools you need to aid in the arrest and conviction of criminals, give resolution to families, and bring justice to victims.

Case History: Surette Clark and Little Jane Doe

In 1993, a Canadian woman could no longer keep quiet about a crime she believed her brother had long ago committed in Arizona. The woman’s decision to contact police led to her brother’s arrest and conviction for the murder of his 4-year-old stepdaughter, Surette Clark, even though Surette’s body had not, at the time, been found. All through the trial, and for years afterwards, the remains of a female child, known only as “Little Jane Doe,” lay unclaimed in a nearby agency’s evidence room.

Forty years after the girl’s murder, after the convicted killer had served his time in prison and was released on parole, a DNA match finally identified the remains as Surette’s. Her story combines a homicide investigation with an identification, and it also illustrates the following facts:

• The passage of time can change family relationships.

• Incorrect race (or even sex, in some cases) can set a case back for years.

• Interagency cooperation is essential.

• Revisited cold cases can be solved.

In Surette’s case, there was nothing that anyone could have done to speed up the passage of time, but the child might never have been identified if investigators in both Tempe and Phoenix, Arizona, had not pulled this cold case off their evidence room shelves and worked on it together.

The investigation into Surette’s remains began on Saturday March 24, 1979, with two rockhounds who were hunting for specimens along the edge of the then-dry Salt River bottom, west of the Mill Avenue Bridge, in Tempe. When the men began to overturn rocks, they unexpectedly stumbled upon the skeleton of a child. Then they called the police.

Three days later, a story titled, “Child’s Skeleton Found in Tempe,” made modest headlines on page 2 of Section B of the Arizona Republic. At first, investigators could not determine the sex or the exact age of the child, but they estimated the individual to have been between five and seven years old. Clothing was found, but no identification. There were no missing-child reports that fit. A patch of brown hair was still attached to the skull, but the condition of the child’s remains indicated that he, or she, had been buried for at least a year, or up to thirteen more years, as the shallow grave was lined with copies of the Arizona Republic dated June 6, 1966 and October 2, 1966.

Of the skeleton, Tempe Police Captain Richard Christensen told a reporter, at the time, “It didn’t wash up. The water never got that high. It was laid up against a bridge support, and it had been buried wrapped in a blanket.”¹ Officers searched the area and found additional small bones that they said were part of the same remains. Inspection of the skeleton revealed a broken jaw, but it was unknown whether it had been broken before or after the child’s death. “We will be sending the bones to the medical school in Tucson,” added Christensen, “and they should be able to give us a better idea of the age and, possibly, the cause of death. We really can’t call it a murder at this point.”²

On the day that the story of the child’s skeleton ran in the newspaper, much larger headlines proclaimed that Egypt and Israel had signed a treaty ending 30 years of hostility. A front-page photo of a beaming President Jimmy Carter showed him clasping the hands of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachem Begin. But what of the unidentified child left under a bridge in Arizona? How many cars had passed overhead before the remains were found? And who, and where, were his or her parents?

These questions haunted police as the unidentified child’s remains sat on an evidence shelf for the next 18 years in the Tempe Police Department. Little did their detectives know that in 1971, and far away in Canada, a short-order cook named Wayne Clifford Roberts had confessed to his brothers that he had “accidentally” killed his wife’s daughter from a previous marriage.

Decades passed; then in 1993 Roberts’s sister, also a Canadian resident, learned of the child’s death and the possibility that her brother had killed Surette Clark. The girl was born in Tuba City, Arizona, on the Navajo Indian Reservation, on June 21, 1966. Stated Roberts’s sister in a recent interview, “I guess I put everyone on the spot when I decided we could no longer be quiet and take the risk that another child could be hurt by Wayne.”³ The sister then contacted the local Children’s Aid Society in Ontario, which called Arizona police and set in motion Roberts’s extradition and a November 1996 trial in Arizona.

The year 1993 (when Roberts’s sister came forward) was also the year that the Phoenix Police Department created its Cold Case Unit, and Detective Ed Reynolds (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2) was the department’s first cold case investigator. The Illinois native had moved to Phoenix shortly after he graduated from high school, and he joined the police department in 1979. Ten years later he became a detective, and was assigned to the homicide division in 1992. The following year, in the newly formed Cold Case Unit, Reynolds was working on the murder of Jeanne Tovrea, and would soon be handed the Diane Keidel case, when the murder of Surette Clark landed in his lap.⁴

Although Roberts had confessed to family members, Surette’s stepfather had not, technically, confessed to the Phoenix Police (the county attorney did not want to litigate the Miranda issues), and they still did not have Surette’s remains.⁵ In correspondence with the author, now-retired Detective Ed Reynolds stated, “The difficult part was convincing the Canadian ‘Crown’ to extradite him for a murder with no body.” Reynolds, however, did a good job of showing Roberts’s predisposition for extreme child abuse, just before the murder, by finding very old medical records of a then-recent visit to an American Indian hospital emergency room when he had beaten Surette and taken her in for treatment. Added Reynolds, “Just getting those records was a real tough job.”⁶

Figure 1.1 Surette Clark’s murderer was behind bars, but the child’s remains had not yet been found when Detective Ed Reynolds and the other members of the Phoenix Police Department’s Cold Case Squad posed for the press in 1998. From left, the detectives are Tom Gabriel, Frank DiModica, Ed Reynolds, and Robert Brunansky. (Photo by Todd Lillard. Reprinted from the Ahwatukee Foothills News, 14 October 1998. With permission.)

Figure 1.2 Detective Ed Reynolds had time to relax in 2008, the year he retired after 30 years with the Phoenix Police Department. He recently reflected, “I had a wonderful career, and I miss it.” (Photo courtesy of Ed Reynolds.)

Detective Reynolds personally arrested Roberts in Calgary and brought him to Arizona. Then, with evidence from Roberts’s siblings as well as his former wife (who had divorced him prior to his arrest), Roberts was convicted of Surette’s murder and sent to the Arizona State Prison. The court was convinced that Roberts, as stepfather, had violently punished Surette for an act of disobedience while her mother was at work. Prosecutors determined that Roberts had forced his former wife—the child’s mother—to remain silent, before fleeing with her to Canada. At the time, Surette’s mother was seven months pregnant with the couple’s first child.⁷

Independent of the arrest and conviction of Wayne Roberts, the Tempe police received a federal grant, in 1997, to re-examine their unsolved cases. They hired former Phoenix homicide investigator, Charles Hodges, a colleague of Detective Reynolds, to create a forensic sculpture of the still-unidentified child found in 1979. By then, medical examiners had determined that the skeleton most likely belonged to a 4-year-old Caucasian girl, but her body was so badly decomposed that the cause and manner of death remained unknown. Possibly, she had suffered a broken neck. In Hodges’s new position as criminal investigator for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, the sculptor spent 40 hours in his basement workshop creating a “likeness” of the girl he called “Little Jane Doe.”

Hodges started by placing 25 tissue-depth ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Case Histories and Profiles
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Section I TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES
• Section II MISSING, MURDERED, AND UNIDENTIFIED
• Section III RESOURCES FOR EXPANDED RESEARCH
• Section IV REVIEW TEAMS AND THE MEDIA
• Selected References
• Index