Post by LadyBlue on Nov 19, 2012 11:27:05 GMT -5
I just located this article from 2003 that features the murders of girls around the area where I was growing up at the time and going to highschool.
Law enforcement officials are comparing notes and DNA evidence to determine whether a Cecil man, arrested for the 1977 murder of an Allegheny County girl, was involved in murdering two other women beyond Washington County borders in an era when fears of serial killings besieged the county.
It's the latest twist in a long-standing mystery that's only now being unraveled but is far from being solved.
David Robert Kennedy, 48, of Cecil, is awaiting trial for the March 17, 1977, rape and strangulation murder of Deborah Jeannette Capiola, 17, of Findlay.
Since 1977, Washington County police have been haunted by a rash of unsolved homicides involving the strangulation of four young women in separate incidents. Some police and residents believed the slayings of four local women between November 1976 and May 1977 were the work of one man, dubbed the "Washington Strangler."
Investigators and families of the other murder victims from that era hoped that when Kennedy was arrested in December 2000, more information about the other murders would be forthcoming.
But recent investigations show that two of the four murders were not related.
If not Kennedy, then who?
Advances in DNA allowed police in 2000 to analyze a sperm sample from Capiola's jeans, which were used to strangle her. That led to the arrest of Kennedy, a suspect in the case from the beginning.
Theories that Kennedy may have been involved in at least two of the other murders came undone when he was eliminated as a suspect in the Feb. 13, 1977, rape and beating death of Mary Irene Gency, 16, of North Charleroi. Police have a suspect in the case and are convinced Kennedy had no part in Gency's murder and that her death was unrelated to the others.
DNA analysis also cleared Kennedy in the Nov. 25, 1976, slaying of 21-year-old Susan Rush, of Washington, who was found strangled in her car on North Avenue.
old.post-gazette.com/neigh_washington/20031005wacover1005p2.asp
Law enforcement officials are comparing notes and DNA evidence to determine whether a Cecil man, arrested for the 1977 murder of an Allegheny County girl, was involved in murdering two other women beyond Washington County borders in an era when fears of serial killings besieged the county.
It's the latest twist in a long-standing mystery that's only now being unraveled but is far from being solved.
David Robert Kennedy, 48, of Cecil, is awaiting trial for the March 17, 1977, rape and strangulation murder of Deborah Jeannette Capiola, 17, of Findlay.
Since 1977, Washington County police have been haunted by a rash of unsolved homicides involving the strangulation of four young women in separate incidents. Some police and residents believed the slayings of four local women between November 1976 and May 1977 were the work of one man, dubbed the "Washington Strangler."
Investigators and families of the other murder victims from that era hoped that when Kennedy was arrested in December 2000, more information about the other murders would be forthcoming.
But recent investigations show that two of the four murders were not related.
If not Kennedy, then who?
Advances in DNA allowed police in 2000 to analyze a sperm sample from Capiola's jeans, which were used to strangle her. That led to the arrest of Kennedy, a suspect in the case from the beginning.
Theories that Kennedy may have been involved in at least two of the other murders came undone when he was eliminated as a suspect in the Feb. 13, 1977, rape and beating death of Mary Irene Gency, 16, of North Charleroi. Police have a suspect in the case and are convinced Kennedy had no part in Gency's murder and that her death was unrelated to the others.
DNA analysis also cleared Kennedy in the Nov. 25, 1976, slaying of 21-year-old Susan Rush, of Washington, who was found strangled in her car on North Avenue.
old.post-gazette.com/neigh_washington/20031005wacover1005p2.asp