IAPE Evidence Blog

Man­assa Jour­nal Mes­sen­ger (Vir­ginia) STATE AND REGIONAL NEWS
BYLINE: Uriah Kiser, News and Mes­sen­ger, Man­as­sas, Va.

Tri­an­gle, VA

Mar. 11 – TRIANGLE, Va. – A man help­ing ready a Tri­an­gle home for the rental mar­ket found two tomb­stones in its base­ment Wednesday.

For the last week, Edward Grogg has been doing handy work at the a one-story home on Tri­an­gle Street, help­ing land­lord Elliot Dia­mond get the 60-year-old house ready to be rented again, after two “unfa­vor­able” ten­ants abruptly left with lit­tle notice two weeks ago.

While in the base­ment, Grogg said he saw slabs of con­crete lying on the floor.

“When I picked them up I could feel the grooves, so I took them and turned them around, leaned them against the wall and then I real­ized they were real tomb­stones,” said Grogg. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I was kinda spooked.”

Accord­ing to Grogg, the tomb­stone dis­cov­ery is the lat­est in a series of eerie events in this house, includ­ing a light bulb that inex­plic­a­bly turned on while power was shut off to the house.

The head­stones of Mary J. Fit­ton, alive between 1880 and 1935, and David M. Ingram, alive between 1957 and 1980, are now in a police evi­dence room in Wood­bridge. Grogg called author­i­ties on Diamond’s advice and reported what he’d found.

Prince William library his­to­rian Don Wil­son said a check of local records showed Fit­ton lived with her hus­band, Han­son Fit­ton, on Saint Asaph Street Alexan­dria before her death on Oct. 6, 1935. Social Secu­rity death records showed Ingram lived in Wash­ing­ton in 1971.

Wil­son said both peo­ple could be buried in Alexan­dria, and that their head­stones could have been stolen or replaced.

“Usu­ally, when we find a tomb­stone in Prince William County, it has been removed from a grave site and replaced with a new one, after the stone begins to show wear,” he said.

Inves­ti­ga­tors do not know how the stones got into the house, but they’re try­ing to find out.

Dia­mond bought the house as an invest­ment prop­erty in 2003, and said his last ten­ants were a man and a woman who argued fre­quently. He said the man left with­out notice, and the woman weeks later sur­ren­dered the key to the house, leav­ing no con­tact infor­ma­tion behind.

“The head­stones weren’t there when I was in the base­ment about a year ago,” said Dia­mond. “The police are going to have to track down where these guys went and ask them about it if they are going to find out who they belong to.”

While Dia­mond said he doesn’t know about any para­nor­mal activ­ity in his house, Grogg said the ten­ants pre­vi­ous to the man and woman who abruptly left moved out because they heard strange voices, doors slam­ming and foot­steps on the wooden floors where no one was walking.

Grogg lives next door with his fiancee, Sab­rina Ham, on the first floor of a house also owned by Dia­mond and below a woman who helps Dia­mond man­age his prop­er­ties. For a few dol­lars off the rent, Grogg agreed to help Dia­mond clean the vacated house.

Three days ago, Grogg was doing elec­tri­cal work there and had shut off power to the house. While back at his home, he saw a light on in the vacant house, and so did the prop­erty man­ager, who asked him about it.

“She said ‘Look inside the house, the light’s on,’” said Grogg. He pointed Wednes­day to a sin­gle round light bulb that hangs in a light fix­ture above the kitchen, say­ing it had inex­plic­a­bly turned itself on.

With much of the clean­ing nearly fin­ished, Grogg said he will not vol­un­teer to paint the house or do any other side jobs there. He said he’ll leave them to some­one else.

Staff writer Uriah A. Kiser can be reached at 703 – 878-8065.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
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Wash­ing­ton Exam­iner
BYLINE: Michael Neibauer, Exam­iner Staff Writer, mneibauer@washingtonexaminer.com

Per­sh­ing Park, VA

An inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion of miss­ing evi­dence tied to the Sep­tem­ber 2002 mass arrests at Per­sh­ing Park found that a detailed tally of D.C. police actions that day prob­a­bly did exist but was either pur­pose­fully purged or lost.

Retired U.S. Dis­trict Court Judge Stan­ley Sporkin called “trou­bling” the “con­tra­dic­tory evi­dence that sur­faced” dur­ing his pro bono inquiry into the miss­ing police run­ning resume of the events of Sept. 27, 2002, and gaps in police radio recordings.

“The whole thing has been so ineptly han­dled and now we have pretty clear indi­ca­tions that some of it had to be inten­tional destruc­tion,” Ward 3 D.C. Coun­cil­woman Mary Cheh told The Exam­iner on Mon­day. “I don’t see how this can’t be a dis­as­ter for the District.”

D.C. police offi­cers arrested hun­dreds of anti-World Bank pro­test­ers and inno­cent bystanders in Per­sh­ing Park, hog-tied their left wrists to their right ankles and detained them for up to 36 hours in some cases.

“We are par­tic­u­larly dis­turbed by the fact that not only have we been unable to retrieve a hard copy of the Run­ning Resume but also that the elec­tronic copy was purged from the sys­tem,” Sporkin wrote in his report, dated Fri­day. “We have no way of know­ing whether this was an act of inten­tional mis­chief or reflects a benign action.”

That said, Sporkin found no evi­dence of any “overt attempt to deceive or mis­lead us.”

Both the run­ning resume and radio record­ings would be key tes­ti­mo­ni­als in a pair of law­suits filed against the Dis­trict alleg­ing wrong­ful arrests. The cases are cur­rently before U.S. Dis­trict Court Judge Emmet Sul­li­van, who has admon­ished D.C. attor­neys for their court­room tac­tics and fail­ure to turn over crit­i­cal documents.

Only one per­son inter­viewed dur­ing Sporkin’s inves­ti­ga­tion recalled see­ing a copy of the run­ning resume — Rai How­ell, for­mer act­ing direc­tor of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police Department’s qual­ity assur­ance divi­sion. But How­ell could remem­ber few other details.

Police Chief Charles Ram­sey told inves­ti­ga­tors he was “99 per­cent sure” he did not see the run­ning resume. George Craw­ford, a Met­ro­pol­i­tan Police Depart­ment com­puter spe­cial­ist, said it is “hard to believe” the doc­u­ment was “over­writ­ten” in the sys­tem or that every hard copy was all destroyed.

Ram­sey, who was alleged by a police detec­tive to have ordered the mass arrests, also said he “knows noth­ing about the radio tapes and gave no instruc­tions to edit or oth­er­wise alter them.” The tapes, Sporkin con­cluded, do have gaps but inves­ti­ga­tors were unable to dis­cern how they occurred. He rec­om­mended that the Dis­trict retain a foren­sic expert.

D.C. Attor­ney Gen­eral Peter Nick­les Mon­day praised the inves­ti­ga­tion, but said he has not yet decided whether to fol­low through on Sporkin’s suggestions.

“I just need to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing from [Sporkin] to under­stand how dif­fi­cult it will be,” Nick­les said. “I don’t know whether it’s fea­si­ble or how much it costs.”

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

www.wtkr.com
Link to Arti­cle
One Video

York County, VA

Reports say cru­cial evi­dence in Colo­nial Park­way mur­ders may have been destroyed

YORK COUNTY — After a week­long search for miss­ing evi­dence from the first Colo­nial Park­way killings, law-enforcement offi­cials located records show­ing the two small boxes were destroyed at the FBI’s sug­ges­tion in 1994. But it is the unusual eight-year path the evi­dence trav­eled before destruc­tion? pass­ing from the med­ical examiner’s office to a York County inves­ti­ga­tor who never asked for it? that’s sparked worry among fam­ily mem­bers. They fear other cru­cial mate­r­ial has been mis­han­dled or lost.

“Now we are just learn­ing that they’ve destroyed what could have been valu­able evi­dence after hang­ing onto it for eight years,” said Bill Thomas, brother of Cath­leen Thomas who was among the first cou­ple mur­dered. “There is no way to demon­strate the depths of my family’s frus­tra­tion with the Fed­eral Bureau of Investigation.”

At the Oct., 1986, autop­sies of Cath­leen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski, a med­ical exam­iner col­lected swabs that would deter­mine if the women, found fully clothed, had been raped. Nei­ther were.

The women were dis­cov­ered in Thomas’ small Honda, shoved off a Colo­nial Park­way bluff. The killer slit their throats. They were the first in a series of slay­ings and dis­ap­pear­ances that became known as “The Park­way Mur­ders.” The killings stopped in 1989.

Nor­folk FBI spokes­woman Vanessa Tor­res said in a state­ment Fri­day because the women were not sex­u­ally assaulted, the Phys­i­cal Evi­dence Recov­ery Kits assem­bled by the med­ical exam­iner “did not con­tain evi­dence of value.” That’s why the FBI never took the kits.

Dr. Angela Williamson, direc­tor of foren­sic case­work for Bode Tech­nol­ogy, a pri­vate lab­o­ra­tory spe­cial­iz­ing in DNA sci­ence, said the FBI’s deci­sion “seems logical.”

How­ever, the strange way the kits ended up in a York County evi­dence room six years after col­lec­tion has caused con­cern for Bill Thomas. The FBI has promised advanced test­ing on the old evi­dence, but Bill Thomas says he can­not con­vince the agency to reveal what evi­dence still exists.

“After 23 long years, I would say we’re mildly hope­ful,” said Bill Thomas, speak­ing from Los Ange­les. “How­ever, all of this is pro­vided the FBI has prop­erly stored and hung onto this valu­able evidence.”

Recently, the Thomas fam­ily received from the state a full account­ing of evi­dence recov­ered at Cath­leen Thomas’ autopsy, includ­ing strands of hair found in Cath­leen Thomas’ hand; a small sec­tion of rope some­how left behind after the killer cut the cord from Thomas’ neck; and nail clip­pings that could con­tain the killer’s DNA if Thomas man­aged to touch or scratch her attacker.

Autopsy pho­tographs leaked by the FBI and later obtained by NewsChan­nel 3 show the two-inch rope frag­ment tan­gled in Cath­leen Thomas’ hair. The pho­tographs also show Cath­leen suf­fered a knife wound to her left thumb, pos­si­bly indi­cat­ing she strug­gled with the killer. Her brother, Bill Thomas, said the hair found in his sister’s hand must either be Dowski’s or the killer’s.

In an ear­lier tele­phone inter­view with NewsChan­nel 3, Chief Med­ical Exam­iner Dr. Leah Bush said evi­dence col­lected at the Colo­nial Park­way autop­sies more than two decades ago could yield leads when sub­jected to new DNA science.

Dr. Bush and her pre­de­ces­sor, Dr. Mar­cella Fierro, are review­ing all the autop­sies at the request of the fam­i­lies. That review sparked the search last week for the miss­ing evi­dence. Rich­mond records show the two Phys­i­cal Evi­dence Recorvery Kits, or PERKs, were given to a York County inves­ti­ga­tor in 1992, but York County offi­cials last week could not recall a rea­son to request that evidence.

How­ever, days later, Maj. Ron Mont­gomery of the York-Poquoson Sheriff’s Office said reviews of case files showed an inves­ti­ga­tor trav­eled to the med­ical examiner’s office in 1992 to retrieve skele­tal remains from a sep­a­rate case. The Colo­nial Park­way evi­dence kits were some­how included with the remains, Mont­gomery said. He doesn’t know how or why.

Accord­ing to Mont­gomery, when the inves­ti­ga­tor real­ized he had the kits, he put them in an evi­dence room and con­tacted the FBI. Mont­gomery said the inves­ti­ga­tor placed calls to agents over a two-year period until March, 1996, when an agent sug­gested the boxes be destroyed.

Vanessa Tor­res, a spokes­woman for the Nor­folk FBI, said agents did not retrieve the evi­dence because it was not help­ful to the case.

The PERKS “… did not con­tain evi­dence of value inas­much as nei­ther vic­tim was sex­u­ally assaulted. This find­ing was made by the state,” Tor­res wrote. “There­fore, the FBI did not take pos­ses­sion of the kits.”

Bill Thomas is press­ing the FBI to reveal whether the other evi­dence taken from his sister’s autopsy still exists, and if so, when it will be tested.

“I can­not get a straight­for­ward answer from them in terms of, do they still have this evi­dence, and when do they play to move for­ward with the advanced test­ing they promised us,” he said.

Tor­res would not dis­cuss any spe­cific pieces of evi­dence, say­ing only “all evi­dence of value col­lected by the FBI or turned over to the FBI regard­ing this inves­ti­ga­tion has been main­tained and remains stored.” 

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org