“After over twenty years, Reese was still on the street and my daughter was in the ground,” Ted said. “The less I thought about it, the better I could handle the stress. But still sometimes I just couldn’t help but remember.” To get by, he would fantasize about how Paul Reese Sr.’s own death would occur. Of course, the police were well aware of these kinds of thoughts, and they had warned Ted against acting on them.
“I was told by law enforcement at the time of the murder that if a bolt of lightning came down and struck Mr. Reese in the head, and there were ten witnesses standing around, that they would still investigate me,” Ted recalled. “They told me I couldn’t get away with it, so don’t do it.”
After years of depression and anguish, however, Ted Stuard knew he had to somehow find a way to deal with the terrible memories of what had happened to his daughter. He found himself becoming physically ill whenever he thought about how he had failed Dawn, about how he should have been there to protect her. Of course, he also knew that no one could have foreseen what had happened, but that didn’t stop the guilt. The only thing that got him through it was hoping that someday something would happen in the case, that some new witness or piece of evidence would appear, anything that could bring about an arrest and a trial, and perhaps give him some closure. Then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much.
But the years slipped by and nothing new happened with the case. It went cold and stayed cold. “Any chance I got, I tried to bring Dawn’s case back up to the public interest,” said Ted Stuard. “I hoped that maybe somebody would think, ‘Oh, that hasn’t been solved yet? I know something about that case.’ I did anything that I thought could kick start the case. Of course, this just brought the old memories back.”
Ted was willing to deal with all of the grief and despair, with all of the depression and anger, if it would just get something done about his daughter’s murder. He desperately wanted someone to come forward with new evidence or new testimony. He wanted Paul Reese Sr. to be held accountable. But as the years passed and no one came forward, the case stayed unsolved. As the 1980s, the 1990s, and most of the first decade of the twenty-first century passed without any changes in Dawn’s case, Ted began to lose hope that her murder investigation would ever be revived. He began to believe that he would never see justice for his daughter.
But then, in July 2008, when the police arrested Brian Reese for the shooting of Officer Jason Fishburn, and then arrested Brian and Paul Reese Sr. for the robbery and murder of Clifford Haddix, Ted found that his years of trying to bring Dawn’s case back to the public’s attention finally bore fruit when Russ McQuaid, a reporter for the local Fox affiliate WXIN, researched the case, found out about the connection to Dawn’s murder, and requested an interview with Ted Stuard. Ted, of course, was glad to give the interview. This was the best opportunity he had seen in decades to have his daughter’s murder investigation reopened by the police.
“Ted Stuard told me that he had always suspected Paul Reese Sr., and that he even confronted him about it the day after Dawn disappeared,” said McQuaid. The story about Dawn’s murder then appeared on the local Fox evening news. Soon other news media outlets also picked up the story, and although talking about it was painful, Ted did several more interviews with the news media about Dawn’s case. Again, he hoped that the exposure would pressure someone with information to come forward. Ted had always felt certain that there was someone, somewhere, with the information they needed to convict Paul Reese Sr. for the murder of his daughter.
But despite everything he did, despite the reopening of old wounds, nothing of significance came of all this publicity. The old despair and hopelessness, like a flood raging behind a breaking dam, felt ready at any second to burst forward and drown him. Because his hopes had been raised so high with the arrests of the Reeses, Ted didn’t know if he could go back to his old method of not thinking about Dawn and what had happened to her. He didn’t know if he could block it out anymore. Too many things now reminded him of Dawn.
“I was at a wedding, and they played my daughter’s favorite song,” said Ted Stuard. “It’d been twenty-three or twenty-four years by that time. The song started it all back up again.”
The feelings simply couldn’t stay repressed any longer. It was just too much to bear. Fortunately, Ted’s wife, Linda, could see what was happening to her husband and decided in 2011 to take over his efforts to get the case reopened. She had witnessed the despair and grief Ted had gone through for so many years and knew that she had to do something and do it quickly. Even though Ted had been quiet about Dawn’s murder for a long, long time, she realized that the incident had suddenly come back alive for her husband, and also realized that it would drive him into even deeper depression if it wasn’t somehow resolved.
“Linda saw how I was acting and feeling,” said Ted Stuard. “She said that we couldn’t afford to lose another person to the Reeses. She told me to settle down and let her see what she could do about the case.”
“I just didn’t want this case pushed back again,” said Linda Stuard. “What with the Reeses getting arrested for those other murders, I knew that the time to go forward with Dawn’s case was now.”
She knew that the detectives in 1986 had also been certain that Paul Reese Sr. was involved in Dawn’s murder. Now, with the recent turmoil over the three murders and the shooting of Officer Fishburn, it just added more support to the idea that Paul Reese Sr. and maybe other members of his family had been involved in Dawn’s death. Linda called the Homicide Branch of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department and was transferred to the Cold Case Squad.
Linda spoke with cold case detective Mark Albert, who, like the entire Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, naturally knew about the Reeses and their recent troubles with the law. It wasn’t a far stretch for him to believe that they might have been involved in another murder. After they had talked for a bit, Detective Albert told Linda that he would pull out Dawn’s case file and see if there was anything that could be done.
“I had just solved a thirty-year-old murder case, and was looking for another good cold case to work on. I didn’t know anything about Dawn’s murder, but I told her that I would pull up the case file and have a look at it,” said Detective Mark Albert.
Naturally, the relatives of all murder victims whose cases had gone cold want their loved one’s investigation reopened and solved. But detectives who investigate homicide cold cases know that success in their field comes only rarely. Reopening a case was by no means a guarantee that it would eventually lead to an arrest and a conviction in court. Still, Detective Albert felt that it was certainly worth looking into this case, especially with all of the recent troubles the Reeses had been in.
“Mark told me to give him just a little time,” said Linda Stuard. “He said that he didn’t know anything about Dawn or her case, but that he would look into it.”
When Detective Albert pulled out the Dawn Marie Stuard case file, he saw that the investigation had originally been assigned to Detective Sergeant Roy West. He knew Roy West well. West was retired now but had also worked for a short time on the police department’s Cold Case Squad, though on a different shift. And so, Detective Albert contacted West and spoke with him about the case, which West remembered vividly.
“Roy told me that he wanted to solve this case more than any other case he’d ever had,” said Detective Albert. “He said that he had never forgotten about it.”
After reading the case file, Detective Albert felt that perhaps something could be done with the investigation, but that he needed to give the case a little push. Like Ted, he thought it might help to give the investigation some publicity. The public needed to know that the case was still unsolved, that the murderer of a thirteen-year-old girl still walked around free.
“I knew we needed to get some publicity on this case so that people who might not have wanted to talk about the case in 1986 would remember it
and perhaps be willing to talk about it now,” said Albert. He drove Ted and Linda Stuard to WIBC Talk Radio and had them do an interview, and also scheduled them to appear on a radio call-in show hosted by county prosecutor Carl Brizzi.
“We have over eight hundred cases in our homicide cold case file,” said Detective Albert. “This one just stuck out for some reason. Ted Stuard went on Prosecutor Brizzi’s radio show and gave such a passionate plea for help that the other media outlets picked up on the case, and as a result a really important witness came forward.”
It was a new step forward, but the case was still a long way from being closed.
TWELVE
While one occasionally hears about a murder case that is twenty, thirty, or even forty years old finally being solved, and the perpetrator convicted and sent to prison, these are the rare cases, which is why they make the news. The truth is that most homicide cold cases go cold for very good reasons: lack of evidence, lack of reliable witnesses, lack of a body, or a thousand other possible causes for failure. Resurrecting a case is often nothing but an exercise in frustration and futility both for the police and the families of the victims. There may still be no evidence, still no reliable witnesses, or still no body. The cases are simply not workable.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department had over eight hundred cases in its homicide cold case file. These are unsolved murder cases from a certain date forward, using a date so that detectives can assume the murderer and/or possible witnesses are still alive. The number eight hundred is fairly typical and proportionately true for every other city in the United States. According to an article in the June 2004 issue of the magazine Law Enforcement Technology, in 2004 there were over 200,000 unsolved murders in the United States since 1960, with 6,000 new unsolved murders being added every year.
So how many out of these eight hundred cold cases will the Indianapolis cold case detectives solve? The Cold Case Squad considers itself a great success if it solves two or three cases a year. Unlike new cases with fresh evidence, these are cases that have already been thoroughly worked over by homicide detectives and then “deactivated” because the detectives at the time were unable to collect the evidence or witness statements necessary for an arrest—they are cases detectives thought would likely never be solved. Any case that they felt stood a decent chance of being solved would never have been deactivated in the first place. Again, this success rate of two or three cases a year is proportionately true for cities across the United States. Therefore, it doesn’t take a lot of mathematics to see that, when one compares the total number of homicide cold cases with the success rate, most homicide cold cases will never be solved.
Unlike regular homicide detectives, who simply take every new investigation they are assigned and work with its new witnesses and new information to try to solve the case, homicide cold case detectives are following someone else’s work: what clues were followed, what witnesses were talked to, and how the crime scene was searched. Cold case detectives don’t get the chance to look at the crime scene right after the murder, and they don’t get the chance to talk to witnesses while their memories are still fresh. Instead, cold case detectives must try to figure out what the original detectives may have missed, or what evidence can now be scientifically analyzed that couldn’t be when the case was new. Cold case work is mostly a lot of dry research and a lot of rereading of old homicide case files. The work can be slow, tedious, and often frustrating, with only an occasional victory, and not all detectives are suited to it. As retired Miami Detective Sergeant David Rivers, who headed Miami’s Homicide Cold Case Squad, said, “We discussed who would come into the squad and we all agreed not all homicide detectives would make good cold case detectives. Action doesn’t come fast and furious. There has to be a pragmatic approach.”
Similarly, not all cold cases are suited for reexamination. Cold case detectives carefully review the homicide files in order to determine which ones may have a chance of now being solved—to try to work on every single homicide cold case would waste millions of man hours every year across the nation. How are those cases, the ones that cold case detectives do decide to look into, chosen? What would make a homicide cold case like the Dawn Marie Stuard case, which had in the past already been thoroughly investigated, suddenly viable?
There are a number of factors that figure into why a homicide cold case detective will decide to reopen a case and try to solve it. One of the things homicide cold case detectives look for in an old murder investigation is a change in relationships, such as former lovers or spouses. While a person may have been deeply in love when he or she gave a murder suspect an alibi, this person may now be estranged and possibly even openly hostile to the suspect. The estranged individual may have given the murder suspect an alibi that he or she now wants to recant, or has some facts about the case that he or she withheld at the time of the original investigation, information that he or she is now willing to share. That person could now fill the detective’s ear with good information that will lead to an arrest.
It can also often be worthwhile to talk again with witnesses not as closely attached to a murder suspect as a lover or spouse but who might recall things that for some reason didn’t come up during the original investigation, yet that may now appear crucial to the homicide cold case detective. The witnesses’ relationships with a murder suspect may also have changed over the years. At the time of the original investigation the witnesses may have been afraid to tell the detectives what happened for fear of retaliation, or it may have been that they thought the suspect was innocent and they were trying to help him or her. The passing years can diminish the fear or bring these witnesses to the realization that the suspect likely wasn’t innocent after all. Also, witnesses may have had a religious conversion since the murder and suddenly feel guilty about not sharing information with the police that they know they should have.
And of course, in any homicide cold case, it can sometimes be helpful to just have a new set of eyes look at the investigation. Sometimes the original homicide detectives became too close to an investigation, or became so convinced that a certain person was the murderer, that they couldn’t see the importance of other evidence. This tunnel vision may have led them to dismiss other suspects, or—even unintentionally—overlook or ignore important evidence that didn’t agree with their belief. A new set of eyes looking at the case can often see directions that the case should have gone in originally, but didn’t.
But by far the biggest help to homicide cold case detectives comes from the many recent scientific breakthroughs and ever-improving technology that brings with it new methods of analyzing evidence and identifying criminals. Over the last few decades, science has stunningly improved upon computer systems, chemical processes, microscopes, spectrometers, and other scientific equipment. Evidence that twenty or thirty years ago couldn’t be analyzed or identified suddenly now can be.
For example, advances in alternate light sources and chemicals have allowed investigators to locate blood that would have been impossible to find in the past. Chemicals such as luminol and fluorescein can detect both new and old blood at a crime scene. They are sprayed on an area, and then a technician, using a special light and goggles, will see either a bluish glow for luminol or a greenish white glow for fluorescein wherever there is blood, even though the suspect may have tried to clean it up. It is also possible to use a special ultraviolet light source to detect blood, even on walls that have been painted over.
The emergence of national databases has also proved invaluable. For instance, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) now maintains a national link between state computer systems that hold information about markings on bullets and bullet casings. Called the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, or NIBIN, this system can be accessed by any police department in the United States.
One of the most important scientific advances in closing both old and new homicide cases, ho
wever, has been the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS. Prior to the introduction of AFIS into law enforcement in the mid-1980s, the recovery of even an excellent fingerprint at a crime scene could often prove useless if the police didn’t have a known suspect to compare the fingerprint against. There was simply no practical way to manually check it against the often millions of individual fingerprints most large cities had on file. Consequently, if a recovered fingerprint in a murder investigation didn’t match anyone already known to be involved in the case, it simply went into the case file, and that was that. It would only be looked at again if a new suspect came up in the case.
“Officers would go to a crime scene and throw [fingerprint] powder around and make the complainant think they were doing something,” Peggy Jones, a fingerprint examiner for the Houston Police Department said in an interview in the September 12, 1985, issue of the Los Angeles Times. “But then the prints would be filed away never to be touched again unless a suspect was developed.” AFIS changed this by allowing officers to use computers that digitized fingerprints and then not only stored this digitized information in their memories, but also compared this new digitized fingerprint against the fingerprints already stored in their memories. And most important of all, it could do this in minutes rather than the years it would have taken if done manually.
Because a fingerprint recovered from a crime scene is seldom as good a quality as a fingerprint taken with ink and a finger roll at a police station, an AFIS computer doesn’t give just one match to a evidentiary fingerprint, but offers a batch from its memory with characteristics similar to the evidentiary fingerprint. A fingerprint technician must then compare the AFIS results to the evidentiary fingerprint and find the one that matches. Usually, the matching fingerprint is among the first few on the list.
Killers in the Family Page 17