I think every LE professional has a case that haunts them. Mine is a rape/murder, the most brutal I have seen in 50 years in law enforcement. My boss, Ron Bridgemon, and I spent two and a half days at the crime scene and autopsy.
Mary Anne Holmes was 29. She had two babies, a 4 year old daughter and an 18 month old son. They lived in a small frame house on a large lot in Thatcher, Arizona. Mary Anne had a garage sale on Saturday, July 8, 1995. I think the killer visited the garage sale, saw what he wanted, and came back late that night to get it.
He stalked in from several blocks away. We backtracked him and got good casts of his shoeprints. We got beautiful electrostatic lifts of them from inside the house. The shoes were a size 13 cheap sneaker from Walmart. They showed no damage and no wear. I believe he bought them just for the offense, probably a couple of sizes too large, and disposed of them immediately afterward.
He brought his own “rape kit” – clothesline rope, handcuffs, condoms, club, knife, and whatever else he used to commit his crime. This hints at an ex-con rapist
He stalked in, circled the house, and peeked in every window. Behind the house, he tripped in the dark and caught himself with his left hand on a dirty water heater. I got his whole palmprint in the dirty smear, but with only a few ridges on one fingertip, nothing identifiable. Touch DNA was still years away.
The back door had been left unlocked. He entered there. He woke Mary Anne first and handcuffed her, still in her night clothes. He got the little girl out of bed and tied her to the front of her mother with his rope. He cut their night clothes off with either a knife or scissors.
Then he anally raped Mary Anne as he bludgeoned her to death. No one heard the screams.
After he finished, he wiped the feces from his penis on a bedsheet. He sponged any surfaces he might have touched. He left shoe prints everywhere, but no fingerprints. He left the naked little girl tied to her dead mother’s chest.
The little girl wriggled out of the ropes shortly after daylight and ran screaming across the street to a neighbor’s house.
Ron and I spent two full days processing the scene. The next day, I went to the autopsy to remove the handcuffs myself. I got a print of the very tip of the killer’s right thumb off the tongue of the handcuffs that was protected inside the locking mechanism, but it lacked sufficient detail to be identifiable.
Several suspects have been the focus of the investigation through the years, but I’m not convinced any of them were the killer. Mary Anne’s murder had all the earmarks of a transient serial killer, a Ted Bundy kind of killer. I submitted a ViCAP form but got no good leads.
Mary Anne’s murder has never been solved. It is still reopened from time to time by cold case detectives. The killer has never been caught. How many others did he do before Mary Anne? How many since? How are her babies doing today?
It still haunts me.