GUILTY KY - Walter Sartory, 73, abducted & murdered, Hebron, 16 Feb 2009

hoppyfrog

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http://www.wlky.com/news/18907625/detail.html

11 March 09

A Golden Alert has been issued for a 73-year-old northern Kentucky man.

The Boone County Sheriff's Department said Walter Sartory reportedly has been missing and unheard from for three weeks.

Sartory was last seen around Feb. 15. Police said he lives alone, but usually has contact with out-of-town friends. It was one of those friends who contacted the Boone County Sheriff's Department.

Police said they visited Sartory's home several times and tried to enter the house, but Sartory wasn't there.

Sartory's silver 2007 Toyota Prius with Kentucky license 899-HXH is also missing from the residence.

no pic at link
 
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-in-burntremainscorre,0,6852853.story

15 March 09

A Kentucky woman and her son have been arrested on charges including kidnapping in connection with the disappearance of a man the woman had cared for after authorities found burned remains in a forest near Indianapolis.

Forty-seven-year-old Willa Blanc of Union, Ky., and her son, 27-year-old Louis Wilkinson, were arrested Saturday at a Cincinnati-area motel in connection with the disappearance of 73-year-old Walter Sartory of Hebron, Ky.

Kentucky authorities say Sartory was last seen Feb. 15.

Kentucky investigators on Friday searched the Morgan-Monroe Forest about 35 miles south of Indianapolis and found two burn pits that possibly contained human remains.
 
Mom, son returning in man's disappearance

On Saturday, Crawford was charged with kidnapping Sartory, stealing more than $200,000 from him and trying to take more than $1 million from his investment account. She and her son, both of Union, are also charged with abusing a corpse.

They have not been charged with killing Sartory. Investigators are still trying to determine where and how he died, Scheben said.

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20090316/NEWS0103/303160054

Disgusting!!
 
From link that Tonia posted above:

The charred remains of Walter Sartory were found in a field southwest of Indianapolis on Friday night, said Boone County sheriff's spokesman Tom Scheben.

Prayers to Walter's friends and family.


Mods can we move this to discussion thread as there will be a trial? TIA.
 
Ky. judge sets $10M bond in kidnapping

A northern Kentucky grand jury will consider the case of a 73-year-old millionaire whose body officials believe was stuffed in a trash can and burned.

Boone County District Judge Michael Collins ruled Monday that the case can go to a grand jury and set bond at $10 million each for housekeeper Willa Blanc, 47, and her son, Louis Wilkinson, 27.

They are charged with kidnapping, tampering with physical evidence, abuse of a corpse and knowing exploitation of an adult.

Walter Sartory spent his last days drugged and duct taped to a chair in Blanc's basement, Detective Coy Cox testified Monday during a preliminary hearing for Blanc and Wilkinson. After the reclusive Sartory died, his body was put into a trash can and burned, Cox said.

http://www.examiner.com/a-1921110~Ky__judge_sets__10M_bond_in_kidnapping.html
 
Mother, Son Arraigned In Missing Man's Death

A Kentucky woman and her adult son have been arraigned on complicity to murder charges in the death of a 73-year-old millionaire whose body was found burned in central Indiana.

http://www.wlwt.com/news/19525212/detail.html
 
RIP Walter.
 
Feature article from January 2010:

http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/jan/07/nation/la-na-scientist-murder7-2010jan07

Like the disturbed genius in Hollywood's "A Beautiful Mind," Walter K. Sartory was a brilliant mathematician with a grave mental illness. It made him the perfect victim.

Sartory worked for 30 years at Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was built in secret for the atomic bomb project and became America's largest science and energy lab. Sartory's work on nuclear weapons remains classified, but he published pioneering papers on reactor design, medical centrifuges and other subjects. He won a top award at the lab and held three patents...

Sartory was treated most of his life for paranoid schizophrenia. He believed the CIA trained ants to spy on him. He battled social phobias so acute that he turned down a high-paying job rather than submit to an interview.

When Sartory retired in 1992, he shut himself in a tiny apartment and used algorithms to invest on Wall Street. The savant built a $14-million portfolio before the stock market crashed last year, records show.

With therapy and new medicine, he began to travel. He moved to Hebron in March 2008 to be near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport. He had no immediate family and knew no one in the area. Then last February, old friends phoned police to say the 73-year-old recluse had vanished. Their plea for help came too late.

Feature article from June 2013:

http://www.cincinnatimagazine.com/features/death-and-the-maid/

It’s unclear to Boone County detectives exactly how Walter Sartory allegedly ended up duct taped to a chair in the basement of Willa Blanc’s large brick house at 10632 U.S. 42 in Union, Kentucky, last winter...

But it’s plain that something happened. Detective Cox theorizes that shortly after Sartory returned from Chicago, Willa Blanc paid him a final visit, this time taking Sartory to the house on U.S. 42 that she shared with her son Louis Wilkinson and her husband Paul Blanc. While Cox would not reveal the means or method he suspects Blanc employed to kidnap Sartory, he doesn’t believe Blanc tried to trick the man. “From what we have at this point in time from the evidence,” he says, “I don’t think he willfully got into the car and went to her house for a purpose. I think he went there, right from the beginning, against his will”...

According to Detective Cox’s testimony from the preliminary hearing, the last time that Willa Blanc called upon her son for help was two days after they placed Walter Sartory’s body in a trash can in their garage. According to detectives, during the early morning hours on Sunday, February 22, Blanc told her husband that she was going to drive to Indianapolis to see a gambling friend named Dwayne Lively. By this time, the trash can with Sartory’s body had been loaded in the back of Paul Blanc’s Chevy TrailBlazer. Otherwise, she was alone as she set out that cold, dark night. She made it as far as Ripley County, Indiana, where, just past the 150-mile marker on I-74, she crashed the TrailBlazer into another vehicle that had apparently stopped in the road. The SUV was totaled. Blanc called her husband and had him wake Louis, and told them to meet her at the accident site. Around the time of that call, Ripley County Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Bradley and a tow-truck operator named Bob Buckley arrived at the scene. The trash can was still in the back of her car...

In January 2012, Willa Blanc was sentenced to life in prison without parole. In September of that year, Louis Wilkinson was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
 

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