Karen Oatley, 14, murdered 5 August 1979
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Aug. 6, 1979: Karen Oatley, 14. Body found in a wooded area near what was then Gardner Junior High School. She had been strangled and her throat was slashed.
Nearly 35 years later, her parents, Lee and Sandra Oatley, still don't know who killed her. Or why. The case is one of 63 unsolved homicides in Lansing between 1963 and 2012, according to police records. A case is typically designated "cold" after one year if no charges are filed.
The not knowing, Lee Oatley said, is "like having a bamboo shoot under your fingernails."
"You live with it every single day," Oatley said in a telephone interview from Ft. Myers, Fla., where he and his wife now live. "There's always something that will come up during the course of a day that will remind you of it."...
… Lee Oatley used to meet regularly with one of the detectives who worked on his daughter's case.
But since he and his wife and children left Lansing in the early 1980s, he has not been contacted by police. He has lived in Alabama, California and now Florida.
Oatley, a onetime engineering technician for the Michigan Department of Transportation, left for another job.
But his daughter's senseless killing haunted him.
Lansing, he said, became a place he wished he'd never lived.
"When I drove down the street," he said, "everyone I looked at, I wondered if they were person that killed my daughter."
It has been more than 30 years of not knowing. And hoping, he said, for "a miracle."
"Of course we pray a lot," he added. A resolution is "one of the first things we pray for." ...