Shucks, it wasn't Dan Cooper's parachute after all.
But that won't stop the annual D.B. Cooper party, Aerial, Washington's celebration of its dubious claim to fame.
So does the aircraft pirate live on with his ill-gotten riches?
Or is he scattered in the woods, deader than Jimmy Hoffa?
Will we ever know? Do we really want to know?
(The John Doe indictment at right from the FBI files.)
A detective who first learned as a child of the tragic unsolved murders of the Walker family in southern Florida hopes that DNA will help him solve the case on the eve of his retirement.
The annihilation of a couple and their two children in late December 1959 may sound familiar if you've read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, in which the crime is mentioned; the eerie parallels to the Clutter case had some briefly considering whether the cases were connected. (If you have the 1993 edition, it's on p. 258.)
The DNA has now been processed, as explained in a recent article in the Sarasota Herald Tribune. The evidence was actually submitted quite some time ago, but the chronic, scandalous underfunding of DNA labs meant years and years of waiting for results. Now the lab work is done and a DNA profile is ready for comparison.
A second piece in the Herald Tribune includes headlines and images from the original news reports. A third piece takes a broad view of the tragedy, and a fourth names the critical suspects and evidence.
Here's hoping Detective Ron Albritton gets his man. Or at least an answer to the mystery, 49 years later. And I'm getting ahead of the story but here's wishing too that some true crime writer in Florida takes that solution and puts it in context in a book and explains to us not only what befell this family but why.
##
(Thanks to Jim McCord for the links.)
He was a successful lawyer.
A classmate of Walter "Fritz" Mondale.
A father of four.
And he made clumsy errors that led to his conviction for the hired murder of his wife for gain.
He was "Cotton" Thompson and is the subject of a new book hailed as "excellent" by the editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "Engrossing?" remarks the editor: "Your host could be seen a few weeks ago at a McDonald’s in Fargo North Dakota at 7:25 AM, reading the book over hotcakes. I put it down when I went to bed and picked it up when I rose." Now that's quite the endorsement, and the story sounds intriguing.
The book is Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson
From an online excerpt:
State of Minnesota v. Tilmer Eugene Thompson was advertised and described as “the trial of the century” in Minnesota, a reasonable claim when it began on October 28, 1963, and long afterward as well. A widely admired and much loved mother of four small children had been brutally murdered in her own home in a fashionable, presumably safe neighborhood of a law-abiding community. An upward-bound attorney, husband, and father was on trial for his life.
“It had everything,” lead prosecutor William Randall said nearly four decades later, referring to the essential components of a classic murder case, “Blood, money, and sex.” ....
For more, see WCCO's long article, videos, and links.
Ninety-nine years ago serial killer Belle Gunness met her own grisly fate.
OR DID SHE? 
DNA may now answer this century-old mystery. For years there were rumors that the most vile, crude, profligate murderess in Indiana's history got away. The remains of the woman thought to be Belle have now been unearthed from their burial place in Chicago and genes from those bones will be compared to DNA from an envelope known to have been sealed by Belle Gunness. The Indianapolis Star has the details in a nice long feature story. It seems fitting that as we near the century mark on her purported death that the case gets a firm ending after all, and another poignant touch is the use of an envelope. Did it contain one of the black widow's billets-doux? A larger question - will DNA wonders never cease?
For more Belle see The Mistress of Murder Hill: The Serial Killings of Belle Gunness
Guest Post by E.J. Wagner
(A CLEWS note: Edgar-winning author E.J. Wagner reminds us with this essay alluding to the Phil Spector verdict that some things never change.... If you haven't read her compelling history of forensic science, The Science of Sherlock Holmes, you're in for a treat. Art via All Posters.)
Sherlock Holmes kept extensive files of old crimes, finding the insight they gave useful in solving his current cases. As usual, the Great Detective made an excellent point we might find of interest.
The similarities between the Lizzie Borden Case of 1892 and the O.J. Simpson Case of 1992, for instance, are striking. In each case there were two victims, a man and a woman, who were killed in extremely violent fashion, by a weapon never clearly identified, and in a domestic setting. Both trials were marked by strong prosecutorial evidence withheld from the jury. Both defendants were acquitted, only to be viewed ever after as guilty pariahs by most of society.
In 1926 Edinburgh Scotland, the Merrett case of mysterious death by firearm compellingly reminds us of a recent unpleasantness in California. The earlier crime involved a man and a woman, alone in a room, with a single domestic servant in the next room the only soul within hearing. A shot suddenly rang out. The woman fell, a bullet in her head.
The man insisted she had shot herself. There was no note, and the victim's friends insisted she was not depressed. The man, who had a history of bad behavior, and who owned the gun, was charged with murder.
The trial featured the famous pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury testifying for the defense. He based his testimony on experiments that were inadequate but compellingly stated. The confused jury made use of the equivical Scottish verdict "Not Proven".
Sir Sydney Smith, the pathologist who had consulted for the prosecution, remarked "This is not the last we'll hear of young Merrett".
Sir Sydney was, to the distress of two future victims, quite correct.
Certainly one cannot decide on the solution to a modern crime simply because of a similarity to an historic one. That would be reasoning from insufficient data, anathema to Mr. Holmes.
But an acute awareness of criminal history may provide very useful insights to investigators, just as it might suggest convenient methods to the perpetrators.
"There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."
-Sherlock Holmes, in A Study in Scarlet
###
For more of E.J.'s essays on forensic science, see The Crime Lab Project, where she blogs with Jan Burke and Sandra Ruttan. The Crime Lab Project is an effort to draw attention to the fact that Hollywood seems to spend more money on fictional crime labs than the government does on real ones.
The transcript of one of the most extraordinary criminal trials in world history has just become available - 
seven hundred years after the proceedings began.
Beginning in 1307, the Knights Templar - who could be called the Blackwater of the Christian Crusades, which, if it isn't accurate, at least gives you the general idea - went on trial for heresy in a legal proceeding known as Processus Contra Templarios.
The Vatican has announced that the Latin transcript of the proceedings, which resulted in the loss of their wealth and the suppression of the order, will be made available in a limited edition. Price tag: $8,400.
According to media reports - the Vatican has not mentioned this document on its official site - the transcript reveals the Pope's opposition to the proceeding.
It would have been available earlier, we are advised, but it was "misplaced" - for three hundred years. Needless to say, the medievalists are rejoicing, and many are already begging for an English translation.
As trial transcripts go, that's not expensive at all. Trial transcripts generated today in the US routinely run $2 or 3 a page (and they're double-spaced, have super-wide margins, large type, numbered lines, and every other gimmick court reporters can think of to lengthen a transcript.)
Of course as books go, well....
For more:
Surprise endings are wonderful. Shocking twists at the close of a murder case? A century later? Magnifique!
It took us crime historian types a week to fully fathom the implications of the DNA results in the Crippen case. Now that some of the pure shock has worn off, we're voting not to rewrite the books. CLEWS heard from E.J. Wagner (whose new name is "Edgar," since she won that award for her brilliant rendering of the history of forensic science, The Science of Sherlock Holmes). She offers four reasons why the DNA results should not be taken as proof of Crippen's innocence. Says E.J. --
The "proof" rests on a few assumptions.
1. That the slide is indeed the proper one. Chain of custody was not as carefully kept in 1910 as might be desired.
2. That the woman known as Cora Crippen was biologically related to the individuals who gave the DNA samples. Keeping adoptions secret was very common in 1910 - many adoptees in that period never knew their biological heritage differed from that of their parents.
3. That the woman married to Dr Crippen had not assumed another's identity. Cora Crippen was known to change her name. She began life as Kunegunde Mackatmotski.
4. The rare chimera possibility.
All that had been definitely proven is that slide labeled as that of Cora Crippen does not match the donated samples of individuals who are believed to be biological relatives.
As far as I'm concerned, If the human remains (and "remains," in this context, is horrifyingly appropriate) weren't those of the woman known to the world as Mrs. Crippen, then one could reasonably conclude that Crippen was a multiple murderer. And yet those who were involved with the DNA testing maintain that they are proof that Dr. Crippen was innocent!
If Crippen committed no crime, then how does one explain a corpse in his cellar? Planted evidence? At the time the remains were found, Scotland Yard merely suspected a murder. However strong, it was a suspicion. There were no eyewitnesses. They had nothing definitive to demonstrate that anyone by any name had met her demise at Dr. Crippen's hand. Would Scotland Yard's best men have planted these remains at the risk of bringing on their own ruination if Cora turned up alive after all?
January Magazine's J. Kingston Pierce wrote a nice summary of the new Crippen puzzle in which he quotes Dr. Crippen's great champion, Raymond Chandler. Said Chandler: “I cannot see why a man who would go to the enormous labor of deboning and de-sexing and de-heading an entire corpse would not take the rather slight extra labor of disposing of the flesh in the same way, rather than bury it at all.”
Gosh, I can't see why he did that either. But let's back up the truck, Mr. Chandler! In the real world, idiots abound; in the fictional realm, everything is supposed to make sense.
He wonders why Crippen didn't dispose of the entire corpse? That is the wrong question. The more appropriate inquiry is, why did Crippen murder the woman, rather than simply divorce her (or simpler yet, abandon her) in the first place?
Actually the answer to both questions is the same: Dr. Crippen was a moron.
Better men than Hawley Crippen have made similarly egregious errors that in the end cost them everything. Crippen was far from the first man of higher learning who had trouble disposing of the entire corpus delictum. Recall the case of Dr. Webster, the Professor (!) of Chemistry (!!) from Harvard University (!!!) and the stubborn remains of poor Dr. Parkman.
As crime historian Albert Borowitz observed in A Gallery of Sinister Perspectives
Guest Post by Robert Waters
(True crime author Robert Waters explains the story behind Doe Network Case File No. 363DFFL and remarks, "This story has never been published in any detail. But it has bothered me for many years, maybe because it happened in my own hometown and because there were never any real clues. Somebody got away with it. Also, the very place where she was abducted (J. M. Fields department store) is now the site of the Marion County Public Library and every time I walk in there I feel creepy.")
It was one o’clock on Thursday, July 22, 1976. 
Highway 40 cut across the center of Florida and through the heart of a town that was quickly becoming a city. Ocala. Locally, the highway was called Silver Springs Boulevard.
The Florida Highway Patrol station sat near the eastern edge of town, on the Boulevard. You couldn’t miss it—-an ugly red and white metal tower stood behind it, rising maybe two hundred feet into the sky.
Lena Scofield and her twelve-year-old daughter, Dorothy, nicknamed “Dee,” arrived a few minutes after noon. Lena needed to get her driver’s license renewed, and Dee had accompanied her mother. At four-feet-ten, and weighing nearly one hundred pounds, Dee was beginning to develop a figure. She wore blue jeans, a red blouse, and brown tennis shoes. She had brown braided hair and wore glasses with teardrop-shaped gold frames.
While in line, Dee asked to walk over to the J. M. Fields department store. She’d recently bought a pair of sandals there and wanted to exchange them. The store was about a football field’s-length from the Highway Patrol station.
According to an article in the Ocala Star-Banner, “Mrs. Schofield (sic) first indicated displeasure with the idea, but then relented, telling her daughter if she got through first, she was to return to the FHP station. In turn, Mrs. Schofield (sic) said if she got through with the test first, she would go to the shopping center and meet her daughter.”
As the sun scorched the parking lot between the FHP station and J. M. Fields, Dee walked away, swinging her bag with the sandals.
By one o’clock, Lena was done. She drove over to Fields and began looking for her daughter. She spoke to several clerks who’d seen Dee in the store. At least one employee had noticed the girl leave through the double-doors at the store’s entrance.
Thinking that they’d missed each other, Lena drove back to the FHP station. When she couldn’t find her daughter, she reported Dee missing to the officer in charge.
Florida Highway Patrol troopers interviewed Lena. They learned that Dee was an honor student at Marion Middle School. During the summer, she’d been working at her parent’s barbecue restaurant. According to police, she was “obedient...from a close-knit family.”
An All-American girl, police didn’t believe she would have run away. Using the FHP station as a base, Joe and Lena Scofield waited for information. All Lena could do was cry and second-guess herself. How could someone just vanish from a crowded parking lot?
Joe was in shock. Marion County, he thought, is larger than some states. Much of it is rural. “You could go three or four miles from here,” Joe said, “and find thousands of places to hide somebody.”
The Ocala Police Department had jurisdiction, but troopers from the Florida Highway Patrol and deputies from the Marion County Sheriff’s Department helped in the search for Dee. A sales receipt confirmed that she’d been in the department store and had exchanged her sandals. A clerk remembered the girl browsing at the jewelry counter. Investigators and employees searched every inch of the store. Then they moved next door to a bowling alley that was under construction. They worked their way across the Boulevard to the Sears Town Plaza. Throughout the afternoon, police and volunteers combed the area.
There were few leads. In fact, investigators initially labeled the disappearance as a “missing persons case” because there was no solid evidence to show that Dee had been abducted.
Then they got the only clue they would ever get.
Nuby Shealey’s store is a landmark in Marion County. It sits at the intersection of Highway 40 and State Road Highway 314, less than a mile from the Ocala National Forest. It is a combination gas station and restaurant and bait shop. Locally, it has always been known as “Nuby’s.”
When the good old boys show up, one of the major topics is whether there’s a world record bass in one of the thousands of lakes and ponds that dot the Forest. They still laugh about the former chef who drove in from Mississippi and “guaranteed” that he would catch the record bass. He claimed to have a secret bait. Turns out he used wild eels, something unheard of among the locals. After a year of frustration, he gave up and went back to cooking.
The day after Dee vanished, detectives interviewed a clerk at Nuby’s. According to an article in the Star-Banner, “A woman employe (sic) at the store positively identified a young girl who had been in the store as the missing Schofield (sic) girl.” Sergeant Gordon Welch of the Ocala Police Department said the clerk “described the girl and clothing she was wearing before police presented her with a description.” The clerk said that the girl entered the store with two men--she was shaking and crying and looked uncomfortable.
Because of this tip, the search shifted to the Ocala National Forest. The Forest is huge. It consists of more than six hundred square miles of scrubland and swamp. Wild critters such as bears, alligators, coyotes, and bobcats roam the Forest. It’s a hunter’s delight, and every year hundreds of deer are bagged. Dozens of ten-pound bass are taken from Forest waters annually. Unfortunately, it’s also a good place to hide a body.
Police and volunteers fanned out, trudging through the rattlesnake-infested hills and slogging through cotton-mouth swamps. Hunting cabins were checked. A helicopter flew over the area for days, looking for any sign of the missing girl. The desperation of the searchers was evident when the cops turned to self-professed psychics for help. As usual, they offered only vague leads that came to nothing.
The Scofields offered a $ 1,000 reward, all they could afford. They moved into a trailer near the Forest. Dozens of family members from all over the country converged on the trailer. Lena and the women cooked all day and manned the phones while the men searched.
Day after day, the searchers went out fresh and hopeful, only to return filthy and exhausted and discouraged.
In the end, it was all a dead-end. The searchers went home, the cops gave up, and the case went cold.
It’s been more than 30 years since Dorothy “Dee” Scofield disappeared. Unless her abductor is still alive, no one knows what happened to her. During those early days of the search, Lena vocalized her frustration. “I just can’t imagine why they took her,” she said. “No, I can imagine a lot of reasons, but I don’t want to admit it to myself. [This] person has got to be sick.”
Dorothy “Dee” Scofield, the All-American girl, still rests in the black hole of the missing.
Guest Post by Robert Waters
(Floridian Robert Waters is author of several true crime books, including Outgunned! True Stories of Citizens Who Stood Up to Outlaws—And Won, an exciting, well chosen set of
crime stories. He recently came across a curious, century-old postcard, did some research into his crime souvenir, and shares a bit of what he found. It's a story of barbarism and scandal, of a private prison system gone all wrong. Thanks, Robert, for sharing it.)
Reconstruction left Florida financially destitute. Since the state had few prisons and no money to build more, politicians developed a system of leasing prisoners to businesses.
Participating companies paid the state $26.00 per year for each convict. In 1900, for instance, 778 convicts lived in thirteen camps: seven of the companies mined phosphate and six produced turpentine. (Later, as the system became more financially sound for both the state and the companies involved, the fee increased, finally leveling out at $150.00 per year in the 1920s.)
By all accounts, the system was brutal. Men who had been convicted of minor crimes such as vagrancy or writing bad checks were forced to work in the mosquito-infested camps from sunup to sundown six days a week.
In the camps, anything went. An article in the Panama City News Herald stated, “For the slightest infractions, [convicts] were prodded with bayonets or whipped with straps dipped in salt until they could not walk.”
In 1890, J. C. Powell wrote a book entitled The American Siberia. In it, the former camp guard described a series of tortures used by guards such as “sweating,” “stringing,” and “watering” convicts. A high percentage of prisoners died of the tortures.
The camps were so inhumane that local citizens often took risks to help prisoners escape. I recently obtained a rare (maybe unique) postcard from the S. A. Rawls Company of Ocala, Florida. 
Dated November 16, 1907, the firm offered a $100 reward for the capture and return of a Norwegian native, Adolph Fetch. According to the card, which was sent to the sheriff in Deland, the prisoner “escaped on the 12th, 1907, from the camp of Taylor County Stores Co., located at Perry, Fla.”
After describing the prisoner, the card stated that he had been convicted of Grand Larceny in Duval County and sentenced to one year in prison a month before his escape. Two photographs of the prisoner are attached to the postcard.
The convict leasing system lasted until 1923. It came to an end after the brutality of the system was brought to the attention of the public. Several incidents contributed to the demise of the system.
On October 7, 1905, the stockade of the Aycock Naval Stores caught on fire. Fifteen prisoners were trapped: six were rescued by trustees, but nine died. The doomed men had been chained to the walls of the stockade where they burned to death.
According to a contemporary account in the Pensacola Journal, those who saw the blaze told of “hearing the way the chained men [who] hung from the window begged witnesses to cut off their feet or legs so they could be free before being burned alive. Others told of jeering, drunken guards...who taunted victims and ignored their pleas for help.”
Although the state tried to cover up the legal investigation into the tragedy, publicity generated by local and national newspapers further eroded the public’s waning support for the convict leasing system. The system limped along until 1922.
The final straw was the death of Martin Talbert, a North Dakota resident. He’d been arrested near Tallahassee for “hopping a freight train.” He was ordered to pay a fine of $25.00 or serve three months in a labor camp. He had no money but his parents sent enough to pay the fine along with funds for a return ticket home. The funds arrived at the Department of Corrections but disappeared. It was never found.
Talbert was leased to the Putnam Lumber Company in Clara. While working in the north Florida heat, he developed a fever (he was diagnosed by a company doctor as having malaria), sores, and severe headaches.
An article on the Florida Department of Corrections website reports, “When he could no longer remain in the woods, Walter Higginbotham, the whipping boss, propped him up on his swollen feet and flogged him about fifty times with a 5-foot leather strap because Talbert failed to do his day’s work.” The prisoner died later that night.
Talbert’s parents wasted no time blasting Florida’s convict leasing system. National newspapers heaped ridicule on the Sunshine State. The Panama City Pilot wrote a scorching indictment of the system entitled, “Florida’s Disgrace.” Other newspapers followed suit.
In 1923, Governor Cary Hardee signed a bill that abolished the convict leasing system and provided money to build prisons.
In his book, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928, Matthew J. Mancini writes that the S. A. Rawls Company leased convicts from state prisons and local jails and sub-leased them to “turpentine and phosphate operators. Rawls’s own profit from this venture in 1906 alone was $100,000.”
***
[Information for this article came from the Florida Department of Corrections website, various collectors of Florida memorabilia, and my own collection of vintage Florida material.]
Guest Post by Kevin Sullivan
A Clews note: This article originally ran in the now-defunct Snitch magazine, and when I read the story of the drive-in, it sounded like something out of a Stephen King horror film. I asked Kevin Sullivan if I could post it here. It is a reminder of the sheer mundanity of murder, of how callously some very stupid people are willing to take the lives of people precious to their families and for how little lucre. It's also a tale of how easily policemen can be distracted. It has been abbreviated from the original piece, and a new update on the status of the pair of real stinking idiots who ruined several lives, including their own, appears at the end. Thanks, Kevin, for sharing it.
Seventeen-year-old Rita Joan Robbins had been employed as a ticket taker at the Valley Drive-In Theater only six days when she disappeared on the evening of June 3, 1973.
The theater, now only a memory, was at one time a popular spot for families and couples, and was located at 14700 Dixie Hwy. in Southwest Jefferson County (Kentucky).
As a ticket taker, Robbins occupied the small booth on the gravel road between the drive-in and Dixie Highway. In case of emergency, a buzzer situated next to the cash drawer could be pressed, summoning help from those working in the concession stand. As an added precaution - and perhaps for those with more time available to them - a telephone was within arm's reach.
About 10:55 p.m., the manager of the drive-in, Lucille Hornsby, stopped by the ticket booth on her way home and spoke to Rita, who was sitting on a stool with the door propped open. Hornsby told Rita that she was going home but would be returning in a few minutes. As she pulled away from the booth, she noticed a car entering the drive-in but paid little attention to it.
Perhaps within a minute of Hornsby driving away, concession stand worker John Southern walked out to the booth and gave Rita a 7-Up, setting it on the counter.
When Lucille Hornsby returned, between 11:06 and 11:07, the ticket booth was empty, and Rita Robbins was nowhere to be found. The 7-Up was still sitting onthe counter, and it appeared to be untouched. Lucille's husband noticed the cash drawer was empty.
Later, police would hear that Rita had been concerned because, for two consecutive nights, a car pulled in and stopped at the end of the gravel road, its headlights shining at the ticket booth, making it virtually impossible for her to see the driver, or what kind of car it was. On both occasions, however, after sitting there for a few minutes with lights blazing, the vehicle simply drive away.
As officers began their investigation, it was by no means clear to them whether they were dealing with an actual abduction, or yet another case of an unhappy teen-age runaway, who just happened to empty the cash drawer on her way out.
Yet the runaway theory should have looked highly unlikely from the beginning, for Robbins had not only left her purse behind in the booth, but she left her father's car on the property, just were she had parked it when she reported for work that evening.
Mrs. Hornsby, who had retrieved the purse when she found Rita missing, turned it over to the police when they arrived on the scene. Inside it, detectives found the usual items. Also found, however, was a pipe used for smoking marijuana.
When authorities interviewed Reid and Joan Robbins, they were told that Rita was a happy person, and that their daughter had never run away before or given them any kind of trouble. They assured police they had no knowledge of the marijuana.
Between June 4, and June 13, searches were conducted on the ground and from the air, but there was still no sign of the missing girl. None of Rita's friends had seen or heard from her, nor had she made any contact with her parents.
Then, on the evening of June 14, around 11:30 p.m., Ronald Shumaker, 21, a soldier stationed at nearby Ford Knox and working part-time at the Valley Drive-In, disappeared from the ticket booth, much the same way Rita Robbins had 11 days earlier.
Later that day an investigating officer from the Jefferson County Police raised the possibility that no abductions actually occurred.
"There was $62 missing from the cash register," he wrote. "The victim's car was left at the scene, as was Rita Joan Robbins' father's car. It should be noted that there is a strong possibility that Robbins and Shumaker are together. It has been established that Robbins used drugs, and it appears Shumaker is having domestic problems with his wife. This may be simply a planned plot between the two missing persons."
However, Cook concluded by saying: "It should be noted that there is no information to verify this assumption and the case should be continued as if foul play was involved until they have been located."
While it is true that Ronald and Connie Shumaker were having problems in their marriage, there were no obvious signs pointing to him wanting to vanish. On the contrary; Shumaker, who was due to be honorably discharged from the Army on June 22, openly expressed his desire to become a lawyer and was making plans to attend the University of Louisville in pursuit of that dream. He had also told some of his co-workers of his intention to remain at the drive-in, working part-time.
And, just like the night Rita Robbins disappeared, Shumaker reported to management that a strange car had been sitting near the entrance of the drive-in. Co-workers would also tell police that on the nights they disappeared, Rita Robbins and Ronald Shumaker seemed apprehensive.
Leona Sabins, who worked with Shumaker in the concession stand, explained to detectives that on that night, "Ron... was acting strange -- like he was sick or scared."
Sabins also said that, on the night Rita Robbins disappeared, she, too, seemed a little jumpy, even describing her as wearing a "grim face."
It must be noted here that by June 20, investigators had come up with the names of Danny Lee Tetrick and James A. Sefcheck. The initial leads came from people who knew the two men and told police they were the ones responsible for abducting and killing the two drive-in workers.
Three days after police received this information, Tetrick, 23, and a parolee from the Kentucky prison system, and the 19-year-old Sefcheck were arrested for disorderly conduct and armed robbery of a man for $210 on the highway, not far from the drive-in.
Then, on July 9, at 5:45 p.m., an anonymous call was received by the police, stating: "Danny Tetrick killed them and left one of the bodies at Valley Village field and the other at Weavers Run (Road)." The caller then ended by saying he hated Tetrick and calling him a "son-of-a-bitch."
The next day police would find the badly decomposed remains of Ronald Shumaker.
The following day, police would interview a 15-year-old girl who had been with the two men when they robbed, abducted and murdered Ronald Shumaker. Tetrick wanted to obtain bail money for the girl's 20-year-old sister and told her he planned to borrow the money that night. Before 11 o'clock, James Sefecheck, Danny Tetrick and the girl set out to "borrow" the money. Driving his mother's car, Sefcheck laid a sawed-off shotgun across his lap.
When Sefcheck turned into the entrance of the drive-in, the girl asked Tetrick if this is where he was going to borrow the money and he said yes.
But when they pulled up tot he ticket booth, and Shumaker came out to take their money, Sefcheck aimed the shotgun at his face and told him to get in the back seat an dlie on the floor. Shumaker obeyed, climbed inside the car and lay down on the floor.
Moments later they were gone, turning left onto Dixie Highway as they made their way to the secluded area off Weavers Run Road. According to the girl, as Tetrick held the shotgun, Sefcheck said: "Get the billfold." After robbing Shumaker, Tetrick made him walk toward the ditch. At this time, the girl said, she heard a shot, and Tetrick then attempted to return to the car, but Sefcheck shouted, "Shoot him again!"
Shumaker had already rolled down the hill, and this second blast, the girl believes, hit him in the legs. What the girl didn't know, and what Tetrick later confessed, is that besides shooting Shumaker, he also hit him in the head, and it would later be determined that it was the blow to the head that killed the young soldier.
On July 12, after Tetrick and Sefchick heard of the girl's statement to police, the walls of denial came tumbling down, and they made full confessions of their involvement in the abductions and murders of Ronald Shumaker and Rita Robbins. 
One of the things they told police was that they planned to keep going back to the drive-in to rob -- if not abduct and kill -- subsequent ticket takers.
Tetrick, apparently feeling some degree of remorse for the killing of Rita Robbins, led authorities to her body. Detective John Spellman later testified that Tetrick said:
"...that he killed both these people. He told us how he did it, why he did it. He also seemed to be very disturbed by the fact that he had done it. With regard to the girl, Rita Joan Robbins, he stated that it bothered him that this girl was buried somewhere where the parents did not know where the body was ... and he would like to see her given a proper burial."
In describing the kidnapping of Rita Robbins, Tetrick said she was forced at gunpoint to lie down on the back-seat floor of Sefcheck's mother's car. And, as he would do with Shumaker, Sefcheck was responsible for robbing the cash drawer. Tetrick said "that they got the girl out of the car, that she helped them count the money that was taken in the robbery, and he said she didn't show any real fear of them; that she... was making a game out of the whole thing...."
Tetrick also said that Sefcheck made Robbins get undressed and then made her get into the car with him. When they emerged a short time later, he told Tetrick that the girl had to be killed, as she could identify them.
Tetrick said Sefcheck started hollering: "Kill her! Kill her! Kill her," and then grabbed Robbins's arms. It was at this time, Tetrick confessed, that he stabbed Rita Robbins.
Using the large knife, the two killers dug a shallow grave and placed Robbins in it. Because she had gotten blood ont he car when she fell against it, Tetrick said, they ran it through a car wash when they got back to Dixie Highway.
Danny Tetrick and James Sefcheck would eventually enter guilty pleas for the murders, and both would receive life sentences for their crimes. Today, they remain in the custody of the Kentucky penitentiary system.
Sefcheck, convicted of being an accessory before the fact, will be up for parole again sooner or later. Tetrick is ordered to serve out his sentence of life.
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