The case we want to talk about today is very tortuous, not only involving many people, but also the relationship is complicated, and the entire process of solving the case has experienced 14 years.
There is a small town called Wichita Falls in Texas, according to 2000 data, the resident population here is only a little more than 100,000, but although there are not many people, there has been a secretary of state: Rex Wayne Tillerson, who was also the chairman and CEO of the Exxon Meifu Group, and our story today is happening here.
The Murder of Tony Gibbs
Tony Gibbs, 23, is a nurse living in Wichita Falls. On the evening of January 19, 1985, as usual, she returned home from work at The Vekito General Hospital where she worked, and then mysteriously disappeared, and no family, colleagues, friends, or the police knew where she was, and everyone could not even guess. But just a few days after Tony's disappearance, her car was found a few kilometers away from the hospital.
Originally, the police thought that they should be able to find some clues about Tony's whereabouts in the car, but the reality disappointed them, there was nothing useful in the car, and the investigation of the case almost came to a standstill.
A month passed quickly, and on February 15, 1985, an electric worker, while maintaining equipment along U.S. Highway 281, 1.6 miles south of Wichita Falls, suddenly noticed what appeared to be something in the wilderness on the side of the road, and when he walked in out of curiosity to take a look, he was immediately frightened to call the police.
When the investigators arrived at the scene, they found a lying in the grass, of course, this person has long been lifeless. Not far from the woman was an abandoned bus with a bloodstained nurse's uniform, the woman was none other than the long-missing nurse Tony Gibbs.
According to the forensic medical examiner, Tony died because of multiple knife wounds on his body and was violated by someone before his death. The forensic doctor extracted the semen from Tony's body, but left no other clues.
The police speculated that the first scene of the case should be the abandoned bus, and the reason why Tony appeared in the grass on the side of the road was mostly because she tried to go to Highway 281 for help after the crime, but before she could get to the place, she fell to the ground due to her injuries. The trouble is that after investigation, the investigators failed to find any suspicious objects among acquaintances, which means that if there is no accident, the case should be a random type of crime.
In desperation, the police could only cooperate with the media to publish the basic information of Tony's case, trying to find possible insiders among the public. Don't say that this trick is quite effective, after the case is made public, all kinds of clues are flocking to it, although most of them are useless information, but the police still screened out a piece of information worth paying attention to.
Late on the night of January 19, 1985, on the night of Tony's disappearance, a man on a motorcycle was seen passing by the scene of the crime, named Danny Laughlin, who was a little famous in the local area, and the witness happened to know him. Laughlin, then 24, was a bar dancer who danced the kind of dance shown to adults.
Then another problem arises, as the scene of the crime along highway 281 is not a particularly remote place, the traffic is very normal, how to focus on Laughlin? Mainly because Danny likes to clubbing on weekdays, and the bar she most often goes to is the bar where Laughlin is, so there is a high probability that Danny and Laughlin should know each other.
Investigators contacted Laughlin and asked him to go to the police station to cooperate with the investigation. The dancer was quite honest, and after learning the reason why the police were looking for him, he directly admitted that he and Danny knew each other, and every time Danny went to the bar, they both had a good chat. He had seen the murder in the media, but it had nothing to do with him.
Of course, the police also questioned Laughlin's whereabouts on the night of the crime, and although the latter gave a clear explanation of the itinerary of the whole night, no one could testify for him at several key points in time. In this case, the police decided to conduct a lie detector test on Laughlin, and the results of the lie detector test showed that Laughlin had told a lot of lies.
Then a friend may have said that the police took a biological sample from Danny's body at that time, and it was not enough to make a DNA comparison? In fact, this matter is not so simple, here are two more words to explain.
In 1984, british geneticist Acrylic Jeffreys invented the DNA signing technology, but at that time, the DNA database had just been established, and the amount of data was still very small, so it was not applied in the field of criminal investigation until the mid-to-late 1990s, when it began to occupy an important position in the field of criminal investigation.
In fact, the forensic doctor did do Laughlin's DNA comparison at that time, but the result could not be determined. At this point in the case, the evidence in the hands of the police is not enough to prosecute Laughlin, after all, the lie detector can only be used as a reference.
However, the police's choice to publish the case information to the media had a side effect. When the public learns that there may be a dangerous person in the local area who commits a random crime, their panic can be imagined, which makes the pressure on the police officers to handle the case very large, and now it is difficult to find an important suspect, how can it be easily let go? The investigators did not care whether the chain of evidence was complete and directly took Danny Laughlin to court.
After several days of trial, only 1 member of the 12-member jury felt that Laughlin was guilty, and the rest voted against it. With Laughlin's acquittal, the investigation of the case came to an impasse, and in the days that followed, neither the police nor the private investigators hired by Tony's family could crack it.
Time flies, and in the blink of an eye, 14 years have passed. In 1999, a district attorney named Barry Macha was sorting through the files and found that there were several unsolved old cases in Wichita Falls, so he asked his agent, John Leet, to pick a few unsolved cases in the archives to re-investigate.
John ended up looking for 3 cases that occurred in the mid-1980s, and the 1985 Tony case was one of them. But what we're going to talk about next is two other cases that John has chosen.
The Murder of Trinity Sims
The victim in the second case was a girl named Trinity Sims, a texas state student who worked part-time as an electrocardiogram operator at the Belsania Hospital in Wichita Falls.
On the night of December 20, 1984, 20-year-old Trinity got into the car of her colleague Lesha Boone after working the night shift. Terri plans to spend the night at Lysa's house, because the final exams are about to begin, and Dr. Lysa can help her temporarily hold her feet and open a small stove.
Unfortunately, as soon as the two arrived home, Lesha received a call from the hospital, which wanted her to go back to work due to the lack of manpower. No way, Lysa left the keys to the house with Terri, and then she went to the police station to work overtime.
At 7 a.m. on December 21, Lysa, who had worked the night shift, dragged her tired body back to the residence, and since the key had been given to Terri, she had to knock on the door. Strangely enough, no one opened the door no matter how it was knocked, so Lesha had to find the landlord and open the door with a spare key.
But when the two men entered the room, they were dumbfounded, the originally tidy room was a mess at the moment, and Terri was lying on the floor of the bathroom, and had been dead for a long time. When the police arrived, after a preliminary investigation, nothing was found except a pair of sneakers tied together with shoelaces. The forensic doctor extracted semen from Terri's body, proving that she had been violated during her lifetime. The cause of her death was several knife wounds on her body.
Then this case is very similar to the Tony case mentioned at the beginning.
First of all, the two are similar in age, Terry is 20 years old, Tony is 23 years old; second, they both work in the hospital; and the suspects have the same motives and methods. And that's not all, the Terri case took place on December 21, 1984. The Tony case occurred on January 19, 1985, with an interval of less than a month.
So much in common that Inspector John suspected that the two cases were committed by the same person.
Fortunately, in 1999, DNA technology had developed a lot, and the semen of the suspects had been extracted in both cases, so it was quite simple to confirm John's conjecture, just compare the DNA extracted in the two cases.
Later, after comparison, it was a perfect match.
Murder of Alan Braw
The third case chosen by Inspector John is more special. On October 10, 1985, a roadman, while mowing the lawn on the outskirts of Wichita Falls, found a dead woman lying in the grass and immediately called the police.
When the police arrived at the scene, they found only a lady's coat and a pair of sneakers at the scene of the crime. The weather was hot in October, with the maximum daytime temperature above 35 degrees, and the woman was apparently killed for a long time and had been seriously corrupted, which made it impossible for the forensic doctor to find the cause of her death, let alone other clues, and even the identity of the woman could not be known.
In the end, the police had no choice but to investigate the missing reports during that time, and finally they focused on a girl named Alan Brau.
Like Terri, Allen is a college student who works as a waiter at a local restaurant on weekdays, and on the night of September 20, 1985, 20 days before the woman was found, Ellen disappeared for no reason after work.
The reason why the police linked her to the body found in the grass was because the forensic doctor judged based on the skeleton that the age of the body should be around 20 years old, and Alan was exactly 21 years old. Later, the forensic doctor compared the nameless woman through Allen's dental records, and the result was a complete coincidence. But unfortunately, there were too few clues to the case, and the police could not investigate it at all, so the case was quickly shelved.
Compared to the previous two cases, the Allen case lacks an important piece of evidence, and that is the SUSPECT's DNA. In addition, the distance between the Telly case and the Tony case is less than 30 days, but the Allen case is more than 8 months apart from them, so it cannot be proved that the 3 cases were committed by one person. But Detective John still found the same point in it.
First, it was still about the same age; second, Alan and Telly were both Texas State University students; third, a pair of sneakers were found at the scene of the Allen case, and the Allen case also had it.
So in John's opinion, most of these 3 cases were committed by the same person, but the question is how to find this person? Although the FBI had established a database of criminal DNA at the time, through queries, the DNA of this case did not find a match in the database.
Without clues, John fell into contemplation: a criminal does 3 big cases, but the police are helpless, so how will he react? Will he continue to commit crimes?
Thinking of this, Officer John immediately went to inquire about similar cases in the same period, but the results were disappointing, although there were far more than 3 cases in Wichita Falls, but none of them were the type john was looking for, and if it was necessary to say that there was a little similarity, there was only one case that occurred in 1986.
Murder of Tina Kimbre
On May 6, 1986, someone reported the case to the police station, saying that he saw a strange man running out of the neighbor's house in a panic, and he knocked on the neighbor's door out of good intentions to see if the neighbor was okay, but the other party did not respond. When police officers arrived, a deceased woman was found in the house described by the informant.
Later, after investigation, the woman's name was Tina Kimbray, who was 21 years old at the time and worked as a waitress in a restaurant.
However, three days after the case, Wichita Falls Police received a call from Galveston, Texas, from a man who came to inquire about Tina's case.
The police wondered how Galveston was more than 600 kilometers away from here, how did this man know about the case? It is clear that he is related to the case. So the police held the mentality of trying, invited this person to the Wichita Falls Police Station for a detailed discussion, did not expect that this brother really came, and when he arrived at the police station, he actually turned himself in.
The suspect, Feriyan Edward Wardlip, was 27 years old.
According to the confession, Feriyan met Tina at the restaurant where she worked, and the two soon became good friends, and the case occurred in an accident.
Because during that time, Feri Yanggang and his wife divorced in a bad mood, and he was a guest at Tina's house on the day of the crime. At the time of eating, Feriyan told Tina about his experience and dissatisfaction with his ex-wife, which may be the effect of alcohol, and as he spoke, he suddenly found that Tina was very similar to her ex-wife, regardless of her appearance or stature, so a nameless fire came up, and in a trance, Feriyan picked up the pillow next to her and covered Tina's face.
When he woke up, the tragedy had already happened, and Fei Liyang's first reaction was to run quickly, but after calming down, he still chose to surrender himself.
In the end, Friedan was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but after he was imprisoned, he was painfully sad and behaved very well, so he was released from prison on parole 11 years later, in 1997. After his release from prison, Feriyan returned to his hometown in rural Olney, Texas, to live with his parents and siblings.
When John saw the case, Feriyan was 40 years old, had remarried and had children, and the family lived a simple and warm life.
So what does this case have to do with the above cases? In the beginning, John was only because Tina was about the same age as the girls in the 3 cases, and the time of the crime was not much different. But John looked at it and felt that something was wrong, because in the interrogation record of Tina's case, there was a sentence that caught John's attention.
The interrogator asked: Do you know Alan Brau?
Ferrijan replied: Of course I know, but I have heard that he seems to have died.
John's three outstanding cases are arranged chronologically: The Triny Sims case of December 20, 1984, the Tony Gibbs case of January 20, 1985, and the Alan Blow case of September 20, 1985.
According to the archives, the police asked Alan during Tina's interrogation, just casually. But it was such a casual question that made John Jing feel a tightness in his heart, Alan was not a celebrity, so Feriyan must have some kind of relationship with her. When John read Ferryan's detailed background information, he was shocked and excited.
It turned out that Feriyan and Allen actually lived in the same apartment building, which meant that the two of them were neighbors. But that's not amazing enough, with the point being that Ferrijan worked as a janitor at Tony's hospital, where he lived in an apartment just two blocks from Terri's crime scene. Although these cases occurred in Wichita Falls, they were under the responsibility of different police stations at the time, and the various police stations did not communicate with each other, so this clue was never discovered.
All John had to do at this point was to obtain Ferryan's DNA. However, the matter was not easy, and the police had no right to ask Feriyan for DNA without sufficient evidence. In desperation, John had to use one of the most stupid, but also the most effective, ways to go directly to Feriyan's hometown and stalk them to get a DNA sample.
Not to mention that this trick is really a tri-and-test lark, and soon the opportunity will come.
One day, Ferryan walked toward a parking lot with a cup of coffee in his hand and a cookie in his mouth. When he finished his coffee, he threw the paper cup directly into the trash and drove away.
John rushed up to open the trash can, but he was dumbfounded: the trash can was full of paper cups! Fortunately, John's brain was fast enough, and he remembered the scene of Fei Liyang chewing on the biscuit, so he found a cookie crumb with a biscuit crumb on the edge and brought it back to the police station.
As for the end result of the DNA testing, the DNA extracted from the paper cup was exactly matched to the DNA in the case of Triny Sims and Tony Gibbs.
With the confirmation of the results of the comparison, the police immediately arrested Feriyan. In the face of DNA evidence, Ferryan confessed to the crime he had committed, and he confessed to another case.
Debra Taylor case
On March 24, 1985, Feriyan met a woman named Debra Taylor in the bar, who went to the bar with her husband Ken Taylor, but Ken left early because she was a little tired. Feriyan took the opportunity to invite Debra to dance, and the beautiful wife disappeared.
On March 29, 1985, two construction workers found Debra at a construction site.
Officer John's previous failure to discover the case was because it took place in Fort Worth, Texas, not in Wichita Falls. More importantly, after the Debra case, both in the hearts of the police and the family, a suspect was identified, but he did not solve the case because there was no evidence, and this person was Debra's husband: Ken Taylor. Therefore, Ferriyan's confession not only cracked a long-standing case, but also rescued Ken Taylor, which can be described as of great significance.
In the end, Feriyan was convicted of multiple murder charges and sentenced to capital punishment in the first instance. However, capital punishment in the United States often takes a long time from judgment to execution, and there will be many demon moths during this period, and this case is no exception.
In 2008, a federal judge recommended to the court that Lyon's enforcement sentence be taken on the grounds that he had not received a valid defense at that trial that year. After six years of deliberation, the court rejected the request to annul the original judgment in December 2014.
So was Feriyan executed in the end? Not really, because in 2019, at the age of 60, he died naturally in prison, ending his sinful life.