This is from our news this past friday;
HYDE PARK -- Incriminating forensic data will be allowed as evidence in the murder trial of Howard Godfrey, the man accused of raping and killing Patricia Scoville in 1991 in Stowe, a judge has ruled.
Scoville's slaying prompted the 1998 creation of a statewide databank of DNA profiles of convicted felons. Police and forensic experts say they used the registry to solve the dormant case and arrest Godfrey, 61, of Kirby in 2005. Now that genetic material might become a crucial tool for prosecutors to wield in court.
More at this link
Burlington Free Press link
Here is an article from 2006, it is very informative;
Cornell Magazine
July/August, 2006
Sometimes, especially lately, people ask David Scoville about the man who raped and strangled his daughter. If you could get that guy alone in a room, what would you do?
Maybe this is supposed to give Scoville an opportunity to vent some bitterness; maybe those who ask are just genuinely curious. Either way, it doesn't work. David Scoville '61 is a sixty-seven-year old retiree with the mild voice and preternatural patience of a former elementary school teacher, which is what he is. He's not the type to relish the notion of beating the man. "I have no desire to do that," he confirms, polite and a little bemused.
The question was for a long time an abstract one; the perpetrator seemed to exist only as a sample of DNA recovered from the clothing of Patricia Scoville '86, who was twenty-eight when she disappeared on a bicycle ride near Stowe,Vermont, in October 1991. No arrests were made in the case for more than thirteen years. But now Howard Godfrey is sitting in a Vermont correctional facility, awaiting trial for Patty's murder. Godfrey is a thin, weathered man with bristly grey hair, fifty-eight years old, the owner of a window and door company. The fact that he is in a cell is at least in part because of the efforts of Scoville and his wife, Ann Van Order Scoville '61. This might explain the apparent lack of animus toward his daughter's likely killer: in a sense, David Scoville has already exacted a deeper revenge.
Much more at the link at the Cornell Magazine link.
Respectfully,
dark_shadows