5
New Year’s came and went. More interviews ensued. Most of them were full of “he said that she told him she heard this guy say that because he heard it from that girl,” and it all led nowhere.
Several people who heard about the Cole murder called the Cape Girardeau Police Department. Emma Glass said that she was driving to Kentucky on November 17 and stopped at the rest area on Illinois Route 3, near McClure. She said that she walked into the restroom, saw someone lying on the floor, and quickly turned around and walked back to her car.
Cheryl Bonta called to say that Donald Charles, who parked cars at the Hush Puppy Tavern in McClure, Illinois, saw Sheila Cole leave there with three guys on the night she was murdered. She said that she lived near Charles, and also near Jim Farmer and Dean Abernathy. Bonta said that Beverly Mayberry told her that Farmer drove a van similar to the one that she saw at the rest area on Illinois Route 3 on the night that Sheila Cole was murdered.
A lead with the potential to break the case presented itself on January 5, 1978. A man who asked to remain anonymous because he was in fear for his life contacted the Cape Girardeau Police Department. He spoke with Sergeant Dennis Dolan and told him that Donald Charles had witnessed Cole’s murder.
Harold Cole called Special Agent Smith to report that he received a phone call from a woman named Sandy, from St. Louis. Sandy told him that Sheila attended the Bethany Baptist Church on Koch Street, near the Parshes’ house in Cape Girardeau. He told Smith that Sandy told him that the pastor of the church received two anonymous phone calls prior to Sheila’s murder. The first time, the caller told the pastor that Sheila had been involved in a car accident and was hospitalized. The second time, the caller said that Sheila had been killed in Illinois.
Sergeant Brown followed up on this information by contacting the secretary of the church and was told that there were no records to indicate that Sheila ever attended services at the church. Sheila’s roommates Barnard and Gredizer said that they had no knowledge of Sheila attending the church, either. They also told Brown that their other roommate, Connie Walker, had moved back to her home in California.
Special Agent Smith contacted Donald Charles on January 13 to follow up on the anonymous caller’s tip from the previous week. Charles told Smith that he did not know Sheila Cole and had no information about her death. He said that at the time, he had to take his daughter to St. Judes Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, for treatment for leukemia and that he stayed at the Convention Center Hotel. Charles submitted to taking a polygraph examination. The results indicated that he had no involvement with Cole’s murder.
And round and round it goes until it ends up back at square one—with no evidence, no leads, no suspects, and no end in sight.
The details of the Cole and Parsh cases were put into a new database developed for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) was a state-of-the-art behavior-based crime analysis and investigative tool that could be used by any law enforcement agency to collect, collate, and analyze their own violent crime information on a local level, and assist in identifying similar cases on a regional, state, or national basis. Based on the criteria submitted, other cases across the country would be searched to find links that might connect them to other cases with similar details. The purpose of this process is to detect repeated or identifiable patterns of modus operandi (MOs) that are often connected to the commission of multiple unsolved homicides, which will, in turn, allow ViCAP personnel to pinpoint those crimes that have been committed by the same offender. Law enforcement agencies that enter information into the database or are involved in an investigation can access the results to see if patterns of behavior might point to a specific individual who could become a suspect in the crimes committed. The law enforcement agency can then pursue the suspect based on the information that is gathered. Computer technology at the time was relatively new and not always effective, but today the program is a very resourceful tool that is often used to identify dead bodies that have been found where the manner of death is known or suspected to be a homicide. It is also useful for suggesting a suspect in unsolved homicides—especially those that involve an abduction, or are apparently random, motiveless, or sexually oriented, or are suspected to be part of a series of similar attacks. Once a case is entered into the ViCAP database, it is compared continually against all other entries on the basis of certain aspects of the crime. When a pattern of criminal activity is discovered—for example, a serial murder suspect has been identified—ViCAP can then assist law enforcement agencies by coordinating a multiagency investigative conference for case review.
6
Virginia Witte
May 12, 1978
Nine months after the Parsh murders took place, and just six months after Sheila Cole’s body was discovered at the rest area on Illinois Route 3, near McClure, another murder took place not very far away. On May 12, 1978, David Witte discovered the body of his wife, Virginia, just after 1:00 P.M. in their Westernaire Estates home on Lakeview Drive. He found her naked body on their bed with a kitchen knife protruding from her chest.
The Wittes lived comfortably in a well-to-do neighborhood in West Marion. David was formerly a district manager for General Motors Corporation and had more recently begun operating his own financial investment firm. His financial success afforded his wife, Virginia, the opportunity to be a stay-at-home housewife. Virginia was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1926. She met David and they fell in love and were married in 1942, in Webster Groves, Missouri. She raised two sons, David Witte Jr., who was living in Jefferson City, Missouri, at the time, and Michael Witte, who was married and living in Denver, Colorado. The couple in Denver just had a daughter of their own, Monica Lee Witte, who shared Virginia’s middle name.
The day before she was killed, David and Virginia had just returned home from visiting their son and newborn granddaughter in Colorado. At the age of fifty-one, Virginia was elated to finally become a grandmother. She looked forward to more frequent visits with baby Monica. Unfortunately, she would never get the chance to watch her granddaughter blossom into a young woman.
David decided to run a few errands and meet with a friend for lunch while his wife went to buy groceries. They both left their house in separate cars at around half past eleven o’clock in the morning. When David returned about an hour and a half later, he saw that his wife had already returned before him. Apparently, she had been attacked as soon as she arrived home because bags of groceries were still standing on the kitchen counter.
David called out his wife’s name but received no reply. He walked through the house, looking for Virginia, and found her body lying across their bed with a knife sticking out of her chest. She was dead.
He immediately called the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department (WCSD) and told them that he needed police and an ambulance at his house right away because he believed that his wife had been murdered. Uniformed officers from the Marion Police Department (MPD) arrived at the scene at approximately 1:15 P.M. followed by members of the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department and investigators from the Williamson County Detective Unit.
After they arrived at the scene, Witte led investigators into the bedroom where they found the naked body of fifty-one-year-old Virginia lying across the bed with her hands bound together behind her back. On examination of the body, in addition to the knife that protruded from her chest, they also discovered a large wound across her abdomen, which appeared to be a slash caused by a knife. The knife that was still lodged in Witte’s body matched the set of knives that were found in the kitchen cabinet.
Crime scene investigators sealed off a perimeter around the property and spent almost two hours going through the house and collecting evidence. They decided that there was no indication
