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Murder suspect due in U.S. court after DNA cracks open 1988 case
A 59-year-old Indiana man will be formally charged on Thursday with the 1988 murder of an eight-year-old girl after the decades-old cold case was cracked open by DNA evidence linked to a genealogical website, authorities said on Tuesday.
John Miller of Grabill, Indiana, was arrested in nearby Fort Wayne on Sunday after DNA evidence and records on publicly accessible genealogical websites helped investigators track him down. Investigators followed a pattern similar to that used to track down the "Golden State Killer" in California earlier this year.
Miller on Monday was preliminarily charged with murder, child molestation and confinement of someone under 14 years old, 30 years after eight-year-old April Tinsley was found dead in a ditch. He has been ordered held without bond.
If you don't hand over your DNA, you want child murderers to frolic in freedom.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday July 18 2018, @04:25PM (2 children)
Whats he been doing for the last 30 years?
I'm not making a stealth argument for going easy on the guy, but just stating the practical obvious argument the defense lawyer is going to make, that "everyone knows" that pedos are serial killers and they kill over and over for the thrill and predators can never stop and all that stuff that's a weird mixture of being true and merely good Hollywood...
So the defense argument is going to be theres been dozens of recent incidents of sloppy lab work giving false evidence over the years, everyone knows that both pedo and predator is like the TV commercial "you can't stop with just one" so if they're accusing him of one murder-rape there must be like 59 others unsolved in the last 30 years. Because everyone knows predators are unstoppable, that means "rather unlikely" conspiracy theory stuff starts being more likely than he killed one then permanently quit the hobby.
Just saying its an interesting collision of technical results being near perfect assuming no corruption colliding with some equally strong interesting belief systems about human behavior. There's a lot of Hollywood indoctrination about this situation on both sides, prosecutor and defense.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 18 2018, @05:02PM
Similar thinking went through my mind. Except, I was wondering more about how many other people he may have killed. Reading TFA, he promised to kill again when he left taunts for the police.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 18 2018, @08:38PM
Hypothetical Prosecutor says: Maybe there IS a string of unsolved murders that this particular pedo is guilty of. Pointing out that there might be, is not a defense against the evidence and burden of proof being presented by the prosecution in this particular murder trial. Nor is it evidence of any fault in the science or technology. We may indeed be back with more murder trials for this guy once more evidence comes to light. But today we're trying THIS case. Not hypothetical ones.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.