Authorities believe that 24-year-old Christine Walker arrived at the family's farm home around 4pm on Saturday, December 19, 1959, where she was raped, then murdered by gunshot. Christine lay barefoot, bruised and bloody, her pink flowered dress pulled up, her slips and petticoats in a muddle. Sadly, it never came. The assailant covered little Debbies face with Jimmies hat and shot her in the head, failing to kill her. That had never been clear, McGath replied. This week on Out of the Past: The Walker Family Massacre. He passed a polygraph, and even though there is significant controversy over the validity of early tests, in 2006, Elbert was eliminated through DNA. Cliff was ambushed and killed by gunshot. This article was originally published in the Tampa Bay Times. On December 19th, 1959, an entire family was found brutally murdered in Florida. But McGath's supervisors shut down her efforts to gather the men's boots from Kansas. Some thought he was in love with Christine. . A ranch worker for the Palmer Ranch, McLeod started his morning by getting ready, and then travelling to the home of his coworker Cliff Walker. Unfortunately, the results proved inconclusive. Kansas authorities told Boyer they passed. The docuseries features people who knew her well and remember her as a great hostess and a lot of fun. | https://linktr.ee/MichaelEast. Herbert and Bonnie, and their children, Nancy, 16, and Kenyon, 15, died from shotgun blasts to the head. Authorities acted on a lead that connected the 1959 murder of the Walker family with an earlierand much more famouscrime: the slaying of the Clutter family, the very case that inspired Truman Capote's groundbreaking book, In Cold Blood. Will genealogy sites help solve cold cases? About a month before the Walker family slaying occurred, the Clutters were killed in their Holcomb, Kansas home by Perry Smith and Richard Dick Hickock. After lunch, they went to the McLeods. [11] Hickock's and Smith's bodies were exhumed and DNA extracted. Arriving in Miami Beach, the pair was located just four hours away from the Walker family home and checked out of their motel the morning of the killings. Police are said to have investigated Butchs father, but never even spoke to Butch. Cliff and the kids followed a half hour later in his work Jeep. By continuing to browse, you accept the use of cookies and other technologies. Instead, it was parked a cars width to one side, possibly indicating that another car was parked in her usual spot when she arrived. He confessed to everything, even crimes with which he was obviously uninvolved. Local gossip was that McCall was engaged in an affair with Christine Walker, and he was known to own a .22-caliber gun. For all of the agency's early efforts, even obsession, investigators left stones unturned, resulting in dozens of men in the tiny Sarasota County town living under the frost of suspicion, many until their deaths. For those few crime drama aficionados who aren't familiar with the case, in late November of 1959 two petty felons, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Smith, arrived at a house near Holcomb, Kansas. Afterward, he left the bodies in the house and left the scene. Described as wild, he was violent and boisterous when drunk, many believing him to be mentally unwell. Soft-spoken. Worrying that the family had succumbed to a gas leak, he broke in . Not long afterward, Cliff also returned home with Jimmie and Debbie. So, again, he dialed the detective he trusted most. Maggie and Paul Murdaugh. At around 3:30 PM on December 19, 24-year-old Christine pulled into the family farm after running a few errands. Unfortunately, the sheriff noticed when he walked in that several things had been done to contaminate the crime scene. No child had been spared. Theyd only been married for five years. The Herald Tribune reports investigators are probing the possibility that the killers, who were the inspiration for Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," brutally murdered the Walker family of Osprey, Fla. in 1959. McGath had also considered Wilbur Tooker, Clark's favored suspect and the Walkers' closest neighbor, the one pushy with Christine. Authorities suspected the pair of murderingthe Walkers as well, but could never secure acharge after Hickock and Smith werecleared by the results of a polygraph test. In this photo taken Oct. 19, 2009, the former home of the Herbert Clutter family is seen in Holcomb, Kan. Fifty years ago, the home was the scene of the brutal murder of Clutter, his wife Bonnie . Christine was 24. Life in Ina was simple. Now, Myers asked her, "What I don't get is, how did they get in the house with the dogs sitting there?" The case is unsolved as of February 2023. Working at the scene, police began to search the home for evidence and soon discovered that items were missing; some of them seem quite bizarre. But they were on the run, skipping across the country after the murders as the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, or the KBI, had just started to decipher the crime scene. The best piece of evidence they obtained was the semen sample left behind from Christines rape, though that kind of bodily fluid was of no use to police in 1959. Dead trails, missing bits - but also so many pieces of evidence that lined up. On December 20th, 1959 Don McLeod, a coworker and friend of Cliff Walker, arrived at the Walker home at sunrise to pick up Cliff for hog hunting trip they had planned. With a little investigation, however, it was determined that so much information had been leaked to the media that any civilian could have that kind of knowledge of the crime. Some try to blame the attack on Christine. He and his sister, Novella Cascarella, had spoken with the agency more than 15 years ago about exhuming Christine. He was seeking permission to exhume her from her grave. The order of killings of the family members down to the way they were killed. It's important to keep that in perspective.". After killing four members of the Clutter family in Kansas, 34 days before the Walker murders, Smith and Hickock fled to Florida in a stolen car, and were spotted at least a dozen times between Tallahassee and Miami. Don met the deputies at a local grocery and led them to the horrifying scene. To have a theory was one thing; to have proof was another. Its hard to ignore the fact that he was connected to another mass murder and confessed to having homicidal thoughts. A cemetery posted a personal ad for a goose whose mate died. As daylight broke on Dec. 20, 1959, half a dozen lawmen stood in the living room and stared down in silence. LANSING, Kan. (AP) The bodies of the two men executed for the 1959 murders of a Kansas family that became infamous in Truman Capote's true-crime book "In Cold Blood" were exhumed Tuesday in an . Murderpedia. After committing the "In Cold Blood" murder of Herbert Clutter, his wife and two children on Nov. 15, 1959, Smith and Hickock hit the road, hiding out from law enforcement in Mexico and Florida . Even the worst fears of his imagination couldnt have prepared him for the carnage that greeted him. He was shot from a considerable distance as he entered his home. Hickock and Smith slaughtered the Clutter family on November 15, 1959 in Holcomb, Kansas, about 34 days before the Walker family homicide. Despite these clues, and despite upward of 500 suspects over the years, the case could not be solved. However, in 2012, the Sarasota County Sheriffs Office once again began to look into a possible link, having originally considered them suspects as early as 1960 around the time of their arrest. As he saw his own health slipping, he felt the weight of that vow. Police said 77-year-old Glen Samuel McCurley was in custody Tuesday in connection with the 1974 murder of Carla Jan Walker, who was 17-years-old when she was abducted, held captive and sexually . Now her strokes had robbed her of articulation. Im going to go over a few of the main suspects, then tell you a little bit about my own personal theory. Last Updated On: November 20th, 2019. What is the value of solving an older crime versus a newer one? Whether they were already in the house or Christine let them in is unknown for sure, but it seems likely the reason the family car was in a different location is that somebody else had parked in the family spot. The 1959 murder of Herbert Clutter and his wife and kids in Holcomb, Kansas by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock was, by itself, rather unextraordinary. Six decades later, one morning last June, Pat Myers hobbled into the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office and sank into a seat across from a detective in a crisp white shirt. My bus unfortunately had no choice but to go on that street. Evidence is the exact same in both cases. He and Kimberly McGath went back to 2007, when she expressed an interest in the languishing Walker file. Smith's tooth returned a female DNA profile - that of the examiner who analyzed the bones. They did some grocery shopping, then visited a couple of car lots to look for a new vehicle. The Clutter case bore eerie similarities to the Walker case: both were quadruple homicides, with both parents and two children slaughtered (the Clutters other children escaped the violence because they were not home at the time). Within hours, a crush of cars crawled down the shell road just to see where the family had lived. After killing the Clutter family, Hickock and Smith fled to Florida in a stolen car, where they bought items from a department store in Sarasota, just a few miles away from the Walker home, on the very day that the Walkers were killed. And in Kansas, authorities had been focused on the Clutters, an agency spokeswoman said, and they have no evidence that officers interrogated the killers about the Walkers. Myers leaned forward and rested his arms, sun-splotched from decades overseeing orange groves, on the table. The Clutter murders were the topic of Truman Capote's 1965 best-selling true crime book In Cold Blood. What does society owe, say, the family of Cliff and Christine Walker? Freelance writer. But the Walker murders had consumed detectives, then spit them out, for half a century. Both families lived in rural communities. She had never been able to fully put the case aside. He said . And Pat promised her he would make sure to keep it alive, to fight for a resolution. Perhaps a secret lover had been spurned. Want more true crime? Over the past decade, though, the Walker family murders have taken on another chilling dimension, as the prime suspects are, at present, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. But like other detectives, he had to handle them alongside other investigations. The long-unsolved Walker murders bore surface similarities to the . However, in 2012, the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office once again began to . Oct 24, 2019. Christine, 24, bubbly and spirited, hung back with McLeod's wife. As it turned out, the tests exposed contamination at the lab. He was photographed outside the house the day the bodies were discovered - with no marks on him, McGath commented. All had been shot in the head. www.boxingaddictions.net > Blog > Uncategorized > interactive scene of 1959 walker family murders. interactive scene of 1959 walker family murders. He'd opened the place after two decades in the orange groves. One witness said that the taller of the two men "had a scratched-up face. Yet, Spencer was a known pathological liar, and his claims were soon dismissed as a false confession by Sarasota County Sheriff Ross Boyer. Their funding has helped to solve about 2,000 violent crimes, including killings by the Golden State Killer and the Boston Strangler. However, while both Smith and Hickock would be dead and buried by the time Capote released his pioneering book, they were still very much at large on December 19, 1959. He took off with Jimmie and Debbie in a jeep that could be used by any of the Palmer Ranch hands. "Do you realize, in December, it's going to be 64 years?". Still, it's a shame that the DNA test was inconclusive, because "Smith and Hickock did it" wasn't a terrible theory. . Nov 14, 2022 at 9:00 am. Perry Smith, left, and Richard Hickock were arrested in Las Vegas in connection with the November 15, 1959, murders of four members of the Clutter family in rural Kansas. I dont know if these were only rumors or how thoroughly they were investigated. A blonde hair was found in Christines dress, and neither Smith nor Hickock were blonde. At the second, the killers took personal things related to Christine, namely her high school majorette uniform and marriage license. At the time of the murders, the Walkers had been thinking about buying a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air, and this was the same car that Smith and Hickock had stolen back in Kansas, using it during their flight across the country. While a polygraph test appeared to clear them of the Walker murders, at least one expert has asserted that polygraph machines of the early 1960s were notoriously inaccurate. And though Clark was earnest, Myers feared the result would be no different. [Via: Wikipedia; NY Daily News; Tampa Bay Times;Daily Mail], Featured Photo of The Walkers: What Lies Beyond. On June 7, 2021, agents with the South . (Wayback archive copy)", "Walker Slaying Confession Discredited by Sheriff", "The murderous journey from lies to prison and redemption", "Cold case: Stroudsburg bartender may hold key to unsolved Florida murders", "Walker investigation shows parts of 'In Cold Blood' don't add up (Wayback archive copy)", "DNA From 'In Cold Blood' Killers Could Solve 1959 Florida Cold Case", "No DNA link between Walker murders, 'In Cold Blood' killers", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Walker_family_murders&oldid=1138389492, December 1959 events in the United States, Unsolved mass murders in the United States, All Wikipedia articles written in American English, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 9 February 2023, at 12:07. Just days before Christmas 1959, the Walker family was murdered in their small Sarasota County home, a case that became one of Sarasota's most notorious unsolved crimes. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Richard Luscombe in Miami. They are also the main suspects for the massacre of the Walker family in Florida a month after the Clutter murders. The slaying of . Smith stopped his friend from raping Nancy first but was likely responsible for pulling the trigger on all four killings. The bartender never called again. Grant's department store, seven miles from the Walker home, on the day of the murders. Elbert had also previously made advances toward Christine, and family members thought the grief shown was fake, the suspect fainting twice at the funeral. In 1959, the Walker family was getting ready to spend their second Christmas together as a family of four. Police hope genealogy sites will help solve more cold cases, Colombia wants to deport "cocaine hippos" to stop them from multiplying, Alex Murdaugh found guilty of murders of wife and son, How a tragic boating crash is connected to the family of Alex Murdaugh, killers made infamous in Truman Capote's true crime classic "In Cold Blood. The Walker family was laid to rest in Arcadia, Florida on December 22, 1959. Cliff was shot in the face immediately, followed by Jimmie, the young boy eating a lollipop hed been bought as a treat. She had graduated first in her police class, with a perfect entrance exam. In recent years, as suspicion amassed around the "In Cold Blood" killers, Myers grasped at the hope of closure. The best chance to solve a decades-old quadruple murder in Florida ended Tuesday when sheriff's deputies said they could not link DNA to the two killers profiled in the book "In Cold Blood." The . There have been minor developments in the case in the years since the scent went cold. This peeved Myers. Elbert, on the other hand, would be on the police radar for some time. 1. He'd played his violin - badly, according to the conductor - at a concert in Bradenton.
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