FOR 15 YEARS, the murder of Terry Sims just wasn’t adding up. In a horrific crime, the 20-year-old had been found raped and murdered, her mostly naked body found in her apartment, her hands tied together with an extension cord. The young Wichita Falls woman was stabbed eight times in the chest, but the deadly stabbings, according to the autopsy report, had targeted the victim’s shoulder blade. Her boyfriend at the time became the immediate suspect, but police were never able to find the evidence to charge him with a crime.
The case went cold, as did two other murder cases in the area. Toni Gibbs, a 23-year-old registered nurse, and Ellen Blau, a 21-year-old restaurant worker, had each been raped and murdered.
The three murders took place within seven months of each other, within a 5-mile radius, and had their similarities: all three bodies had been found nude, except for socks; their clothes had been found nearby, ripped apart; the girls were similar in age and looks, each about 5 feet tall and 100 pounds. But they were all being investigated by different departments: Sims, by the Wichita Falls City Police; Gibbs, by the Archer County Sheriff’s Office and the Texas Rangers; and Blau, by the Wichita County Sheriff’s Office.
It was 1996, when DNA technology first became available in Texas, that area law enforcement agencies reopened the cases and discovered that the semen taken from Gibbs and Sims were the one and the same and agencies first began investigating the cases side-by-side.
Wichita County Investigator John Little joined the case in 1999. He sat down with each of the three files and read them over, page by page by page, looking for any similarities, matching names, coincidences – anything that would catch his eye.
It was that combination of new technology and old-fashioned detective work that eventually led to the cold cases catching fire.
Little had found a common name: Faryion Wardrip, a one-time neighbor of Blau’s who had worked in the same hospital as Gibbs and who knew Sims. Wardrip had already been convicted of murdering a young woman named Tina Kimbrew, who had been killed in May 1986.
By 1999, Wardrip had finished serving his sentence, paroled and gotten married and was living in the nearby community of Olney. To test his theory, Little took short trips to Olney, where he would sit and do laundry at a laundromat across the street from where Wardrip worked. He would stand in the window, looking out, waiting for Wardrip to discard something that could give a viable DNA sample. A cigarette. A paper cup. A Kleenex. Eventually, Wardrip gave Little what he needed, throwing away a paper coffee cup – a cup with DNA matching that found on Gibbs and Sims.
Soon afterward, Wardrip was arrested for the murders of Gibbs and Sims based on the DNA evidence.
The arrest was all it took to get Wardrip to confess to killing Blau, and he had some other prizes in store for Little as well.
Little recounted his story at the September’s Texas District and County Attorneys Association Annual Criminal and Civil Law Update. “He was a beaten guy,” said Little, recalling the meeting in which Wardrip confessed to the killings but not the rapes. “In less than an hour, he confessed to all the murders we had, and he also said there was one more.”
And that’s the short story of how the unsolved murder of Debra Taylor, a Fort Worth resident who had been killed in the same time period as Gibbs and Blau, was solved.
Most cold cases are solved in a similar fashion – old case files where evidence was collected and stored are dusted off, read by a new set of eyes. Witnesses and suspects are re-interviewed, and their testimony is cross-checked with the older files. Stories that don’t match up are given new scrutiny, odd details are re-examined and new technologies and databases are used to determine suspect matches.
Texas counties who have recently made the effort to spend energy and resources on their cold cases have seen a lot of success.
In the end, most cold cases that are reviewed prove that though there may be unsolved mysteries, there are no perfect crimes.
Capt. Javier Reyna with the Cameron County Sheriff’s Office has spent the last two years reviewing the county’s cold cases in his spare time. So far, he and his fellow investigators have solved four previously unsolved murders.
“As time goes by, sometimes you learn more about other approaches that you can have on these types of cases,” Reyna said. “You learn about different types of evidence collection, you learn different types of interview and interrogation techniques, and you are able to approach it in a different way than you did five, 10, 15 years ago.”
The department recently solved one 10- year-old homicide case, in which a homeless person had been found partially buried in a rock pit outside the city of Brownsville. At the time, DNA evidence was still a relatively new concept – about two years old and just out of the messy 1995 O.J. Simpson trial. But the department collected some evidence, including a cigarette butt and beer can found at the scene, and stored it, hoping it would become more useful in the future.
It did. The DNA found on the cigarette matched that of the department’s original suspect, who was arrested.
“Our department was not very familiar with DNA at the time. DNA was still in the early stages of being used, and without the proper training and evidence collection, you really wouldn’t have known what you had until you could familiarize yourself with those types of techniques,” he said, adding that new forensics technology is getting more and more helpful as time goes on.
“With the new technologies coming up, the forensics scientists, they are getting better and better. You gotta keep up with the times. If you’ve got a case that is five or six years old, technology and science and the criminal field have changed dramatically,” Reyna added.
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Lab, there are many new tools available to departments now than were available 10 years ago.
Reviewing any homicide that happened before 1998 could prove especially worthwhile, since that’s the year DNA technology results were combined with the FBI’s National DNA Index System, which put DNA profiles that were a part of a local or state indexing system onto one national database.
In addition, DNA can now be gathered from a greater number of sources now than before.
In 2003, DNA technology received a boost when President George W. Bush helped pass the 5-year, $1 billion “DNA Initiative” geared toward eliminating the backlog of unanalyzed DNA samples, stimulating forensic sciences research and developing more training on how to collect and preserve evidence.
And DNA isn’t the only tool that keeps getting more helpful, Reyna said. Advances in ballistics analysis, toxicology, trace evidence instrumentation and computer forensics may prove useful, as well as other national growing databases, such as the National Integrated Ballastics Information Network (NIBIN) board, which was started in 1997 as a database to search through and match images of fired casings in shooting incidences.
“The unique microscopic characteristics imparted by the firing pin and breech face on the casing are recorded and stored in the computer’s memory and catalogued into a permanent database,” explains the DPS crime lab Web site. “The unique microscopic characteristics imparted by the firing pin and breech face on the casing are recorded and stored in the computer’s memory and catalogued into a permanent database.”
Another research tool that wasn’t as good 10 years ago? Never underestimate the power of the Internet, and the information that may be found there, said Navoline Varner, the chief criminal investigator from the Collin County District Attorney’s Office and the head of the Collin County Cold Case Fugitives Unit.
“Some of the new technology that we have, like the Internet – that’s a great source of information for us,” Varner said. “We use the Texas Department of Public Safety Web site, they have just an enormous amount of information that we can get off the Internet – CODIS (DNA database), AutoTrack (records search tool), Accurint (people locater tool), Fuginet (TXDPS database of fugitive and parolee information) … the Internet has been priceless.” If the tool is priceless, so has been the reward for using it to solve cold cases. The Collin County cold case unit came together in 2003 under the initiative of District Attorney John Roach. The volunteer team has already solved each of the ten cold cases that had been stacked in the DA’s office. Nine of the cases have already resulted in convictions; the tenth case was just going to trial at the same time as the County Magazine deadline.
Varner said there’s just something about solving a case that was previously unsolvable.
“For our team, solving a cold case is probably as exciting as waking up on Christmas morning when you were a child and knowing you got the biggest gift that you asked for,” she said. “When you finally get the arrest made, and you finally get to take them to court and you finally get that conviction ... there’s accomplishment.”
The unit will continue to investigate cold cases as they come up, but Varner said the her office has decided that it will only look at cases that are 10 years old or older to maximize resources.
Most of the cases Reyna and Varner have helped solved haven’t really required fancy new technology, just good old-fashioned detective work.
“It’s always good to sit back and compare your statements, to make sure everyone’s statements are corroborating one or the other. If not, you got to go back and get the story straight and see what happens,” Reyna said. “If you didn’t catch it back then, you have to go back to it.”
As a general rule, the more eyes that look at a file, the better, For that, the Sheriff’s Association of Texas may be a helpful resource.
Its Cold Case Review Team meets four times a year. During each meeting, experts from various fields – a DNA specialist, a forensic scientist, a trace evidence expert, a missing persons detective, a sex offender analyst and a whole think tank of sheriff’s deputies and Texas Rangers – sit around a table and discuss evidence as it is brought to them, as well as possible who-done-it scenarios.
For each meeting, the review team looks at files of 10 different cases, brought to them on a first-come, first-served basis from departments all over Texas, and even other states as well.
“We’re not saying we’re smarter than anyone else, but they’ll present the case to us… and we will kind of pick it apart and tell them in what direction they need to go. We’ll start over and put it back together,” said Lee County Sheriff Joe Goodson, chair of the team. “Out of the ten cases we hear each quarter, we’ll probably help two. They are just tough cases.”
Even if new evidence never comes up, or rereading the files doesn’t spark any light bulbs, time can often be on an investigator’s side.
A jail informant helped give new information leading to an arrest in one of Reyna’s cases; one suspect, already sitting in the Dallas County Jail for sexual assault of a child, voluntarily confessed to the 1987 murder of 35-year-old Betty Laverne Ingram after Varner’s team contacted him.
And those weren’t the only two confessions Reyna and Varner have heard. Things like murder tend to wear on the soul, Reyna said.
“A person’s conscience is always going to build inside of them. When someone has a conscience that has been killing them for two, three, four, ten years, that works on your side,” he said. “That’s the only way time will help.