The Dardeen Family Murders Morbidology Keep in mind that over 500 suspects have been questioned since 1959. Authorities believe that 24-year-old Christine Walker arrived at the family's farm home around 4pm on Saturday, December 19, 1959, where she was raped, then murdered by gunshot. But McGath's supervisors shut down her efforts to gather the men's boots from Kansas. Writing on true crime, mysteries, politics, history, popular culture, and more. Just days before Christmas 1959, the Walker family was murdered in their small Sarasota County home, a case that became one of Sarasota's most notorious unsolved crimes. By continuing to browse, you accept the use of cookies and other technologies. He claimed that he only saw Christine rarely and the last time he had seen her, she had been with her husband. But national clearance rates have sunk. The bodies were exhumed on December 18, 2012, but it wasnt until August of 2013 that results were officially announced. Smith stopped Hickock from raping a young woman in the Clutter attack. He told Myers, if he could get the OK, he was still after a true copy of Christine's DNA. Its theorized that the outlaws were interested in dumping the car they were currently using, and when they learned the Walkers were in the market, proposed an exchange. 1. On November 15, 1959, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock broke into the home of Hetb and Bonnie Clutter in a failed robbery that ended up with the brutal murder. Did the same men that killed the Clutter family kill the Walker family McGath had also considered Wilbur Tooker, Clark's favored suspect and the Walkers' closest neighbor, the one pushy with Christine. As he saw his own health slipping, he felt the weight of that vow. In 2012, the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office began investigating possible links between the Walker family murders and Perry Smith and Richard "Dick" Hickock, who had been convicted and executed for the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Police theorized that they had been grabbed and used to wipe the blood off the killer or killers. Would he ever get an answer? The doubt, the what-ifs, kept at him like a jackhammer. No one had documented the wrapping paper, and the minister was long dead. House where teen violently murdered his mom and sisters features "In Cold Blood" killers' DNA not linked to Fla. murders Brought in for questioning, McCall denied having any romantic interest in Christine and evasively said he had sold the weapon not long ago. Her husband Cliff, 25, then arrived with their 3-year-old son Jimmie and 1-year-old daughter Debbie. After killing four members of the Clutter family in Kansas, 34 days before the Walker murders, Smith and Hickock fled to Florida in a stolen car, and were spotted at least a dozen times between Tallahassee and Miami. McLeod knocked at the front door, getting increasingly louder as he became more alarmed at the lack of response. Join Mike and Gibby for this 'Best Of' episode as they discuss the facts of the murders and walk through the various suspects. Hickock, a car mechanic and father from Kansas, had suffered a severe head injury in a car accident when he was 19. The Walkers dwelled amongst country folk, whose women were sorted by their morals and men by their prowess roping cattle or catching hogs. The entire Walker family was dead, all murdered, including the children. He and Kimberly McGath went back to 2007, when she expressed an interest in the languishing Walker file. He meant that agency officials didn't want to expose their bungling and lack of commitment. This story is based on more than 8,000 pages of records, most from the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office, but also the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and archives of the Sarasota Journal, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the St. Petersburg Times. "I'm interested foremost in the living cases, where there is a danger to the public or when someone is wrongfully convicted or where a victim is wanting to find an answer," said Hampikian, the DNA expert. Tooker died in the mid-sixties, and I dont believe theyve tried to salvage DNA from his long-buried remains. ", But he never went to Kansas to interview Hickock and Smith. To have a theory was one thing; to have proof was another. Author By Posted on June 8, 2022 Categories mark williams composer shooting in staten island. [7] Spencer's confession was "determined to be cleverly constructed from real murders written up in newspapers and true-crime novels that he liked to read. Chilling crime scene photos within the book. The slaying of . Still, eight years off the job, she felt a certain duty to him. On June 7, 2021, agents with the South . Leonora LaPeter Anton went with Pat Myers to the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office to witness him talking to Det. Entering, she wasnt attacked straight away and had enough time to store the groceries before she was ambushed by the assailant or assailants. They were arrested in Las Vegas in late December after the inmate who had told them about the safe tipped off police. He said detectives have no physical evidence, so far, connecting Hickock and Smith to the Walker murders, no fingerprints. She read a report that the pair sold two dolls to a minister in Louisiana for $1.50 in gas money after they had left Florida. The floors were soaked with their blood. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation lab had pulled partial DNA from the men's femurs and teeth. Jimmie was curled up next to his dad, blood smeared on his clothes and in his hair, suggesting he'd crawled to his father as the killer shot him three times in the head. The detective persuaded officials to dig up the bodies last December in Kansas, where Smith and Hickock murdered the Clutter family in 1959 one month before the Walker slaying and were . But within weeks, Sheriff Boyer's attention turned - for a while - to two other suspects accused of murdering a family 1,600 miles away in a Kansas farm town of 270 called Holcomb. Now Myers related to McGath what he'd heard from Clark: Though not a conclusive match, Tooker could not be discounted. Cold-blooded killings: A look at the Clutter family murders She had no hard feelings, she said, but wished the sheriff's office had allowed her to keep pursuing the men. All were shot in the head. Or maybe it was a home invasion that, for a second time, ended in slaughter. The Christmas tragedy that fell on Osprey in 1959 was an unimaginable horror and one that by all rights deserved justice. He was seeking permission to exhume her from her grave. Despite what Capote asserted at the time, subsequent investigations have since revealed holes in Hickock and Smiths alibis, and some experts have asserted that polygraph tests of the era were notoriously unreliable. Shell casings were found at the site, but the murder weapon was never retrieved. The 1959 murder of Herbert Clutter and his wife and kids in Holcomb, Kansas by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock was, by itself, rather unextraordinary. They were shot one by one. "Behind every good woman, there's a good man," he said, as he filled her cup. Both had relatively minor items stolen. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, has called on agencies to create teams dedicated to handling these seemingly unsolvable cases - more than 100,000 of them from the previous two decades alone. It is therefore believed that Smith and Hickock may have gained entry to the Walker home on the pretense of selling their car. On a couch in an adjoining room was 15-year-old Kenyon Neal Clutter, bound, gagged and shot in the head. [6], A serial killer named Emmett Monroe Spencer confessed to the murders, but the confession was discredited by Sarasota County Sheriff Ross Boyer, who labeled Spencer a pathological liar. People gossiped about a fight Cliff had gotten into a few days before the murder. The bodies of the two men executed for the 1959 murders of a Kansas family that became infamous in Truman Capote's true-crime book In Cold Blood were exhumed Tuesday in an effort to solve slayings of a Florida family killed weeks later. Suspect Arrested in 1974 Cold Case Murder of Carla Walker; Was 'Random Herbert Clutter, 48, his wife, Bonnie, 45, their daughter, Nancy Mae, 16 and son Kenyon, 15, were bound hand and foot and gagged. Myers asked, five rows of wrinkles amassing above his large blue eyes. So when he called one day in late August 2022, she responded. Butch Dennison was also a popular suspect among armchair detectives. 'In Cold Blood' house: Rare photos show home where Clutters were The next morning, McLeod dropped by to go hog hunting with Cliff. However, the best suspect at the time was possibly Curtis McCall, a man described as a troublemaker with a history of violence. So, with that being said, I lean toward Stanley Mauck, the meter-reader. But he told police he had seen the Walkers' neighbor, Wilbur Tooker, at their house at least two dozen times. One witness said that the taller of the two men "had a scratched-up face. Myers, 71, had pleaded for answers most of his life, sometimes dropping into the sheriff's office when the phone fell quiet. He had also been convicted of attempted rape. Over the next six weeks, Hickock and Smith traveled about 10,000 miles, from Kansas and California to Mexico and Florida. Christine lay barefoot, bruised and bloody, her pink flowered dress pulled up, her slips and petticoats in a muddle. There was a problem. Though he is thought to have committed several murders, he was only actually convicted of one. Grant's department store, seven miles from the Walker home, on the day of the murders. And though Clark was earnest, Myers feared the result would be no different. Clifford "Cliff" Walker (1934-1959) - Find a Grave Memorial Dick Hickocks body was too degraded to get a sample, which is unfortunate, because if they were the perpetrators, it is most likely that he would have been the rapist. Hickock soon concocted a plan to rob the familys safe and flee to Mexico, enlisting Smith, who had also once been his cellmate. Cliff Walker wanted to trade in the family car for a 1956 Chevrolet, a two-tone . Authorities acted on a lead that connected the 1959 murder of the Walker family with an earlierand much more famouscrime: the slaying of the Clutter family, the very case that inspired Truman Capote's groundbreaking book, In Cold Blood. The files tell the story of a murder mystery that changed a community and continues today. The list goes on. "[5] The pair was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, on December 30, 1959, for the Clutter murders, and were executed by hanging on April 14, 1965. Not long afterward, Cliff also returned home with Jimmie and Debbie. It sounds like his night could have been too busy to carry out the crimes. Copyright 2023 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. The mix-ups made McGath wonder about the evidence already tested. Elbert had also previously made advances toward Christine, and family members thought the grief shown was fake, the suspect fainting twice at the funeral. I dont know if these were only rumors or how thoroughly they were investigated. The following year, the mother of three would leave the agency to prioritize family. As she organized boxes of witness statements, ballistics reports and crime scene photographs into an 8,000-page digital record, more clues - and gaps - emerged. Hickocks former cellmate had worked for the Clutters, telling him that the father, Herb Clutter, kept a large amount of cash on the premises. According to the sheriffs department, the Walkers had been considering buying a car of the exact make and model that Hickock and Smith had stolen. For example, in 1994, a woman called the Sarasota County Sheriffs Office and claimed to be a bartender in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. ". Tooker had apparently gone out to dinner, then went to perform in the violin section of the West Coast Symphony Orchestra. 2023 The Associated Press. Cliff and Don went hunting, while Christine and Dons wife Lucy stayed behind with the children. I can be contacted for projects through my website MichaelEastWriter.com where youll also find lots more content. Unable to find a safe, they obliterated all four members of the Clutter family. A while later, Cliff and the children were invited to stay at the McLeods for dinner, but he declined, wanting to get home to his wife. The Clutter Family Home in Holcomb, Kansas. Site of the Murders of Nov First, he turned on "Gunsmoke" - their daily routine. This week on Out of the Past: The Walker Family Massacre. A woman came to police claiming that Butch had confessed to her about murdering the family, and also tried to hide bloody clothing in her presence. The second one didnt miss. Then she was taken to Jimmies bedroom and raped on the bed before being shot with a .22 firearm. All Rights Reserved. The Clutter case bore eerie similarities to the Walker case: both were quadruple homicides, with both parents and two children slaughtered (the Clutters other children escaped the violence because they were not home at the time). Its hard to ignore the fact that he was connected to another mass murder and confessed to having homicidal thoughts. Elbert, on the other hand, would be on the police radar for some time. The leads went nowhere, and the case was soon going cold until police believed they had a break in 1962 when serial killer Emmett Monroe Spencer claimed responsibility. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. But then in 1987, this settlement was rocked by a grisly murder that still remains unsolved today. The day before she died, Christine told her mother and mother-in-law that Cliff had been in a fight and "liked to got killed yesterday.". A thought-provoking analysis of a quadruple homicide The author has presented a well-written and well-researched study of the horrific murders of the Walker family, Cliff, Christine, little Jimmy, and baby Debbie in Florida on December 19, 1959, just a month after the Clutters "In Cold Blood" murders in Kansas. But, as she would find time and again, neither Kansas nor the Las Vegas Police Department could locate any of that evidence for her. Some suspect Stanley Mauck, the man who read the meters for the Walker residence, as he was the same meter reader who serviced the home of another recently murdered family. Murderpedia. Some families, she knew, played their traumas over and over 50 or 60 years later. Perry Smith in the army. It would be arguably the most significant true-crime work of all time, In Cold Blood. Hickock had once said his philosophy was to "leave no witnesses.". Clark said he still hoped to get Christine's DNA, to clear up longstanding confusion. But I dont know. ; Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0; additional terms may . Over the past decade, though, the Walker family murders have taken on another chilling dimension, as the prime suspects are, at present, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. While police officially believe that Smith and Hickock remain the best suspects in the cold case, its worth noting that the marriage license was eventually returned to the family when a relative included it in items that were given to Cliff Walkers niece. Finding out who had murdered Christine had consumed his family for decades, and now, with many of them dead or far-flung, it had fallen on him to keep up the pressure. Hickock and Smith confessed to the murders of the Clutter family, for which they were hanged in April of 1965. Brandon Clark. And in Kansas, authorities had been focused on the Clutters, an agency spokeswoman said, and they have no evidence that officers interrogated the killers about the Walkers. Clark hoped to test the underwear stain containing the sperm cell. The sheriff had Hickock and Smith's pictures published on the front page of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. memorial page for Clifford "Cliff" Walker (16 Oct 1934-19 Dec 1959), Find a Grave Memorial ID . Another three were seen drinking on the road to the Walkers' house. If you nenjoyed this story, please consider purchasing my book: Nordic Noir: 14 Unsolved True Crime Cases available now at Amazon. how many kids does jason statham have . However, based on the personal items that were stolen, Katherine Ramsland, of the University of Pennsylvania, finds Smith and Hickock unlikely and instead suspects that the killer knew at least one member of the Walker family. Ozie Youmans, who was married to Cliffs sister, made unwanted advances toward Christine on multiple occasions. Tire tracks from the mystery car were likely gone now that there was a police vehicle parked in its place. Unfortunately, the results proved inconclusive. Cliff was shot in the face immediately, followed by Jimmie, the young boy eating a lollipop hed been bought as a treat. It was quiet, which was odd as the family was known to rise early. Cliff had threatened to kill him but he had a watertight alibi for the time of the murders. Truman Capotes wildly popular book In Cold Blood was written about the crime, and is considered the first real true crime novel. The husband was stabbed, while the wife was raped and shot. The Herald-Tribune gained unprecedented access to investigators' files, which span more than four decades. The year before, she had convinced a judge in Kansas to exhume the remains of Hickock and Smith to see if their DNA matched an unknown profile in Christine's underwear. However, the Clutter family killing resulted from false information, with the home deliberately targeted in the belief it contained significant cash. "I always looked at the Walker case as 'Keep looking,' because it's not Hickock and Smith.". Whether they were already in the house or Christine let them in is unknown for sure, but it seems likely the reason the family car was in a different location is that somebody else had parked in the family spot. They wondered if this could be some sort of revenge killing. Unresolved Home Invasion: Murders of The Walker Family in 1959 The Walkers and their two toddlers were murdered on December 19, 1959 in Osprey, Florida. Freelance writer. Sixty years ago, a prosperous farmer, his wife, and two of their children were murdered in their rural Kansas home in the middle of the night, by a pair of strangers. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock are notorious as the perpetrators of one of the most grisly mass murders of the 20th century: the slaying of four members of the Clutter Family in Kansas in 1959. A family of four was killed in Florida five weeks after the murder of the Kansas family featured in Truman Capotes In Cold Blood.More than six decades later, a brother fights for answers. Somehow, they still made the smart decision to store the sample, in hopes of greater technology coming along. And Pat promised her he would make sure to keep it alive, to fight for a resolution. The ex-cons thought that the Clutters, who owned River Valley Farm in Holcomb, Kansas, had a safe containing $10,000 in cash in their house. The bullet killed him instantly. Many people assume that Christine was the main reason the killer was there in the first place. Christmas is usually a time of good cheer, good food, and good times spent with family. And the day after the murders, in Nocatee, east of Sarasota, three people said they had seen the men, one with a "scratched-up face," seeking U.S. 27, the main road north. He had initially believed the family had simply slept in, amused as his friend was also known to be a habitual early riser. The FBI had purged the "In Cold Blood" killers' palm prints - a crucial loss, as a fingerprint examiner told McGath the faucet print used to exonerate the men was actually a partial palm print. Kimberly McGath in 2013 and last summer. The detective picked up almost immediately, and Myers told him he wanted an update. Two men hanged almost five decades ago for a murder that inspired one of the greatest true-crime novels of all time could soon be unmasked as the perpetrators of another . The family was young and growing and look set to be pillars of the community for many years to come.
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