I hope her parents will one day find out the truth. What a wonderful service these retired law officers are doing!!
http://news.kypost.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060621/NEWS02/606210371/1014
By Shelly Whitehead
Post staff reporter
MELVIN GRIER/The Post
Tom Loos Sr.,a retired Erlanger police officer and private investigator, with a photo of Susan Wolff Cappel who went missing March 16 1982.
COLD CASE UNIT WORKS FOR FREE
-- The Kentucky Society of Professional Investigators new Cold Case Unit will investigate cases at least 20 years old.
-- The team has 13 members from four states, including retired Erlanger police Sgt. Tom Loos Sr., the team leader.
-- Other investigators from the tri-state are from Williamstown, Cincinnati and West Chester, Ohio.
-- The team will work free.
She was 19, and a few weeks away from possibly winning custody of a toddler son who was the sole focus of her life.
That's when Susan Wolff Cappel vanished from a tiny eastern Ohio town where everybody knows everybody else's business, but somehow, nobody has ever known what happened to her since she disappeared 24 years ago.
Now, an all-volunteer unit of mostly Kentucky private investigators hoping to change that has opened a probe of the long-cold and never-solved case. It is the first investigation launched by the newly formed Cold Case Unit of the Kentucky Society of Professional Investigators, headed by private investigator and retired Erlanger police Sgt. Tom Loos Sr.
Loos said members of the unit - formed from his 50-person organization of investigators and retired peace officers - will take on cases that have been inactive for at least 20 years. He said the unit is particularly interested in helping small law enforcement agencies with inadequate resources for cold case investigations.
While searching for such a case in the Cincinnati area, Loos stumbled across a photo of Cappel's parents on a missing persons Web site. Though James and Judy Wolff live 215 miles from Northern Kentucky, Loos said he knew these were the people who needed his organization's help first.
"I came across this picture with her mom and dad holding her picture and standing right where she went missing in the IGA parking lot ... and you could just see the frustration in their eyes with everything," said Loos, now an investigator for the Monohan & Blankenship law firm in Florence.
"It was almost like this case was in some kind of suspension there. ... I felt as soon as I found it that this would be our first case."
Cold case investigations often fall to the bottom of the of case file stacks, buried on detectives' desks at smaller police departments like those in and around Tuscarawas County where Cappel disappeared in 1982. Loos said though the case was originally investigated by police in and around Newcomerstown, a grand jury failed to return an indictment.
Loos said both Cappel's family and the Tuscarawas County Sheriff's Department have welcomed the new attention to her case.
"When I talked to the Tuscarawas Sheriff's detective captain, he said, 'If you could see the cases on my desk, and with the lack of personnel we have, we have very little time to get too involved in cold cases,'" Loos said.
"And really that's the way it is nationally, simply because of limited resources."
Tuscarawas Detective Captain Orvis Campbell said his agency took over the Cappel case file after the original investigative agency - the Newcomerstown Police Department - expressed no further interest in it. Campbell, who was 10 years old when Cappel vanished, said his agency as well as numerous private investigative businesses have probed her disappearance over the years. However, the Kentucky Society of Professional Investigators is the first private group to offer its services free of charge.
"We've dug up property and old wells and interviewed tons of people over the years. ... And this family has been contacted by many private investigators and paid out tons of money over the years," Campbell said.
"So I feel this family has been through so much, it can't do any harm. (Loos) promised never to charge a penny for anything. ... So I said there's nothing to lose. We absolutely support you because these people need some resolution. It has affected them their entire lives."
Susan Cappel was last seen leaving her job at Thompson's IGA in Newcomerstown - population 4,000 - the evening of March 16, 1982. A co-worker told investigators that Cappel got into an older-model blue car that pulled up beside her as she walked to her vehicle in the supermarket parking lot that night.
No trace of Cappel has been reported since.
Compounding the task of Loos' team are two factors: a handful of people considered key to the case are dead, and most of the grand jury investigation records have been lost.
When she disappeared, Cappel and her husband, Allen, were locked in a bitter divorce and battle for custody of their then-18-month-old son, Damin. Cappel was planning to spend the day after she disappeared with the boy and hoped to gain custody of him at a hearing three weeks later, Loos said.
Though Allen Cappel was never charged and always maintained his innocence, Susan's parents have always suspected him in her disappearance. But in September 2003, he was killed in a traffic accident while working for the Ohio Department of Transportation.
An auto crash also killed Allen's friends, Rick and Kelly Parish, two weeks after Susan's disappearance. Campbell said Rick Parish drove an older model blue car like the one Cappel was seen getting into the night she vanished, and investigators suspected that the Parishes might have had information about Cappel's disappearance.
Though some allege that Susan Cappel left town of her own accord, her parents flatly reject that, saying she would never have abandoned her son. But, with the loss of case records, and the deaths of key persons of interest in the investigation, James and Judy Wolff had nearly lost hope for answers.
Then, Tom Loos called.
"As the years went by, I've thought, I may have to face the fact that I may never have an answer to this. I may have to learn just to live with this," Judy Wolff said.
"Just some closure is what I want. I just want to know whether she actually was killed, because people say they're still wondering whether she was killed. I just think, 'How stupid!'... But, until they find a part of her body, I guess there'll always be a doubt in people's mind that my daughter is dead - until they actually prove that she is."
That proof will be difficult to find, even with the complete attention of Loos and his fellow investigators - all of whom are working without pay for their time or expenses on the case.
Loos said the cold case team must locate and interview almost 100 "persons of interest." The team also plans to take cadaver dogs to a Port Washington farm to search for evidence this winter. Loos said around the time of Cappel's disappearance, a witness reported seeing "suspicious digging" on the property, which he said was then owned by the Cappel family.
More at link.
Old Broad