Found Deceased IN - Abigail (Abby) Williams, 13, & Liberty (Libby) German, 14, The Delphi Murders 13 Feb 2017 #129

[Spartygirl]

This has been my thought for awhile. And this is the person LE are hoping calls in. They would be the person who’s info would blow the case wide open. I think this person has probably been scared out of their mind since they connected the dots, likely within a few days of the crime. I don’t think BG ever discussed anything with this person and probably had a reasonable excuse for being wet, dirty or bloody (I fell into the creek and got wet and scraped up). AND I think someone saw a wet, dirty BG leaving or getting into a car and that’s how LE knows the driver exists. The “witness” is who saw BG getting into a vehicle but saw him from behind or at a distance so didn’t get a look at his face. All MOO

DBM-- Duplicate

 

[Spartygirl]

This has been my thought for awhile. And this is the person LE are hoping calls in. They would be the person who’s info would blow the case wide open. I think this person has probably been scared out of their mind since they connected the dots, likely within a few days of the crime. I don’t think BG ever discussed anything with this person and probably had a reasonable excuse for being wet, dirty or bloody (I fell into the creek and got wet and scraped up). AND I think someone saw a wet, dirty BG leaving or getting into a car and that’s how LE knows the driver exists. The “witness” is who saw BG getting into a vehicle but saw him from behind or at a distance so didn’t get a look at his face. All MOO

" The ALIBI" or SO of someone who saw BG come home, however, I tend to think BG lives alone or would not be seen by anyone entering the home. IMO

 

[Spartygirl]

Carter and the rest of the ISP are all about Public relations. I couldn't believe the things he said during that press conference. They wanted everyone, including the killer to think they were on the door step of this guy, and in the end, he made fools out of LE.
Let's review..
Carter claimed this guy was between 18 and 40. Aren't most criminals?
Carter claimed this guy may be sitting right here in the room, then back pedaled the next day on a talk show saying he may have been close. What's close? 20 miles away having lunch at McDonalds?
Carter claimed that this guy may be from the area, worked in that area, or may frequent that area. Who found that hard to figure out?
A large presentation and an unveiling of a photograph that looks nothing like the first sketch and a message about how the killer didn't think they'd change their strategy. All that did was lower the confidence level the public had in reference to the ISP.
A cliffhanger throughout the presser about how they had new audio that may help crack the case.
"Guys."

I, personally, do NOT have much faith in this bunch of LE, however, the families keep saying they have faith and LE did this presser/2nd sketch for a reason.
While I do not see that at all, I hold a little bit of hope that the families are correct.
HOPE is all I have left after 4 yrs, Libby giving us photo, video AND VOICE-- and still NO arrest. SMH

 

[Spartygirl]

Carter and the rest of the ISP are all about Public relations. I couldn't believe the things he said during that press conference. They wanted everyone, including the killer to think they were on the door step of this guy, and in the end, he made fools out of LE.
Let's review..
Carter claimed this guy was between 18 and 40. Aren't most criminals?
Carter claimed this guy may be sitting right here in the room, then back pedaled the next day on a talk show saying he may have been close. What's close? 20 miles away having lunch at McDonalds?
Carter claimed that this guy may be from the area, worked in that area, or may frequent that area. Who found that hard to figure out?
A large presentation and an unveiling of a photograph that looks nothing like the first sketch and a message about how the killer didn't think they'd change their strategy. All that did was lower the confidence level the public had in reference to the ISP.
A cliffhanger throughout the presser about how they had new audio that may help crack the case.
"Guys."

I, personally, do NOT have much faith in this bunch of LE, however, the families keep saying they have faith and LE did this presser/2nd sketch for a reason.
While I do not see that at all, I hold a little bit of hope that the families are correct.
HOPE is all I have left after 4 yrs, Libby giving us photo, video AND VOICE-- and still NO arrest. SMH

 

[Spartygirl]

Sigh....he we are again. Another year gone by and BG is still out there.

I have this terrible feeling that LE has bungled this investigation. No proof, no nothing...just this horrible feeling.

I mean, how do you have audio and video and probably a lot more on that phone and we still haven't put this monster behind bars?

I just don't get it.

MOO

I agree.
Libby gave us video, photo, VOICE and maybe more to help capture their killer, YET...here we are 4 yrs later.. NO Arrest.
WHY ????
I really thought, when I first saw this case at the very beginning, that this would be a slam dunk when we saw Libby gave us video and voice.
NOPE-- no slam dunk here--- 4 yrs later all I know is way too much info on most of the BG look-a-likes in Delphi.. and there are many.

 

[Beachlife926]

IMO
I wonder if they do have a suspect in mind, but they have a strong alibi. The reason they can’t release more evidence is because they need all the evidence for a conviction, to make up for the strong alibi.
IMO I think they have possible suspect(s) in mind or are close. If they didn’t have suspects in mind, and were clueless, they would release more information. They weren’t afraid to release more information in Faith’s case.

 

[Peppery]

My only question with this scenario would be how did the killer get to the trails to begin with? Unless his car wouldn't start, or he lost his keys or something?

Snipped for focus

Well, this fits in with my “BG knows Delphi but Delphi doesn’t know BG” theory. Bear with me.

All moo, but I think BG spent a fair amount of time in Delphi in the past. Maybe as a child he spent summers there with grandparents or cousins so he never made many friends, or his family moved out of the town when he was perhaps in middle or high school. The grandparents have since died, or the family has been gone for 30 years and doesn’t give it much thought. Very few people in Delphi knew or remembers BG as a kid. Except his ride, who could be a relative or old family friend.

LE asked for info if anyone saw a hitchhiker or someone walking along the Hoosier Highway from 12-5 on the 13th, possibly with a backpack or bag (I think, could be slightly off). Well we know the girls were alive at 2:07 and did not answer DG’s calls starting around 3:15. We also know Libby’s phone rang for a period of time, then started going to voicemail so I assume either the battery died or the phone was damaged. Assuming BG left the scene as late as 3:30 (but probably earlier), it’s nearly impossible to think he was still there at 5.

Why is the window of 12-5 so large? Well, BG may have called for a ride and he wasn’t about to wait any closer to the trails than he had to be. He started walking HH and told his ride to pick him up there.

He was staying with/visiting the person who provided his ride. To get to the trails that day he either walked, hitchhiked or, my top theory is he had been in the park for a few days. Camping out, doing drugs, hunting, who knows, but it’s possible. Also explains his clothing and possible backpack. He had to wear everything he had and it was cold the few days prior to the murder.

He and his ride get to the ride’s house, BG says he’s going home, his visit is over, and gets in his car and leaves. Ride thinks nothing of it. Ride hears about the girls either that night or the next day. He calls BG and says omg, did you hear about the murder, did you see anything while you were there? Or Ride doesn’t know BG was even at the trails, he may have said he was somewhere else. BG says he doesn’t know anything about it. 3 days later LE releases the BG video, Ride connects the dots and is terrified. He never brings it up to BG again because he’s afraid and BG never brings it up to him either.

 

[Satchie]

.I wonder if whatever DNA they had, they planned to submit to Parabon, but realized that familial genealogy would yield nothing ? Because whoever they suspect lives under a different name? And they don’t have enough reason to ask him for his DNA sample directly?

I've heard of many cases where LE collect DNA from something the surveilled suspect discards: a coffee cup, for eg. No warrant needed, and suspect need never know, if they're ruled out.

However, the larger issue of whether they have DNA has never been confirmed, has it? Presumably, they would have tested every man in Delphi, if they did.

 

[Skully]

This is another good source to explain some of the DNA mysteries here. This is not my area, but we have a old case from 1972, and we exhumed her body to get some DNA to see if we could get enough to ID her. The bones were sent to USF to Erin Kimmerly (sp) and she actually did the dig for us. We didn't get enough of a sample at first to put it into CODIS, but a second try and more science, she was able to get a better sample and she is now in CODIS. But we didn't have enough of a sample to use PARABON. If we could have worked with them, then they could have done an ancestry search of databases to see if any of her ancestors were in 23& me or Ancestry or any of those databases. But we have a profile in CODIS and it cycles all the time and hunts for any new samples, so there is hope one day we will give her back to her family.

Solving Crimes and Mysteries
A large portion of human DNA does not code for genes (units of DNA that contain instructions for creating proteins). These non-coding regions nevertheless contain much information useful for forensic and other human identification applications. Non-coding regions of DNA contain many of the markers used for identity testing.

• Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) as discussed above are useful for human identification. The combination of STR alleles is unique to each person and can be used to either include or exclude a person as the source of a biological forensic evidentiary sample. These DNA profiles or DNA fingerprints, are routinely used to solve crimes.
• Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) are individual letter changes in the DNA, i.e. an A in one person and a G at the same position in another person. There are millions of such changes in our DNA and they can be used for identification and ancestry testing. DDC’s GPS Origins™ test uses about 800,000 SNPs to determine ancestry and migration routes of our ancestors.
• Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is found in the energy-producing organelles of the cell called the mitochondria. Most of our DNA is found in the nucleus of cells in two copies; one from each biological parent. Mitochondrial DNA, on the other hand, is a shorter piece of DNA found in hundreds or even thousands of copies per cell and is inherited from the biological mother only.
  Mitochondrial DNA analysis is performed by determining the DNA sequence of a specific region of the mitochondrial DNA known as the hypervariable region. Although not unique individually, mitochondrial DNA can help establish a maternal lineage, since the mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the biological mother.
  Non-coding regions in mtDNA, called hypervariable regions, have significant sequence differences that can be used to differentiate two unrelated individuals. In contrast, biological relatives with a common maternal ancestry have the exact or very similar sequences at this region. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited through the mother, and the biological relationship of two or more individuals may be determined by examining their mtDNA sequences at the hypervariable regions.
  Mitochondrial DNA testing was used to identify the bodies of the Romanovs found in a burial site in Yekaterinburg, Siberia. Mitochondrial DNA sequences from a maternal relative, Prince Philip, matched the DNA extracted from the remains of the Tsarina and her daughters; mtDNA sequence from the Duke of Fife (a maternal relative of the Tsar) was used to confirm the identity of the Tsar’s remains.
• Y chromosome typing (Y-STR) uses short tandem repeats found on the Y chromosome to trace the ancestry of males through the paternal line. The Y chromosome is only passed from father to son, relatively unchanged through the generations, and thus males related through a paternal line share the same Y-STR pattern. While Y-STR analysis gives clues about recent male ancestry, another type of markers called SNPs (pronounced “snips,” single nucleotide polymorphisms) give clues about deep male ancestry—the early origins of the different human populations, going back even up to 100,000 years. Analysis of SNPs combined with Y-STR typing is used to recreate historical migrations of waves of populations across the world.

 

[BeckyF]

HLN special examines the case. This a TV adaptation of the podcast. Airs tonite.

HLN Special Down the Hill Examines Unsolved 2017 Murders of 2 Indiana Girls

 

[minazoe]

Snipped and bolded by me...regarding the bolded part, how do you know that leaving three signatures equals a "seasoned" killer? Are you trying to say that serial offenders leave no signatures on their first crime, one signature in their second murder, two in their third, and so on? Because that's definitely not how investigators view signatures...I think it is an incorrect assumption that signatures equal criminal experience.

Signatures are not defined by whether or not they occur in series. They are only defined as outward manifestations of the inner psychological urge that led to the crime. Take this example:

Charles Albright is believed to be the murderer of at least three women in Texas in the early 90s. He had an early fascination with violence and his mother took some of the small animals he killed to a taxidermist. He developed a fixation on taxidermy, especially the removal of the eyes. He killed his victims, who were sex workers, by beating and shooting them. He also removed their eyes.

Removing their eyes was not in any way necessary to kill them. He did that for his own pleasure and it was a clear reflection of a fantasy or a psychological urge that likely grew out of documented experiences in his troubled childhood. So my question is, has he been caught after the first victim, would we not call the eye removal a signature? Or would we recognize it for what it was, the personation of his fantasy in the crime? Yes, this feature of the killings did ultimately link all three of his murders as the work of one extremely evil and disturbed man, but that does not mean that in the first killing it wasn't a signature.

I'm also thinking of the killer Roger Kibbe. He had several signatures, and used them even on his first crime in the series (tying the victim with a particular type of cord that was special to him, cutting their clothing, and cutting their hair).

I've mentioned Jessica Ridgway's killer here before. He only committed one murder because he was caught fairly quickly but he performed several signatures in his first attempt: hair cutting, re-dressing, souvenir taking, and inserting a cross in the victim's remains. He later tried to say the cross part was re-direction but investigators were able to show that the cross had direct ties to the psychological reasons that he decided to kill. So if you looked at all the signatures this offender left and claimed they had to be the work of an experienced killer, you might have overlooked the teenage suspect who actually committed the crime.

The more I think about the Delphi case, the more I question the idea that he was experienced. IMO the only highly correlated conclusion we can draw from signatures is that the offender is driven by psychosexual urges and is highly likely to seek out more experiences in which to express those urges, i.e. offend again.


All MOO

basically it was my understanding that the signatures led LE to believe this is a SK and may have even linked him to other cases based on the signatures at the crime scene.

this could be totally wrong and I should have couched it as " if we are to believe the signatures point to a seasoned killer.." you are absolutely right and we don't know any thing about what the signatures could mean or if they have been seen in other murders.
mOO

 

[Yemelyan]

basically it was my understanding that the signatures led LE to believe this is a SK and may have even linked him to other cases based on the signatures at the crime scene.

this could be totally wrong and I should have couched it as " if we are to believe the signatures point to a seasoned killer.." you are absolutely right and we don't know any thing about what the signatures could mean or if they have been seen in other murders.
mOO

I understand you now.

However, my advice would be, since we know very little about the crime scene at this point, don't conflate LE's idea that signatures were present with the idea that they know this because they recognized them from another crime. That may be, or may not be. Perhaps, like the unfortunate case of Jessica Ridgway, even though they have a singular crime unlike anything they've ever seen, LE has enough information from the crime scene to infer that fantasy-driven psychological factors were at play.

 

[3blue1pink]

Getting ready to watch the HLN piece tonight . I hope it is more informative that last nights Dulos piece by 48 hrs . I wanted to throw a brick at the TV .... decided against it since it’s hubby’s 70” new Vday gift . Lol here’s to hoping . RIP girls we will find out one day !

 

[Spartygirl]

basically it was my understanding that the signatures led LE to believe this is a SK and may have even linked him to other cases based on the signatures at the crime scene.

this could be totally wrong and I should have couched it as " if we are to believe the signatures point to a seasoned killer.." you are absolutely right and we don't know any thing about what the signatures could mean or if they have been seen in other murders.
mOO

Correct.. I thing "signature" is different than MO but not sure.. I need to research that.

 

[Spartygirl]

Getting ready to watch the HLN piece tonight . I hope it is more informative that last nights Dulos piece by 48 hrs . I wanted to throw a brick at the TV .... decided against it since it’s hubby’s 70” new Vday gift . Lol here’s to hoping . RIP girls we will find out one day !

Same here... getting ready to watch HLN special.
Waiting for hubby to complain about the volume as he is snoozing on the couch..his butt can go upstairs to the bed if he does not want to listen LMAO

 

[Tiger Stripes]

It has been a LONG time since I've been replying but I hope that this comes out right! I don't think it is ridiculous at all to think that BG was disguised, and part of his disguise was a mask. I have been saying exactly that from the very beginning of this case in fact. That is the reason I believe that he DID allow himself to be videotaped and not destroy the girls cell phones. MOO

I have long thought that the killer *did* wear a mask, even if only a partial mask. While thinking of Libby and Abby today and yesterday, and especially remembering their families during this difficult time, a creepy thought came to mind: What if...when the girls *first* saw the man, they just kept on talking (as has been mentioned by various posters here re: "talking about things that middle school girls talk about..."). Then...when he got closer, and called out to them, they...recognized his voice? (And yes, this is entirely speculative.)

Supposing one of the girls said, "Oh, hey, fill in the name of someone well-known to them here, what's with the mask, huh? You can't fool us! We'd know that voice anywhere!" (Yet...*if* this hypothesis were the case, LE is certainly *not* about to divulge that info. Not to the general public, for obvious reasons.) And we *don't* know everything that Libby's phone recorded (speaking of the audio here); what we *do* have is a polished-up version of "DTH".

All JMOO here, but...this possible "voice recognition" (of the killer by the girls) would explain how LE has tended toward the killer's being local to Delphi, or to a nearby town/township/unincorporated area. (Ages ago -- a year? Two years? Not sure right now, but someone here mentioned the possibility of voice-typing, using the sound waves from an audio recording, in order to narrow down potential suspects.)
--
As a side note, I still think that the killer is local -- not necessarily in Delphi (though he absolutely *could* be), but ve-e-e-ry close... Do I think that he's "disguised" himself? Meh. Maybe. But more likely is that he's *truly* "in.plain.sight", and thinks that, since he's skipped away free for 4 years now, he's "home free". Still goes to all the local places (and with Covid? All the better to remain "in disguise", at least partially, with a mask covering part of his face -- more difficult for anyone to suddenly realize... "Could he be the killer?"), lives life as if everything's fine and dandy. All this, while two young girls' lives were cut short.

Not.so.fast.

There is not a day that goes by that he does not think about the crime, his present situation, and reminds himself to not do anything "extraordinary" (i. e., drawing undue attention to himself). Thus, it would *appear* (operative word) that he's gotten away with murder.

Nope.

Justice will prevail.

(Even if the killer's *one* person who "knows"/has "connected the dots" is still too, too terrified to say so much as a word -- to the killer, to LE, to anyone.)

Also (MOO) while the killer may be a quiet individual, they are "known" (even if they've left for a few months, or a semester, etc.) in town, and by local individuals. Those who do know him? They would never dream that he would be capable of such a thing... (but now we're getting into profiling.)

On this sad 4th anniversary weekend, continuing to pray for justice for Libby and Abby and their families.

 

[PingTheRouter]

if my timezone fu is correct down the hill just started airing episode 1 a few minutes a go right?

*edit* all good have it on now

Well part 1 over with, i hope part 2 is a little different and i think it will be, part 1 seemed like more of a catch up episode for people who don't know Abby and Libby

 

[ReadySet]

I have not listened to the "Down the Hill" podcasts or any of the podcasts; so watching with interest the HLN "Down the Hill."

It's certainly clear that people were searching throughout the night. LE until at least 1:30am and then, I believe, back at around 2:30am when they got information that Libby's phone pinged around the area of the bridge.

It's also clear, jmo, that the families did not think anything bad had happened to the girls at first; it was certainly a search for girls who were alive. It wasn't until it was around 9pm or so that Becky Patty began to be alarmed.

There was a lot of contamination of the general area because of the searchers; spit, people relieving themselves, etc.

Part 2 will be aired tomorrow night.

 

[PingTheRouter]

that the families did not think anything bad had happened to the girls at first; it was certainly a search for girls who were alive. It wasn't until it was around 9pm or so that Becky Patty began to be alarmed.

becky patty was on websleuths live on youtube last year and recounted the entire day for us, you can go check it out if you'd like

 

[Charlot123]

I've heard of many cases where LE collect DNA from something the surveilled suspect discards: a coffee cup, for eg. No warrant needed, and suspect need never know, if they're ruled out.

However, the larger issue of whether they have DNA has never been confirmed, has it? Presumably, they would have tested every man in Delphi, if they did.

But does it fly in court? How is the legal side of it?

Can you go to court with the cup you pulled out of a thrash bin?