I feel a little odd about posting this. I'm sorry for the length but I hope a good jumping off point for sleuthing. I asked a few days ago whether LE had clearly stated that this case was, to the best of their knowledge, unconnected to others. I decided to look up for myself what LE had said in official statements about it and (please correct me if there's something out there that contradicts this), I found that they skirted that question when it was posed. LE said they were "unaware" of any cases which appeared to be connected but then they qualified that by saying there were instances of individuals who had been found to have violated probation, etc, but nothing associated with these homicides. So it seems to me that they didn't directly address the question of whether there are other homicides out there that they believe are connected. Not that I think they could or should reveal their hand on that topic at this stage. So with that said, I went looking for other unsolved homicides and I found a possible one to discuss. There is a Parabon snapshot from this other case to compare with our newest composite sketch of BG, which I will attach to this post.
April Tinsley was an 8 year old girl who was abducted and murdered in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1988. There is a thread here on Websleuths devoted to her case and it has all the background info. In summary, she was abducted around 4 pm from a street in her neighborhood. Witnesses said they might have seen her being forced into a pickup truck. Three days later, her body was found in a ditch 20 miles northeast of Fort Wayne. She had been raped and suffocated. The case went cold but 2 years later the killer started to communicate with police. He wrote a message on a barn door (evidently returning to the scene over multiple days to re-write the message until it was dark enough to be seen). There were still no breaks in the case but in 2004 he started to communicate again. This time he left messages on little girls' bikes and in mailboxes around the Fort Wayne area. I won't go too far into the messages and the contents thereof but he left indisputable DNA evidence in them that he was the same person who raped April Tinsley. He also left Polaroid pictures of the lower half of his body against a distinctive bedspread. Despite all these clues, he has never been found and his DNA has never been matched to any database.
At a glance this case has several differences from the Delphi murders - younger victim, transported a distance from the abduction point. But Fort Wayne is only 95 miles away from Delphi, railroad tracks were in close proximity to both the crime scene and the place where the killer left taunting notes, and several things about the Parabon snapshot, generated in 2016, made me wonder.
According to Parabon, April Tinsley's killer had fair or very fair skin, hazel or green eyes (not blue), brown or black hair (note: not reddish brown as the Delphi sketch tells us, but remember he also sent Polaroids and the man in those is said to have "reddish tint" to his leg hair). His age estimate as of 2015 was 45-55 years old, though LE in that case urged people to consider someone a few years older or younger. I felt that the age-progressed Parabon snapshot may have failed to capture things like a goatee/facial hair, perhaps a past broken nose or the age effects of chronic alcohol use or sun damage to skin, but that there could be similarities to BG.
The time between a murder in 1988 and one in 2017 seems insurmountably long to me to consider this the work of the same perpetrator. However, I read in the FBI's official profile of April Tinsley's murderer that, contrary to the average person's belief that once an offender kidnaps, rapes and kills, he will always kidnap, rape and kill, in reality a sex offender can engage in a lot of different behaviors that satisfy their urges. These include peeping, indecent exposure, etc and often these go unreported by the victims so it flies under the radar of police. Gaps in activity can be explained by institutionalization, relocation, or, terrible to think about, ongoing access to a victim in their "normal" life.
What about the fact that a pedophile preferred an 8 year old victim in the first instance - why would he go after a 13 and 14 year old in a subsequent murder? I discovered, again in the FBI profile of April Tinsley's killer, that not all child sex offenders are the same and some will victimize adults or older children/teens situationally. I think - MOO here - that it has probably become relatively more difficult to abduct young children as parents are less likely to let them play outside unsupervised in the way they did in the 80s. However, pre-teens like Abby and Libby have more freedom to be alone or unsupervised in public. Therefore, perhaps a killer will evolve in his methods as time goes on and/or perhaps his fantasies change.
If LE in the Delphi case have the perpetrator's DNA, then obviously this is a dead-end. If they are still working on separating out all the DNA at the scene, or if the killer managed somehow to commit a sexual assault without leaving DNA (and assault can happen in more ways than rape, or attempts can be made to destroy evidence, so I guess it's theoretically possible), then...could the killer of April Tinsley and Libby and Abby be one and the same?
