Fred Howard Coffey, Jr.
Photo about 2012
Fred Coffey is a convicted child killer serving a life sentence in North Carolina. He also has several convictions for child molestation and is the primary suspect in two other child murders.
Coffey has admitted to psychiatrists to having molested over a hundred children.
He came to Maryland sometime after September 1974 when he was kicked out of the US Navy. He had served 12 years and had signed up for another 4-year hitch when civilian authorities in Virginia Beach charged him with the rape of a 13-year-old girl who was the daughter of another Navy man.
In Maryland, he applied for a job at Vitro Laboratories, a Defense Contracting firm. He gave as his address, the Holiday Motel in Gaithersburg.
Coffey worked at the Vitro Laboratories building seen in a previous post, as well as possibly other Vitro sites. It is known that he had a personal vehicle which he drove to work and would have parked in the Vitro parking lots.
Kathy Lynn Beatty was viciously attacked on the evening of Thursday, 24 July 1975 and left for dead in a field near the K-Mart shopping center parking lot, which was directly across Georgia Ave from Vitro. She was found the next morning by her sister, still barely alive and in a coma. A newspaper report printed on Saturday, 26 July 1975 stated that she was still alive and in hospital.
Coincidentally, Fred Coffey left town without notice to his employer that same day and remained missing from work until another newspaper article stated that Kathy died from her injuries 12 days after entering the hospital, having never regained consciousness.
Only after that report did Coffey come out of hiding to ask for his last paycheck from Vitro. He gave as an excuse for his absence that his wife and daughter were in a car accident in Kentucky. His story was later proven to be a complete fabrication.
Coffey returned to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where in October 1975, he was arrested and charged with "Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor" with a 15-year-old girl in his car.
Did he have anything to do with the murder of Kathy Lynn Beatty? Or was his presence in the area just a big coincidence?
