Murder Mystery: The Evidence Was Right Under Their Eyes All The Time
And yet it takes 8 years and a genius to solve this murder
November 30, 1984. The students of Drexel University in Philadelphia, walking into the Randell hall inside the campus, witnessed a horrible sight: the body of a dead woman lying under the stairwell.
The deceased was Deborah Lynn Wilson, a 20-year-old pre-junior mathematics student of the Drexel University.
Deborah had her jeans and blouse on, with the overcoat neatly placed over her body-as if the killer had a soft corner for her. There was no sign of sexual assault, but her shoes and socks were missing, along with the backpack.
The investigative officers figured that the killing happened elsewhere, and the body was dragged all the way upto the stairs. In the process, Deborah might have lost her shoes.
The cause of her death was apparent. Deborah’s face showed bruises, had ligature marks on her neck, and foamy saliva oozing out of her mouth. A definite tell-tale sign of strangulation.
Who would have wanted a cheerful, harmless Deborah dead?
It would take eight years to find an answer to this question, although the evidence was staring at the officers all the time.
Deborah’s late-night assignment
Deborah Wilson was an average but hardworking student. Every time she lost motivation to study, she pushed herself up by staring at a picture of a Mercedes to remind herself how rewarding hard work can be.
Ironically though, this indomitable spirit put her in the line of danger.
Deborah had deadlines to meet on submitting an assignment, and she decided to pull an all-nighter at the computer lab in the basement. It was here that Deborah encountered her killer.
The ligature marks on her neck matched one of the extension cords in the lab. So, the murder weapon and the answer to ‘HOW’ was evident. Also, there were bloodstains on a chair- which could have been Deborah’s or the killers.
The officers were also struck by the fact that the computer lab was so intact. No chair or equipment was even slightly misplaced. The bruise marks on Deborah’s face was a definite indication of a tussle, but this lab didn’t look anything like it witnessed a struggle.
The police soon understood that the janitor had cleaned the lab that morning, unaware that it was a crime scene. He apologised, adding that the room was quite disordered when he came in. But the students always left the room messed up, and therefore the janitor found nothing dubious.
Could the janitor have erased important pieces of evidence?
Even so, the bloodstains were a critical finding that the officers could work on. This was 1984, and DNA profiling was still not developed. However, the officers could match the blood group with the suspects and see if something stood out.
And the police had not one but 4 suspects.
The first suspect
The first suspect was Deborah’s boyfriend- Kurt Raynor. Here is his version of the turn of events on Deborah’s last day:
Raynor had kept Deborah company in the computer lab till 1: 30 AM, at which he felt too tired and left for home. On his way out, Mr Raynor met a security guard, to whom he asked to keep an eye on his girlfriend.
When Raynor woke up in the morning, he heard rumours that a corpse was found under the stairs, and he rushed to the college, fearing it could be his girlfriend. On the way in, he also found Deborah’s car parked in the same spot as yesterday, which intensified his suspicion.
Raynor burst into the cordoned-off area, shouting it was his ‘Debbie’, at a time when even the police had not confirmed her identity. It was Raynor, the first person to have identified the body.
The investigative officers knew that the lover or the boyfriend mostly emerges as the culprit in cases like this. Besides, Raynor had bruises on his fist and a cut between fingers. His explanation for both injuries- that he punched the wall and cut himself while repairing the car, did not impress the officers.
On top of everything, the coat placed over Debbie’s body was construed as the killer’s ‘affection’ towards the dead.
Raynor had just become suspect number 1.
The second suspect
The investigative officers found the security guard, Mr Chapman, to whom Kurt Raynor had asked to watch out for his girlfriend. Chapman confirmed everything Raynor had said.
The boyfriend now had a decent alibi but was far from being eliminated from the list of suspects.
But did this security guard go and check Deborah, as Raynor requested? He didn’t, but he instead radioed another guard- Bronson Ziegler.
He insisted on either Mr Ziegler or Mr David Dixon-the second guard on duty around Randell hall, to keep an eye on Deborah.
Officers ran a background check on all the three guards, and David Dixon and Chapman came out clean. Mr Dixon had served in the army, possessing an untainted record while Chapman was a long-time trusted employee.
On the other hand, Bronson Zeigler had served a sentence for burglary and lied about it to get the job at the university!
The officers grilled Mr Zeigler, but he firmly stood by his statement- that he didn’t feel like checking on Deborah that day, so he instead asked Dixon to do it for him.
However, Dixon denied this but added that he was aware of someone working in the lab as he heard the printer’s sound working around 2 AM.
The officers had no material evidence to pin on Zeigler, but he had just become suspect number 2.
Suspect number 3
A 28-year-old PhD student Ashlyn Berhard was around Randell hall that night. His office was right above where Debbie was working, and Ashlyn’s record was sketchy.
There were several complaints that Ashlyn had sneaked up behind female secretaries and threatened them with a pencil held up to their necks. To make matters worse for him, Chapman, the guard, had seen a silhouette of a student in the night, which turned out to be Ashlyn.
Ashlyn volunteered to take a polygraph but failed. His alibi, too, wasn’t strong. The students with whom he was working on that night reported Ashlyn to have gone out for three hours, and that was enough time to pull off a murder.
Ashlyn thus became a hot suspect.
The fourth suspect
The fourth suspect was Alan Smith, whose romantic proposals were turned down by Deborah. Infuriated by the denial, Alan used to stalk Debbie, and on the day before she got killed, he had an altercation with her. Mr Smith caught Deborah by her shoulders and violently shook her.
Certainly, Smith had a strong motive, and his alibi was the weakest too. He said he was home alone watching TV when Debbie was killed.
But just like all the other three suspects, there was no tangible evidence to incriminate Mr Smith.
The police were pinning their hopes on the blood sample results to match with any of the suspects’ blood groups.
The blood results
So far, the investigative officers had four suspects:
The boyfriend- Kurt Raynor, with a decent alibi.
The security guard Bronson Zeigler with a tainted charge sheet and weak alibi.
The hot-headed Ashlyn with a poor alibi and a failed polygraph test.
The stalker Alan Smith with the weakest alibi.
Unfortunately, the blood type in splatter on the chair didn’t match the blood type of any of the suspects or the deceased!
This was a killer blow to the investigation, at least temporarily. A week after the murder, Deborah’s missing backpack was found in the college’s ‘Lost and Found. But it did not provide any useful evidence to the investigation either.
The suspects had now become obsolete. The available pieces of evidence didn’t lead the investigative team anywhere. The officers were now truly searching in the dark.
The word got out that the investigation had hit a dead wall, which created a sort of panic among the students. Everyone believed that the killer was amongst them. People couldn’t conjure a reason why anyone would ever want Debbie dead- wondering if the killer was doing it for fun, choosing random targets.
Eventually, Deborah’s mysterious case was pushed into oblivion- another frozen case.
The Vidocq society
The year is 1992. Deborah Wilson’s killer was still free, whoever he was. Officer Bob Snyder was assigned to investigate cold cases, and he found the Deborah murder intriguing. There were many suspects evidence, but he felt something was overlooked.
Desperate, Mr Snyder decided to pitch this case to the Vidocq society.
The Vidocq society was a fraternity of detectives, prosecutors, defence attorneys, forensic scientists, FBI officers and polygraphers-the best of the bests from different fields. They occasionally conducted a brainstorming session, in which these men of different expertise offered their valuable insight that opened new avenues of investigation.
Bob Snyder threw Deborah’s mystery at Vidocq.
Mr Snyder explained the details of the case to the members of Vidocq. Several thoughts came up from the members, but what proved critical was the theory of Richard Walter- a criminal psychologist and a founding member of Vidocq.
Known for his profiling, Walter said that the criminal, in all likelihood, is a control freak who wanted to assert his dominance over Deborah.
But he would also ask the officers to turn their attention to a piece of evidence that everyone ignored:
The missing shoes.
Mr Walter theorised that the missing shoes strongly indicate that the killer is a foot-fetishist. The officers who initially investigated the case had not found the missing shoes as an anomaly worth pursuing.
Bob Snyder found Walter’s observations interesting and decided to conduct a re-interview of everyone connected with the case, hoping to find a breakthrough-this time perhaps connected to a shoe.
The breakthrough
Mr Snyder interviewed the manager of the computer lab. As he recollected the events on the day Deborah died, he said he was always bewildered by one particular detail. The printers in the lab were always turned off after 10 PM, so he didn’t know how David Dixon, one among the guards on duty, managed to hear the sound of the printer at around 2 AM.
The officers had eliminated Dixon from the list of suspects for his perfect army record and a clean sheet. But the manager’s revelation now forced Snyder to dig deep into Dixon. Snyder and his team checked Dixon’s file in detail, and they found a curious detail:
While serving in the army, Mr Dixon had got into trouble for stealing another officer’s white sneakers! And Deborah, on the day when she was killed, was wearing a pair of white sneakers!
Snyder was careful not to jump into conclusions. He interviewed several women who were neighbours of Dixon. Four such women reported that their house had a break-in when Dixon lived around.
However, none of them lost any valuables, except their white sneakers and dirty socks!
The officers got a warrant and raided Dixon’s house, and there they found- 20 pairs of white sneakers, all neatly wrapped in transparent covers. They were little souvenirs that Dixon kept for himself. What was also recovered was more than 75 videos in Dixon’s possession.
These videos were mostly women simply walking around or exercising in white sneakers, women sucking toes and having sex with nothing but the sneakers.
When police arrested Dixon, he didn’t admit to killing Debbie. But as soon as he got into the cell, he began to brag about his achievements to his cellmate.
He told him proudly how he had murdered Deborah for her Reebok white sneakers. The cellmate soon reported this to the officers. Mr Dixon’s fate was sealed with this ‘voluntary’ statement.
When Dixon’s collection of videos was played in the courtroom, the audience was embarrassed by its obscenity. The judge requested the videos to be turned off and instead explain their content.
The charges against him were proved, and Dixon was sentenced to life.
David Dixon, the foot fetishist, killed Deborah Wilson because she didn’t let him do what he wanted to do with her feet.
If Vidocq had not come into the investigation, perhaps Dixon would have continued on his merry way, collecting more sneakers and ending more women’s lives.
Interested in more stories like this? Check out the following links:
Sources
“https://services.library.drexel.edu/static_files/triangle/Drexel-Triangle_1984-12-07.pdf”
“https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-05-13-vw-1584-story.html”
“https://apnews.com/article/b5d2113df4bbdfe03c1a2369f23c409c”
