From the Archive of The Friday Read
May 17, 2020
True Crime
From the archives of The Friday Read
Yellowed files, DNA evidence, hazy memories and fresh perspectives – all become tools in the effort to crack a cold case. But justice is slippery, the fog of time make facts ever more elusive. All the more reason to celebrate the detectives, historians and amateur sleuths who retrace paper trails and dig up new evidence in the dogged pursuit of the truth.
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** CONFRONTING THE PAST
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** The Keeper of the Secret (2019) ([link removed])
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By STEPHANIE MCCRUMMEN, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
It was cold and snowing, but John Johnson had an appointment to keep. He wasn’t going to let the weather stop him, or the worsening cough he’d been ignoring the past week. He put on his black fedora and drove across Wytheville to see a friend. “John, come on in,” she said, and after they settled at her dining room table, she handed him a piece of paper with the names of 12 people, all of them long dead. He squinted at them through his glasses.
** LINGERING QUESTIONS
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** A Murder on the Rappahannock River (2019) ([link removed])
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By MARISA M. KASHINO, Washingtonian
The sun was just beginning to fade when David Riley pulled up to the little house off Route 354. The Virginia State Police detective got out of his unmarked Ford Fairmont and took in the setting of the mystery that had brought him here—a low-slung home shrouded in trees and underbrush. Across the street, a cemetery. It was Friday, August 23, 1985, and earlier that day, the local sheriff’s office in Lancaster County had gotten a disturbing call: Mary Keyser Harding was missing.
** unsolved, but not forgotten
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** Almost 35 years ago, she let a stranger hold her newborn (2018) ([link removed])
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By PAUL DUGGAN, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
The woman in the bus depot, the perpetrator, was amiable and chatty, Eleanor Williams tearfully told the police. This was long ago, after Williams, young and naive, had been tragically preyed upon, investigators said. Today, it's a cold case. The woman, whose crime in the terminal that day shattered Williams's psyche, was African American and appeared to be in her 20s, Williams recalled, speaking publicly for the first time in decades about a mystery that has perplexed D.C. police. Williams said the stranger's perfidy left her so mired in guilt and shame that she later contemplated killing herself.
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** Virginia slaying unsolved, 26 years later (2014) ([link removed])
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delmarvanow
It's hard to believe such tragedy came here, to this small, quiet wooded area. It's the place, more than a quarter-century ago, where Milton Ames died, say police and his family. The woods is near a short stretch of Brickhouse Drive in Northampton County — it takes only a few seconds for a vehicle to pass it.
COLD CASE CRACKED
** In 1973, TwoWomen Were Killed during a Virginia Beach Vacation (2019) ([link removed])
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By ASHLEY SOUTHALL, The New York Times (Metered Paywall - 1 to 2 articles a month)
In the nearly 30 years that Ernest J. Broadnax has lived in New York City, he has always been known for getting into trouble, with 14 arrests on charges like assault and burglary. He served three stints in state prison. But now, in an advanced age, he’s become known to neighbors as a cordial but distant man, who has struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. But none of the crimes in New York that he was charged with were as severe as the gruesome killings he is now accused of having committed.
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