“Which he took to the MMIV field agent?” Joanna asked.
“Exactly,” Anna Rae replied. “Once Luke recounted his sister’s story and showed Nadia the bags, she went nuts. The presence of the fingerprint dust suggested to her that, at some point, someone had tried to lift prints from the glasses. She immediately contacted Philip Dark Moon, her North Dakota counterpart, and put him on the case.
“Philip went through his records and saw that Amanda Hudson’s case wasn’t among the ones that had been forwarded to him from the North Dakota Highway Patrol when we sent out our request for cases involving Indigenous victims. When he finally found the case file, he discovered Amanda Hudson’s Lakota origins hadn’t been noted. On her birth certificate, she was listed as Caucasian.
“According to the file, she was reported missing on Friday, May 25, 1962, when she failed to show up for her grandmother’s birthday celebration in Devil’s Lake. Her body was found the next day by a family looking for a picnic spot along the Turtle River west of Grand Forks. She was found fully clothed lying in the river, with her head pushed up against the riverbank. The man who found thebody was initially considered a person of interest, but he was soon cleared. No other suspects were ever identified. Surprisingly enough, the Highway Patrol’s file contained no prints of any kind.
“Philip Dark Moon’s next stop was in Grand Forks. What was once the coroner’s office is now the Grand Forks County Medical Examiner’s Office. When the coroner performed the autopsy in 1962, he noticed what appeared to be a handprint on the front of Amanda’s glasses. He dusted the glasses for prints. In the early nineties, when the coroner was replaced by an ME who was a forward-thinking kind of guy, he went through his files, looking for any unsolved cases, and uploaded any existing prints from those to AFIS. That palm print from Amanda’s glasses has been sitting in AFIS for more than thirty years.”
“But why a palm print?” Deb Howell asked.
“The crime scene photos show that Amanda was partly in the water and partly out of it, with the back of her head shoved into a slightly raised section of riverbank,” Anna Rae answered. “The theory is that while her killer was trying to dispose of the body, he may have been interrupted. Concerned about getting caught, he must have put his hand across her face and shoved the back of her head into the bank, in hopes of keeping her out of sight while he took off, probably in a hell of a hurry.”
“Which explains the partial print on the glasses,” Joanna said. “When was this again?”
“May 26, 1962.”
Joanna turned to Deb. “How old was Stephen Roper in 1962?”
Deb consulted her notes. “Sixteen in May of that year,” she answered.
“He killed her while he was still in high school,” Joanna murmured, “and he’s gotten away with it all this time? I hate to think what else he’s been doing in the meantime.”
“That makes two of us,” Anna Rae replied.
“What was Amanda’s manner of death again?” Deb asked.
“Manual strangulation.”
“Same with our victim, Xavier Delgado,” Deb offered, “only he’s a four-year-old kid. How old was Amanda Hudson?”
“Twenty-one,” Anna Rae answered.
“Any sign of sexual assault?”
“No, and she was fully clothed when she was found.”
“Ditto with us,” Deb offered. “Xavier was fully clothed, and there was no sign of sexual assault. His body was also dumped in a river, except the San Pedro didn’t have any water in it at the time. When a flash flood came through, the body, which had been loaded into a canvas duffel bag, floated downstream where it was caught in debris stuck under a bridge.”
“Any DNA on the bag or the body?” Anna Rae asked.
“Nope,” Deb answered.
“What about the bag?” Anna Rae asked. “Anything identifiable there?”
“Casey, our lead CSI, says it came from Target, but there’s no telling which store,” Deb replied. “The one in Sierra Vista is closest, but there are several locations in Tucson as well. The bag could have been purchased at any one of them, so we’ll be looking into that. As soon as I get off the phone, I’m planning on driving out to Sierra Vista to check with the store manager there.”
“How close are you to having probable cause for an arrest?” Ana Rae asked.
“Not nearly as close as we’d like to be,” Deb replied.
“That’s why we don’t want to do anything to spook him before we’re ready to take him into custody,” Joanna put in.
“All right,” Anna Rae said thoughtfully, “we have two homicides, committed sixty years apart, with the same cause of death—manual strangulation, no sexual assault, and similar disposal sites. To me, those three commonalities count as a signature, so it’s possible it’s the same perpetrator. Assuming the killer has been doing this all along, there have to be other unsolved cases out there. I’ll put some of my people to work looking for comparable cases.”
Joanna knew that Casey Ledford had already started working on that idea, but there could be little doubt the MMIV had a lot more resources on that score than the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.
“Unsolved cases with Indigenous victims or otherwise?” she asked.
