The Trial of the Century
Today, the term “trial of the century” has become a bit cliché due to its overuse. Whenever a celebrity or politician has to stand trial for a major crime, the trial is often referred to in this way. No doubt the media plays a major role. Twenty-four-hour news networks, internet websites, and a host of other media all do their part to keep high-profile trials in the public eye today. Many think that the modern media appeals to sensationalism and the lowest common denominator.
In that respect, things have not changed much.
The Helen Jewett murder case was immediately seized upon by the New York “penny press,” so-called because the newspapers usually cost a penny. The penny papers were known for their sensationalism and were often short on facts but long on lurid details. The New York Herald in particular led the charge to bring the public all of the salacious “facts” of Richard Robinson’s murder trial, even if it affected the outcome of the verdict.
The coverage of the trial by the New York press was eventually picked up by the press from other American cities, making it the first criminal trial in the history of the United States to be nationally covered. No doubt owing to the morals of early nineteenth century America, the majority of the stories were biased against Jewett, although Robinson was far from depicted as an innocent victim.
This was also probably the first trial to have “groupies.”
Young men hung around the courtroom wearing black cloaks similar to the one Robinson was reported wearing, while a number of brave women gave their public support to the slain prostitute, arguing that a woman’s bad life choices should not be the cause of her murder.
The trial itself is considered a farce by most modern legal scholars.
The evidence against Robinson was for the most part circumstantial, although the eyewitness accounts of him in the vicinity around the time of the murder would be enough to land a conviction in many courtrooms today.
That is, if the eyewitness testimony was allowed and considered credible.
Townsend and the other prostitutes testified that they saw Robinson that evening, but the judge later instructed the jury to disregard their testimony because prostitutes could not be trusted.
It only took the jury a half hour to arrive at a not guilty verdict in June 1836. Besides the clear legal and media bias that was exhibited against the victim, there were also reports that Robinson may have bribed one or more members of the jury.
Once he was acquitted of Jewett’s murder, Robinson packed up his belongings and headed west to the newly formed nation of the Republic of Texas. He thought that it would be a good place to start over, where no one would know about him and his past.
Perhaps in an act of cosmic justice, Robinson died just two years later of a fever. It was reported that he uttered Helen Jewett’s name on his deathbed.
Chapter 11: The Cold Case Murder of Linda Strait
For decades, Spokane, Washington has been consistently rated one of the best places to live in the United States. It has continually boasted a low crime rates, good schools, and is within a short drive to forests, mountains, and deserts. Because of these factors, Spokane has consistently attracted companies and professionals who want to leave the urban jungles and crime of California, Seattle, and other locations within the United States.
But crime is not absent from the streets of Spokane.
The Spokane metro area has a population of around 500,000, which means that it invariably has some aspects of big city crime. Methamphetamines, produced locally and imported from California, have been a problem since the 1970s and the city has seen a modest increase in gang activity since the 1980s.
With that said, Spokane has traditionally been a city where you can avoid crime.
Unfortunately, fifteen-year-old Linda Strait was unable to avoid becoming the victim of a violent crime, even though she did nothing to invite it.
A Quick Walk to Safeway
On the morning of September 26, 1982, Linda Strait was spending time around the family home. Early on that Sunday morning, while most people were either sleeping in or at church, she told her mother that she was making the short walk up to the Safeway supermarket to pick up some hair care products. This was a regular routine for Linda. The local Safeway served as a hangout for the local kids just as much as it was a supermarket for the adults. Linda’s mother Donna and her stepfather George had no problem letting their daughter make the walk: it was the middle of the day, she had made the walk plenty of times before, and it was located in a safe neighborhood. Linda said goodbye to her parents and walked out the door.
It was the last time anyone saw her alive.
When Linda did not return after an hour, her parents began to worry, but they reassured themselves that she probably just met up with some friends and would be home shortly. When the afternoon passed into evening, her parents grew worried and called the police. A search for Linda began that evening and carried on into the next day when, unfortunately, her body was found on the banks of the Spokane River.
Crime scene investigators immediately set to work collecting evidence from the scene, which they determined was not where Linda was killed. Among the evidence collected from the dump site was a pillow case that had what appeared to be a semen stain on it. DNA profiling was still several years in the future, but if the biological evidence was large enough and not contaminated then a blood type could be determined. Before DNA profiling was a reality, blood type matching was often used in criminal investigations, although primarily to eliminate suspects more than anything. Since all humans belong to one of the eight blood type groups, narrowing down a suspect based just on that information could be difficult. On the other hand, if investigators had other evidence available to them in an investigation—eyewitnesses, fingerprints, or circumstantial evidence—then a positive blood type match could be just another piece of evidence.
Unfortunately, there was little other physical evidence besides the pillow case that the investigators had at their disposal.
There were no witnesses, at least none that came forward, who saw what happened to Linda and other than the pillow case, the killer did a good job of covering his forensic tracks.
The Spokane County Sherriff’s Department was baffled and Linda Strait’s family was devastated.
“To lose a child in broad daylight on a Sunday morning just yards from her home with people all around by a kidnapper,” said Linda’s stepfather George Ragland. “To be raped, robbed, murdered and thrown in the Spokane River at night like a sack of garbage was just too much to take.”
Homicide investigators developed a theory very early in the investigation. They interviewed all of Linda’s friends, neighbors, and relatives and came to the conclusion that her killer was a stranger. Investigators surmised that either while she was in the store, or on her walk back home, Linda was approached by a stranger who somehow got her into his car.
According to FBI statistics, 68% of all attempted child abductions involve the assailant trying to put his victim in his vehicle.
The Spokane Police believe that is what happened to Linda.
When investigators switched their focus to a stranger being the perpetrator of Linda’s murder, they perused their files for all the known sex offenders in the area. And there were many! Despite the mountain of files of potential killers that the police had to sift through, one name in particular kept surfacing.
Spokane’s Predator
The term “predator” is used quite a bit today—some would say it is overused. During elections, politicians often refer to locking up predators in “get tough on crime” speeches and the media also often uses the word when reporting about various crimes.
But in the case of Arbie Dean Williams, the term is totally appropriate.
In 1982, Arbie Williams was in his late thirties and going nowhere quickly in his life. He was a loner who had a difficult time holding down jobs and relationships.
He also lived in Linda Strait’s nei
ghborhood.
Williams did not immediately come to the police’s interest, but a truly horrific crime he committed in 1983 made him their prime suspect.
On a warm day in 1983, Arbie Williams was cruising around the Spokane suburb of Spokane Valley when he decided to stop at Trent Elementary School. In true predatory fashion, Williams waited for the children to be let out for the day and looked for his prey.
On this day he found two victims.
Williams got out of his car and approached two eight-year-old girls and asked for help to find his keys. That was when the torment began for those two girls.
"As the girls looked under the car, the man opened the door and pushed both girls in on the front floorboard and told them to be quiet," court documents said. "The man drove around until dark and then told the girls to take off their clothes."
When he finally stopped the car to commit his despicable acts on the girls, one ran to safety, but the other was trapped with the predator. Williams raped the helpless girl and then strangled her until she was unconscious. Thinking that the girl was dead, Williams then threw the child into a wooded area as if she was garbage, similar to what happened to Linda Strait.
The girls were able to give investigators an accurate description of both Williams and his car, but unfortunately Williams at that point did not have a criminal record, so he was unknown to the police and the girls were unable to remember his license plate number.
But sometimes criminals do inexplicable things that will make you think they want to be caught.
As investigators were searching the area where the second girl was dumped, Williams slowly drove by the police. Detective Mike McCabe noticed the slow moving vehicle and realized that it fit the description of the rapist’s car. Williams was promptly pulled over and arrested for the abduction and rape of the little girls. Several weeks later he pleaded guilty to the crimes and was sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in prison.
Williams’ assault of the two eight-year-olds was a high profile case in the Spokane Area. The people of the metro area were shocked at the brutality of the crime, but relieved that the assailant would not be on the streets any time soon, if ever.
To the investigators working on the Linda Strait case, there were just too many coincidences to ignore. The method of operation in both cases was similar and then the police learned that Williams had been living in Strait’s neighborhood. The police paid Williams a visit in jail, but he asserted his Fifth Amendment right and refused to give a statement.
Justice for Linda Strait would have to wait.
DNA: A Predator’s Worse Nightmare
Often, in high-profile murder investigations, the police are in a race against the clock. There is immense pressure from the victim’s family to solve the crime and the media is always there to report on any developments, or lack thereof, in the investigation. Witnesses forget important details about the crime and of course, they can also die if the case stays cold long enough. Investigators in the Linda Strait murder case did not have to deal with these pressures in quite the same way.
Although Linda’s family was in regular contact with both the Spokane Police Department and the Spokane County Sherriff’s Department in the decades after her murder, they knew the difficulty of the case and did not put any undue pressure on the investigators. The fact that there were no witnesses to Linda’s abduction was also somewhat of a mixed blessing. A positive identification of Williams may have helped seal the case against him early, but not having a witness also meant that the police were not forced to base their case on someone who could turn out to be unreliable.
But investigators still had the pillow case.
The proper collection, cataloging, and preservation of the pillow case is what ended up solving Linda’s murder.
Spokane County Sherriff Mike Sterk noted as much in 2003 when he told reporters. "If they hadn't have done their job then, we wouldn't have the evidence today to put forward to the scientists.”
From the beginning of the case, investigators knew that the pillow case was the key. In 1989, when DNA profiling was in its infancy and still very expensive and time consuming, the police sent the pillow case to a lab for testing, but the sample was not big enough for the technology of the period.
They tried again in 1998, but had the same result.
As the 2000s came, homicide investigators suddenly were forced with a sense of urgency for the first time. Arbie Williams would be up for parole in 2003!
The big break came in 2003 when the DNA sample from the pillow case, which had been entered into the Washington state DNA database, was entered into the federal government’s CODIS database. A combination of more advanced DNA profiling technology and the fact that Arbie Williams was forced to give a sample of his DNA as a convicted felon in the state of Washington meant that a match was finally made.
Linda Strait’s murderer was finally caught thanks to advances in DNA profiling.
Williams pled guilty to Linda’s murder in 2006 and was sentenced to another minimum twenty year sentence. Now in his sixties, Williams will likely die in prison.
After his guilty plea, during his allocution, Williams was required to relate the horrible details of Linda’s last few hours on earth. After the hearing, Linda’s family gave victim impact statements. Her mother, Donna Ragland, now an elderly woman, succinctly stated the family’s thoughts about the predator who took Linda’s life.
“I think you are the scum of the earth and I hope you rot in hell.”
Before Williams makes it to hell, he will have to navigate his way through the tough Washington state prison system with the reputation as a high-profile child predator.
Hell may come sooner rather than later for Arbie Williams.
Chapter 12: The Strange Case of the Joan Harrison Murder
Most high-profile murder cases involve a victim who is either truly innocent, such as a child, or an unlikely victim, such as a housewife. Sometimes cases attain a lot of media attention because the murderer is a serial killer or an unlikely killer, while the bizarre nature of some cases makes them a media sensation.
The next case falls into the last category.
On November 20, 1975, the body of twenty-six-year-old Joan Harrison was discovered in an abandoned garage in the city of Preston in the northwest of England. Harrison had been raped and beaten to death in what investigators described as a long and painful death.
At first glance, there was little to make this a high-profile case.
The victim was a known prostitute and drug user.
Although few people believe that those are reasons to kill someone, the murder of a prostitute will traditionally elicit far less sympathy from the general public than the murder of someone considered truly “innocent.”
But almost from the beginning, something seemed strange about Joan Harrison’s murder.
Crime scene investigators determined that Joan was raped and murdered in the garage—it was not a dump site. Joan was last seen the night before around 10:30 as she walked to a local bar for some drinks. Investigators believe that she was attacked on the street and then pulled into the garage where the attack continued. The more investigators searched the scene, they realized that this was not an ordinary murder.
The police immediately noticed that Joan had been bitten and they later learned that she was missing some jewelry from her previous two marriages. Once the investigators stood back, they noticed that the scene looked staged, almost as if the crime was committed in some type of ritualistic manner.
Besides the bite, the autopsy showed that her attacker was a rare “B" blood type secretor.
Despite Joan’s background, the police were diligent in their investigation and interviewed scores of men who fit the profile of a possible suspect.
But no viable suspects were found and the case quickly went cold until it took its first strange twist.
The Yorkshire Ripper?
In 1978, the Joan Harrison murder investigation received new
life when the police of West Yorkshire began receiving tips that she was one of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims. The Yorkshire Ripper, who was later proven to be a man named Peter Sutcliffe, killed thirteen women throughout northern England between 1975 and 1980. Most of the Ripper’s victims were prostitutes or women walking the streets alone at night, like Joan Harrison. The Ripper often attacked his victims from behind, before raping and murdering them. Joan’s murder fit the Yorkshire Ripper’s method of operation in many ways.
In 1978, the Ripper was at the height of his killings.
The Ripper killings eventually forced the West Yorkshire Police to form a “Ripper Task Force,” which conducted thousands of interviews and chased down as many leads. On March 8, 1978, the task force received a letter from someone claiming to be the Yorkshire Ripper.
The writer also claimed responsibility for Joan Harrison’s murder.
“I am sorry I cannot give my name for obvious reasons. I am the Ripper. I've been dubbed a maniac by the Press but not by you, you call me clever and I am. You and your mates haven't a clue that photo in the paper gave me fits and that bit about killing myself, no chance. I've got things to do. My purpose to rid the streets of them sluts. My one regret is that young lassie McDonald, did not know cause changed routine that night. Up to number 8 now you say 7 but remember Preston '75. Get about you know. You were right I travel a bit. You probably look for me in Sunderland, don't bother, I am not daft, just posted letter there on one of my trips. Not a bad place compared with Chapeltown and Manningham and other places. Warn whores to keep off streets cause I feel it coming on again.”
Forensic technicians took a sample of some saliva on the letter and learned that whoever wrote the letter, like Joan Harrison’s killer, was a rare B secretor.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 8