Found Deceased IA - Elizabeth Collins, 8, & Lyric Cook, 10, Evansdale, 13 July 2012 - #37

[dotr]

Evidence, experience, Data, Years of Case studies done by local, County, State and Federal Law Enforcement agencies , University studies, Independent studies , Studies done by bodies within the Federal Government, Similar cases, Studies done by State psych institutions, Studies done by local, state and federal Correctional facilities , Thousands of hours of offender interviews , etc..

Think outside the box all you want, Ill stick to the evidence , and the hard facts.

As for evidence , I'm sure there was evidence, however after being exposed to the elements for just over 5 months how much of it was viable or not tainted in some form I can't say

This the last post I will make on the case

Have very much enjoyed your participation and expertise, hoping you stick around here and pop in when you can, thanks!!

 

[lawstudent]

To put it plainly, if I were African-American, I would be terrified that not stopping within the first second of the lights flashing or the siren going would be the first mistake I made on my way to becoming yet another African-American statistic. That would go double were I an African-American man below the age of, maybe, 75.

I know that the vast majority of police officers are professional and all around great people but it is very true that the behaviour of a few bad apples does taint the whole barrel.

Yes - I realize this fear has been counted on in the past by impostors, but as you said, a few bad apples...I didn't get into this before but I was definitely thinking about how my appearance makes me a target for this ruse, but it also protects me from the assumptions that would put me in danger in a police situation. It drives me crazy that I cannot physically defend myself and have to worry every time I walk alone, and that at times I am not taken seriously, because I am very independent. But at the same time, it keeps me from being intimidating and I can get away with speaking up or opposing someone, which tends to happen a lot between my legal training and being very independent. It's a double-edged sword I always think about. Back to this case, I'd bet on 'normal' criminal, not a serial predator. I think there would be a break otherwise. But obviously no one knows. Certainly it is not a normal crime.

ETA: Meth users become paranoid and freak out - random scenario that just occurred to me would be two guys involved in buying it from the father spotted her while high and already worked up about possibly being ensnared in the investigation? Assuming they also distributed or something, so they would face hard time, and that they'd been doing meth and up for days at this point. They initially just want to yell something to her as a warning in hopes of freaking the father out and keeping him from talking. Somehow things get out of hand, they are all worked up on meth and it ends badly. They then panic and try to make it look like a sexual predator. Would explain the frenzied attack but no repeat crimes.

 

[Grainne Dhu]

Evidence, experience, Data, Years of Case studies done by local, County, State and Federal Law Enforcement agencies , University studies, Independent studies , Studies done by bodies within the Federal Government, Similar cases, Studies done by State psych institutions, Studies done by local, state and federal Correctional facilities , Thousands of hours of offender interviews , etc..

Think outside the box all you want, Ill stick to the evidence , and the hard facts.

As for evidence , I'm sure there was evidence, however after being exposed to the elements for just over 5 months how much of it was viable or not tainted in some form I can't say

This the last post I will make on the case

I'm sorry to see you go.

As for being exposed for 5 months, I agree. Those 5 months encompassed 3 seasons: summer, fall and winter. Fall is a good time in Iowa to make compost because it tends to be damp, warm during the day but not so hot that it slows down microbial activity, cool at night but not so cool it slows down microbial activity. I doubt unprotected DNA, such as saliva on a piece of clothing, would survive.

 

[SapphireSteel]

I'm sorry to see you go.

As for being exposed for 5 months, I agree. Those 5 months encompassed 3 seasons: summer, fall and winter. Fall is a good time in Iowa to make compost because it tends to be damp, warm during the day but not so hot that it slows down microbial activity, cool at night but not so cool it slows down microbial activity. I doubt unprotected DNA, such as saliva on a piece of clothing, would survive.

They found the perps DNA on Morgan Harringtons stuff, and she was only bones.

 

[Bootsctr]

They found the perps DNA on Morgan Harringtons stuff, and she was only bones.

Good point and I think LE has something in L&L's case. Blood stains on the clothing, especially if protected underneath the bodies, might reveal something. Hoping for the killer's DNA too.

In just looking at the location where the girls were found, this person looks to be some sort of outdoor enthusiast, a survivalist or former military perhaps. As stated in the article there is no running water or electricity at Seven Bridges and if he stayed there he probably was living off the land primarily. A forager of maybe even mushrooms.

Or perhaps just simply a local who knew where to hide the bodies where they wouldn't be found quickly.

 

[dotr]

Not sure if this is plausible or not, but could bits of skin, hair and clothing fibers have become snagged on any of the trees or shrubbery, as the perp moved through the area where the girl's remains were recovered?
Are there many birds where the girls were found, perhaps there are abandoned nests supplemented with human hair?
Would most hunters bring a dog with them into the woods?
Wonder if any dog hair might have been found on the girls?
imo, speculation.

 

[Grainne Dhu]

Good point and I think LE has something in L&L's case. Blood stains on the clothing, especially if protected underneath the bodies, might reveal something. Hoping for the killer's DNA too.

In just looking at the location where the girls were found, this person looks to be some sort of outdoor enthusiast, a survivalist or former military perhaps. As stated in the article there is no running water or electricity at Seven Bridges and if he stayed there he probably was living off the land primarily. A forager of maybe even mushrooms.

Or perhaps just simply a local who knew where to hide the bodies where they wouldn't be found quickly.

BBM

I think the last is most likely. Knowing that both Seven Bridges and Maiden Lane have been used for keggers in the past means that there are actually a fair number of people who have knowledge of one of the locations and a smaller number who would have knowledge of both locations.

Meyer's Lake strikes me as an unlikely spot for a survivalist because it's mostly what you'd find in any suburban empty lot.

I think hunters with deer cams up would notice someone who was living off the land in Seven Bridges because he would have had to move around quite a bit to forage and to prevent leaving obvious signs of longterm habitation. The Bremer County Sheriff's Department probably only gave it a cursory look and cruise-through after Lyric and Elizabeth disappeared but once their bodies had been found there, I'm betting they walked the entire 125 acres and had the surrounding landowners either check their own property or got permission to walk the adjoining land. If someone had been living out there longterm, the signs of it would have been noticed.

 

[Grainne Dhu]

Not sure if this is plausible or not, but could bits of skin, hair and clothing fibers have become snagged on any of the trees or shrubbery, as the perp moved through the area where the girl's remains were recovered?
Are there many birds where the girls were found, perhaps there are abandoned nests supplemented with human hair?
Would most hunters bring a dog with them into the woods?
Wonder if any dog hair might have been found on the girls?
imo, speculation.

The only legal game to hunt in Iowa with dogs are birds (ducks, pheasant, etc) and raccoon; seasons for all of those fall to new year's, roughly (birds earlier, raccoon later). Hunting raccoon with dogs is more common in Missouri than it is here and most dog hunting of raccoon down there is to tree them, not to kill them, so it goes on longer down there. No one would hunt birds in Seven Bridges because it isn't game bird habitat. Hunting deer with dogs is illegal and the people living on farms around Seven Bridges would for sure notice it if someone were doing so.

Bird's nests supplemented with hair is a good idea except that nesting season in Iowa is pretty much over before August. Those baby birds have to be old enough to either face an Iowan winter or migrate, so they need to be out of the juvenile stage before the first probable frost date in the first week of October.

Someone who was looking for a natural area to hike might bring their pet dog to hike with them, just as people do anywhere. I know that before I was disabled, walking the woods with my dogs was even more interesting than doing it on my own because my dogs showed me things I wouldn't have noticed as a human.

Dunno if any of this information is helpful.

 

[Bootsctr]

Your information is always insightful Grainne Dhu and I'm sorry RichKelly didn't hang around. Since it was a drought year, if this person(s) was living at Seven Bridges, someone would have noticed any smoke if he started any fires to boil water or cook anything I am certain. And, like you said, if the person had stayed there any time there would be evidence of someone living there.

Bringing this article about sex trafficking here because I know we had discussed early on if the girls might have been intended targets of a sex trafficking ring. I believe Lizzy's picture was in some ad somewhere or it was thought to be Elizabeth...

Feds nab sex traffickers in SD: 'catching awful lot of them'

The cases have ranged from predator stings at the last three Sturgis motorcycle rallies to busts of lucrative businesses that have transported girls as young as 14 to cities around the Midwest. Police also have detected a circuit some traffickers travel that includes the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota.

Most traffickers have been transplants with criminal records; two serving life were reputed Chicago gang members. Customers, or those caught in stings, have ranged from a Texas air traffic controller nabbed at Sturgis after answering a bogus online ad offering sex with a 12-year-old (his sentence: 15 years) to a Lamborghini-driving local doctor who prescribed illegal Oxycodone to a trafficker (his punishment: 22 months.)

While trafficking exists around the nation, there's something distinctive about South Dakota: About half the women in the federal cases have been Native American, a particularly vulnerable population.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fe...ching-awful-lot-of-them/ar-BBn0mZK?li=BBieTUX

 

[Squeeze]

Evidence, experience, Data, Years of Case studies done by local, County, State and Federal Law Enforcement agencies , University studies, Independent studies , Studies done by bodies within the Federal Government, Similar cases, Studies done by State psych institutions, Studies done by local, state and federal Correctional facilities , Thousands of hours of offender interviews , etc..

Think outside the box all you want, Ill stick to the evidence , and the hard facts.

As for evidence , I'm sure there was evidence, however after being exposed to the elements for just over 5 months how much of it was viable or not tainted in some form I can't say

This the last post I will make on the case

Interesting.... I wonder how he was connected to the case??? At least it got us all thinking again. Not that we'd forget....

Sent from my SCH-R970 using Tapatalk

 

[Ommmm]

Was he connected to the case?

 

[Grainne Dhu]

Your information is always insightful Grainne Dhu and I'm sorry RichKelly didn't hang around. Since it was a drought year, if this person(s) was living at Seven Bridges, someone would have noticed any smoke if he started any fires to boil water or cook anything I am certain. And, like you said, if the person had stayed there any time there would be evidence of someone living there.

Thank you. (blushing hard)

Cooking anything would probably attract attention if there were relatively near houses in the correct wind direction. We're part of the Great Plains here, so there is rarely a day with absolutely no wind at all but there are often days with just little puffs of wind. People don't realise how far the scent of roasting meat spreads, I think. I know we've been able to tell by the scent when the neighbours behind us are having a barbecue and their house is over half a mile from ours. I doubt that anyone would take particular notice of one barbecue at Seven Bridges but, as little traffic as that area gets, I think they'd notice it if someone was doing it every day.

Plus, you can kind of tell how much traffic an area is getting by the condition of gravel roads. Iowa is really fertile in the summer and weeds will grow even on gravel roads if there isn't enough traffic to kill off the seedlings. So a frequently used (say, 10+ vehicle passes a day) road won't have any weeds growing in the road bed, a less frequently used road (say, 5 to 10 vehicle passes a day) will have weeds growing in the middle of the road but not in the tire tracks and a road used even less frequently will have low growing weeds like creeping charlie covering the surface of the whole road bed.

Bringing this article about sex trafficking here because I know we had discussed early on if the girls might have been intended targets of a sex trafficking ring. I believe Lizzy's picture was in some ad somewhere or it was thought to be Elizabeth...

Feds nab sex traffickers in SD: 'catching awful lot of them'

The cases have ranged from predator stings at the last three Sturgis motorcycle rallies to busts of lucrative businesses that have transported girls as young as 14 to cities around the Midwest. Police also have detected a circuit some traffickers travel that includes the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota.

Most traffickers have been transplants with criminal records; two serving life were reputed Chicago gang members. Customers, or those caught in stings, have ranged from a Texas air traffic controller nabbed at Sturgis after answering a bogus online ad offering sex with a 12-year-old (his sentence: 15 years) to a Lamborghini-driving local doctor who prescribed illegal Oxycodone to a trafficker (his punishment: 22 months.)

While trafficking exists around the nation, there's something distinctive about South Dakota: About half the women in the federal cases have been Native American, a particularly vulnerable population.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fe...ching-awful-lot-of-them/ar-BBn0mZK?li=BBieTUX

That article was both horrifying and sad. Sex traffickers do look for girls who are vulnerable and from poor backgrounds because poor people are just more accessible and less powerful than wealthy people. South Dakota is beautiful but a hard place to make a living. I'm glad some LE agencies have quit treating underage girls as criminals rather than as victims (which they clearly are).

A friend of mine who is really into riding motorcycles has attended Sturgis and makes a good point: what gathering of 700,000 humans doesn't have a crime rate? She said she has never been hassled at Sturgis even given that she's a single woman but that there are parts of the rally and some of the people there that she avoids.

 

[carbuff]

If they had DNA or anything else specific about the killer, we wouldn't have had to wait a year for a circumstantial elimination of Klunder as a suspect.

 

[threecrazykids]

If they had DNA or anything else specific about the killer, we wouldn't have had to wait a year for a circumstantial elimination of Klunder as a suspect.

https://iowacoldcases.org/case-summaries/lyric-cook-and-elizabeth-collins/

SBM:
According to the USA Today story, Meyers said authorities were taking a two-pronged approach to any comparisons: laboratory analysis of forensic evidence, and investigative work that could pinpoint, among other things, where Klunder may have been when other people went missing.


http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/...aded-to-fbi-crime-lab?gcheck=1&nclick_check=1

SBM:
Some of the evidence gathered from crime scenes in Dayton and Evansdale is being sent to the FBI crime lab for analysis, a state official said Friday.

It is regular protocol for state investigators to seek FBI assistance in some cases because the national lab has greater capabilities than those at the state level, said Gerard Meyers assistant director for field operations with the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation.

“It’s predominately evidence that would have DNA relevance,” Meyers said. “We’ve been working for the last week or so to determine what evidence would meet the necessary submission for the FBI crime lab.”

 

[carbuff]

That says they submitted it. It does not say they got results.

 

[Bootsctr]

I don't think perp's DNA is in the system. I think he's young, but has a license. I think he has left the area. He might have enlisted in the armed forces. He might not ever commit a similar crime again. Reminds me of the Maria Ridulph case.

The kidnapping and murder of Maria Ridulph is the nation's oldest cold case to go to trial. It required family members to turn against one of their own and haunted a small town for 55 years.

Secrets often lie at the heart of crimes that remain unsolved so long they are said to go "cold." Most are cracked by advances in science, or by someone's need to come clean.

In the Ridulph case, there was no DNA, no confession by the killer. This mystery was solved by circumstantial evidence amassed over four years by bulldog cops and other outsiders who came to Sycamore to stand up for a little girl whose life was stolen.

"Whoever took her away hit her weak spot. He played with her," the frantic mother added.

Maria was found in the spring, 120 miles from home. A man scrounging for morel mushrooms found her skeleton tucked under a fallen tree on Roy Cahill's farm off U.S. 20 outside Woodbine, not far from the Iowa border.

"There wasn't much left to her," observed James Furlong, the 28-year-old rookie coroner of Jo Daviess County. Son of the local funeral home director, he'd never handled a murder case before. No crime scene photos were taken, he said, because he didn't want them "slobbered all over the front pages."

Neither the autopsy nor the inquest determined a cause of death, beyond "suspected foul play."

http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2013/08/us/oldest-cold-case/



Police stopped and searched every car that entered and left Sycamore in the days after the kidnapping.

Photo: Chicago Sun-Times

 

[threecrazykids]

That says they submitted it. It does not say they got results.

I'm confused what you mean...you had questioned whether or not they HAD any DNA - I was just pointing out articles that I had bookmarked that appeared that they were submitting DNA comparisons for testing is all...

I agree, no mention of results - but I think this indicates DNA of some sort - whether or not it's a good/full profile or not isn't going to be released.

I just remember LE stating from the get go that they didn't think Klunder was tied to the case, and even mentioned something along the lines of it not taking long to rule him out. When they said that I had the feeling the evidence they DID have pretty much ruled him out. But - with no arrests being made in the case, it was probably safest to prove with 100% certainty it wasn't Klunder. If for no reason other than to squash a defense attorney's rebuttal of "but you didn't even investigate/test Klunder's DNA". ESPECIALLY if what they do have is only a partial match.

 

[carbuff]

was expressing my opinion that they probably didn't get any useful results from the testing, because I think they would have behaved differently if they did. If they had a DNA ruleout on Klunder, they wouldn't have needed to do all that work about whether he was near Evansdale on that day.

 

[dotr]

How was it determined by LE that the perp was decidedly male?

 

[carbuff]

Stereotyping, I think.

My opinion only. And truthfully, if it is a sex crime (LE has never said that), the odds of a female killer are pretty close to zero.

If it's not a sex crime, a woman would be likely.