He is def an odd duck, that's for certain. However, I am reminded of another odd duck, one who many were certain was guilty as sin...
Vanished: Missing
Girls Mystery
Sympathetic Stranger or Suspect?
Tim Bindner describes himself as a good Samaritan. (ABCNEWS.com,
cached link )
Jan. 16 Three days after 7-year-old Amber Swartz disappeared from her Pinole, Calif., yard in June 1988, a stranger came by to tell her mother that he had been searching the nearby woods for the little girl.
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Five months later, another little girl, 9-year-old Michaela Garecht, disappeared in Hayward, a nearby town. Bindner showed up again, asking Michaela's mother if he could help find her daughter. Michaela had been abducted while buying candy with a friend, who heard a muffled cry and turned around to see her friend being kidnapped by a white male.
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Birthday Greetings From a Stranger
Bindner's name surfaced again in the Nikki Campbell investigation. Months before Nikki disappeared, a worried couple in the same Fairfield neighborhood told police their 12-year-old daughter was getting odd mail, with the letters written backward so they could only be read in a mirror.
The person who had sent the letters was Bindner, a 43-year-old married man who worked at a sewage treatment plant. It turned out Bindner had been writing to lots of young girls, often sending birthday greetings.
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'Accumulation of Coincidence'
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Bindner once wrote a letter to law enforcement speculating that the next girl to disappear would be 9. Then, 9-year-old Michaela disappeared. On another occasion, Bindner sent a Christmas card to an FBI profiler with an image of a little girl holding up four fingers. Shortly after, 4-year-old Nikki disappeared.
Police bloodhounds also picked up Amber Swartz's scent at Angela Bugay's gravesite, which Bindner often visited. Police said dogs later picked up Nikki's scent at the gravesite.
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Investigators in the Nikki Campbell case questioned Bindner, and named him a suspect in 1992. But bloodhound evidence is too unreliable to be presented in court, and prosecutors never found evidence to support criminal charges against Bindner. Next month, another man goes to trial on charges that he murdered Bugay.
Delivering Little Girls to Jesus
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When she asked what he thought happened to the girls when they were taken, Goldston remembers him saying: "'Well, you know, one of them was sweet and shy and didn't say a thing, but the other went kicking and screaming.'" Then, she said, he added, "'I'm just guessing that that's what they would have said.'"
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A Taunting Game?
Goldston said it seemed he was purposely toying with both investigators and reporters. "Whether he is the person who took the girls, I don't know," she said, "but I felt that he went out of his way to make me think that he had."
Kim Swartz, who had developed a bizarre friendship with Bindner at the urging of police, agreed that it seemed to be a game to Bindner.
"He was walking that fine line, knowing exactly where he can go with it," she said."I think he was getting off on taunting me and my family."
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A Good Samaritan
Bindner refused to be interviewed on camera, but he agreed to speak with ABCNEWS off camera.
He said he was simply trying to help find the missing girls, and described himself as a good Samaritan. In fact, Bindner does have a record of helping others: He was given an award for heroism by the California Highway Patrol for assisting in the rescue efforts after the 1989 earthquake. He continues to insist that he had nothing to do with the girls' disappearances.
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Philpin said that in some of the cases neither he, nor Swartz, nor any of the investigators have been able to rule Bindner in as a supsect or rule him out.
"It's a stalemate," said Philpin. "In the end, all the pieces of this particular puzzle just don't come together."
John Philpin, who is a forensic psych out of Harvard, also wrote a book regarding this case. (
link )
