by Mike Riley
A DNA sample was taken from Denk, and it matched semen taking from Weidner’s sheets back in 1989. He pleaded guilty to Weidner’s murder, and was sentenced to sixty-five years in prison.
Current Status:
Rodney Denk was just seventeen when he murdered Amy Weidner. It turned out that it had been a robbery gone wrong, as police had suspected from the very beginning. However, no one had suspected that the murderer would be a close family friend. After being interviewed by police, Denk admitted to raping and then killing Weidner when she discovered him trying to steal radios from her brother’s room.
Perhaps chillingly, it was discovered during the investigation into Weidner’s murder that Denk’s own son, Dillon Denk, had been charged with murdering his own mother by beating her to death. Dillon was sixteen years old at the time of the crime just one year younger than his father was when he killed Weidner.
Weidner’s family was profoundly affected by her death. For a long time her other children refused to come home from school before Gloria was home from work. Unable to afford to move, they continued to live in the house where the murder took place.
Gloria legally adopted Emily. The child who had been her granddaughter became her own daughter, and she became a sister rather than niece to Weidner’s siblings. The now grown Emily refers to Gloria as her mom and her aunts and uncle as her brother and sisters.
The family made sure Emily knew her mother growing up, keeping her memory alive with stories. Emily herself has no memories of her mother.
Emily has noticed a difference in the family since Weidner’s death. Watching family home movies, she could see a time where everyone was happy at her first and second birthday parties, and after that they didn’t seem as happy again.
Detective Carter was offered a position on the homicide squad, but he chose to remain in his current position. On his own time, he is now investigating other cold cases in Indianapolis.
The Truth Hidden For 25 Years
Victim: Martha Jean Lambert
Location: Elkton, Florida
Suspect: David Lambert
Date of Crime: November 27, 1985
Date Identified: 2010
Backstory:
Martha Jean Lambert was twelve years old, and lived in Elkton, Florida. She’d grown up with a difficult home life. Both she and her two older brothers had previously suffered child abuse and been placed in foster care. One of her brothers had also run away from home in the past, and both brothers had previous brushes with the law.
Lambert was in seventh grade at her junior high school. She was blonde and 4’5” tall. Her brother David Lambert has said that despite her small size, she was extremely feisty. Other extended family members however recall her as shy. She was good at school, and always wore a smile, according to their recollections.
Her neighbors said that she was a girl who was friendly, but was always dirty. They recalled screaming and abuse at home, and thought her family was “odd”. There was a large age gap between her father, who was seventy-four, and her mother, who was just thirty-three. Her father was an alcoholic, and her neighbors also thought her brothers were “a bit strange”. They were however fond of Lambert herself, despite their thoughts about her family.
On The Day In Question:
On November 27, 1985, Lambert was having dinner with her brother, according to his report to investigators. After they’d eaten, she told him she was going out, but refused to disclose her destination.
A witness reported seeing her walking west along a road named Kerri-Lynn Road in St. Augustine, Florida. She was wearing a two-piece bathing suit. The temperature that day was average for the time of year, neither too hot nor too cold.
That would be the last time anyone saw Lambert alive.
Investigation:
As the last family member to see her alive, her brother David Lambert (then fourteen), was questioned extensively by police, but he was never arrested or charged with anything having to do with her disappearance. Thanksgiving was the next day, and he told police that Lambert had wanted to get out of the house to escape her father. He had been yelling over their burned turkey.
Her mother was insistent that Lambert would not have run away, or gotten into a friend’s car without permission. Friends and police searched the area and backwoods for days, but nothing was ever found.
Neighbors told investigators that Lambert knew them all, and would have felt comfortable running to any one of their homes should she have felt threatened, or if someone was following her.
A neighbor told investigators that she saw a green van with two men inside roaming around the neighborhood around the time of Lambert’s disappearance.
Soon after Lambert disappeared, her mother received an anonymous phone call. A girl’s voice told her “Mom, I’m OK”, but her mother does not believe that it was really Lambert making the call.
The case grew cold, until a quarter of a century later in 2010, when a shocking confession would blow the case wide open. Detectives Sean M. Tice and Howard F. Cole (Skip) decided to take a last concerted effort to solve the case, at the time the county’s longest-running missing persons case.
They again interviewed family members, neighbors and acquaintances. Several of them told the detectives that they should take another look at David Lambert. He had always been a strong suspect in the investigation, but no evidence had ever been found to support an arrest.
Tice and Cole decided to try again. They interviewed him three separate times, for a total of over twenty hours. Showing him a photo of Lambert, they approached the interview by telling him it was all about getting justice for his sister.
David Lambert “tiptoed” up to giving a confession several times, but in the end he always withdrew. Eventually though, he cracked, and drew the detectives a map where he said they would find her body, along with a few lines of a confession. While he wrote the confession he was left in the interview room alone.
He picked up a piece of paper, wrote a careful word or line, put the pen down, and then thought again, laboring over his work. He worked on the map and confession so dedicatedly, detectives were sure that it was the real deal.
David confessed that he had walked with his sister down to the abandoned Florida Memorial College, which was at the corner of King Street and Holmes Boulevard. An argument broke out between the pair over a $20 bill.
He told investigators that Lambert had gotten angry and punched him. He pushed her away and she tripped and fell, impaling her head on a piece of steel. According to David Lambert, she died almost instantly.
David Lambert then told investigators that he screamed for help, but at fourteen years old, when no one responded he panicked. He was also terrified of his parent’s reaction, thinking that his parents would kill him in return.
He buried his sister’s body in the woods, and then never said another word about any of it for twenty-five years.
When she was told of her son’s confession, Lambert’s mother refused to believe it. She continues to say that her son told police what they wanted to hear, and believes that the mystery men in a green van took her daughter all those years ago.
Investigators searched the woods for Lambert’s remains, but none were found. It is however entirely possible that after twenty-five years and multiple redevelopment works done on the site, there was simply nothing left to find.
Current Status:
Most missing persons cases in the county are resolved within a few hours, or at the longest a few weeks. Until her brother’s confession, Lambert’s case was just one of three never solved.
David Lambert has not been charged because the time limit from the statute of limitations on manslaughter that was in effect in 1985 has expired. The State Attorney’s Office has stated they made this decision after also taking into account David Lambert’s age at the time of the offense, and other mitigating circumstances.
His confession to detectives Tice and Cole was not the first time he’d confessed to being in
volved in Lambert’s death. When he was arrested for passing a bad check in 2000, he told police that he was responsible for Lambert’s death, and named a different burial place.
However no body was found, nor was there any supporting evidence, and so charges were not filed.
Tice and Cole believe that with his confession, David Lambert can finally move on with his life. Until he told the truth in 2010, in their eyes he was still the same scared fourteen year old who buried his sister’s body in the woods.
Never Made it to Work
Victim: Diane Lee Maxwell Jackson
Location: Houston, Texas
Suspect: James Ray Davis
Date of Crime: December 14, 1969
Date of Conviction: November 24, 2003
Backstory:
Diane Lee Maxwell Jackson was born on May 12, 1944 in Louisiana to parents David M. and Nora Maxwell. Her brother David was 5 years her junior.
The twenty-five year old single mother lived at 5107 Belmont in Houston and worked as a Southern Bell telephone operator.
On The Day In Question:
On December 14, 1969, Maxwell was running late for work. She parked her car in the company parking lot, but never made it to her desk. Instead, she was forced into a nearby shack, where she was raped, and then strangled and stabbed to death.
Investigation:
Police investigated Maxwell’s case, but no suspect was ever identified. Her car was fingerprinted and latent prints were lifted from it. When no match was found, the prints were filed away. The case went cold.
More than three decades later, Maxwell Jackson’s brother, David Maxwell, pushed to have her case reopened. Working in law enforcement himself, he had started reviewing and working on his sister’s case file himself in 1989. At that time he asked investigators to run the prints again, again no match was found.
Technology improved, and he asked again in 2003. This time, a match was made to James Ray Davis, who had never been a suspect before. He did have a criminal record, but had been released from prison ten years ago and as far as anyone could tell, he’d gotten his life back on the straight and narrow.
Identifying the prints was a huge job. They were first found stored incorrectly in archives from 1984. That search alone took a month. The prints were then run against the Houston Police’s database, but as Davis had never been arrested in Houston there was no match to find in Houston’s or the state’s databases. Databases included only Davis’s thumbprints.
The breakthrough came when the prints were run through the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). Prints are voluntarily submitted to the FBI by law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal level.
The FBI then categorizes the prints along with any criminal background linked to the individual. Law enforcement agencies can then request a search through IAFIS to identify prints found at crime scenes. The database contains over 70 million subjects.
When the latent prints from Maxwell Jackson’s crime scene were run, IAFIS had only been online for three years. Within five hours it provided a list of twenty potential matches. A technician then examined that shortlist and found a definitive match with Davis’s prints.
When they examined Davis’s background, investigators discovered that he had only been released from prison for nine days when he killed Maxwell Jackson. Within a month of her murder he was already back in prison again, this time for auto theft.
Investigators located Davis living in federally funded housing on the Texas-Arkansas border. Arguably, anyone could have touched Maxwell Jackson’s car on the day of her murder, and so they needed a confession.
Davis originally seemed calm and friendly, but after the homicide detectives asked him about his life in 1969 and 1970 and revealed they were from Houston, he became visibly shocked and nervous.
Davis confessed to killing Maxwell Jackson, but not to raping her. He was printed again and a DNA swab was also taken. He was released, but placed under surveillance until an arrest warrant could be issued. Davis chose to surrender himself at a parking lot a block away from where he lived.
On January 15, 2004, Davis pled guilty to Maxwell Jackson’s murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Current Status:
Before her death, Maxwell Jackson’s brother, David Maxwell, was planning on becoming a lawyer. After she died he changed his path in life and joined the Texas State Highway Patrol, and then the Texas Rangers. Would Maxwell Jackson’s death forever have remained unsolved were it not for her brother’s change in career choice?
Three Boys Gone
Victims: Robert Peterson, Anton Schuessler, and John Schuessler
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Suspect: Kenneth Hansen
Date of Crime: October 16, 1955
Date of Conviction: August 2002
Backstory:
Robert M. Peterson was born on February 11, 1942 to Malcolm and Dorothy Peterson. Little more is known about him other than he lived in the same neighborhood and was friends with the Schuessler boys.
John Schuessler was born on November 30, 1941 and Anton Jr. was born on November 12, 1943. Their parents were Anton Sr. and Eleanor Holz Schuessler Kujawa. Their father Anton Sr. died not long after his sons’ deaths.
John was 13, his brother Anton Jr. was 11 and Robert was 14 years old when they died.
On The Day In Question:
On Sunday October 16, 1955, the three boys traveled together downtown. They were going to see a matinee of a Disney documentary movie, The African Lion. Back in the 1950s it was not unusual for children the boy’s ages to be making the trip to the cinema without an adult. The three boys all had proven themselves to be responsible, and their parents trusted them to make the trip alone.
The boys had $4 to share between them, and were catching the train to the movies.
Strangely, the next sighting of the boys was at 6:00pm that evening, a long time after the movie screening had finished. The boys had been seen together in the Garland Building’s lobby. Probably co-incidentally, Peterson’s optometrists’ office was in the same building, but the boys had no known reason for visiting.
The boys were next seen at the Monte Cristo Bowling Alley at 7:45pm. They left to go to a different bowling alley, and then tried to hitchhike at the corner of Lawrence and Milwaukee Avenue. It was now 9:05pm and their parents began to worry that they had not yet returned home.
No one saw any of the boys alive again.
Investigation:
The bowling alley owner told police that a man in his fifties was showing abnormal interest towards several young boys in the building, but he could not confirm whether the man had specifically had any interaction with the missing boys.
Two days passed, and the bodies of the Schuessler brothers and Peterson were found lying in a ditch near the Des Plaines River, in Robinson Woods Forest Preserve. They were discovered by a man who had pulled over to eat lunch.
After the autopsies the coroner ruled the cause death of all three boys was asphyxiation. Peterson had also been struck multiple times. By the time their bodies were found, they had already been dead for at least thirty-six hours.
Public fear and outrage over the deaths was high. People were horrified that three boys couldn’t see a movie on a Sunday afternoon and travel home safely. Police officers searched the area, including questioning residents and searching every house in the neighborhood.
Teams also searched the entire woods, searching for evidence or clues of the killer’s identity. Whoever had killed the boys had been extremely thorough in removing any traces. No fingerprints or trace evidence was found.
Unfortunately, the search and investigation was hampered by the arrival of multiple city and county police departments. There was next to no co-ordination or co-operation between the agencies, and evidence may have been lost or missed.
Murder does not have any statute of limitations, and so the case remained open. However as time passed any leads
dried up and the case went cold.
Many years later, in 1994, a lead would come from the most unexpected of places. ATF agents investigating the disappearance of candy heiress Helen Vorhees Brach (her case is discussed in my book Murders Unsolved) when an informant named Kenneth Hansen as being involved in the murders of the three boys.
The informant told the investigators that Hansen had threatened others by saying that they would “end up like the Peterson boy”. It turned out that the FBI had already been informed of this in the 1970’s, but no one had ever looked into it. Could this information have helped to solve this case over two decades earlier?
When the boys went missing, Hansen had been twenty-two years old, and worked for Silas Jayne in his horse stables. Jayne was also implicated in Brach’s disappearance and was suspected of multiple criminal dealings and violent interactions.
Perhaps Hansen could feel the investigation start to focus on him. He started asking neighbors if anyone had seen police around his home, and when he was arrested by Special Agent Jim Grady, it was discovered that he had a bag already packed and was ready to leave town.