CRIME HUNTER: Sunday Cold Case Notebook
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Warren Forrest lurked in the shadows of Clark County in Washington state delivering death and terror.
Forrest is now 75 years old and rotting in a state prison for the murders of two young women. He will never get out.
Now, cold case detectives in the Pacific Northwest suspect that Forrest is a serial killer responsible for the sex slayings of at least five young women in the early 1970s. Investigators are in the process of retesting hair and blood found at the crime scenes.
Forrest was convicted in 1978 in the death of Krista Kay Blake, 20, and found guilty last year in the murder of 17-year-old Martha Morrison.
At the time of the murders, he toiled for the Clark County Parks Department and was married with two daughters. But in 1974, he was arrested and charged with kidnapping and rape.
He told detectives: “All I had in mind was a distraction and the distraction was, you know, deviant fantasies. And the deviant fantasies distracted me from my everyday life. But then it led me to my crimes.”
According to cops, the unsolved all “share common characteristics, including similar victim profiles, the locations of the disappearances and the methods involved in the crimes.”
Starr Lara was in her early teens when her sister Jamie Grissim, one of the five suspected victims, vanished in 1971. She remains traumatized.
“I was 14 and I had no idea what happened,” she told reporters. “I used to write her letters. I’d buy her birthday presents, Christmas presents, you know, I want to make sure she knew I hadn’t forgotten about her.”
SUSPECT, 78, CHARGED IN 1980 MURDER
Deck Brewer Jr. has been caged for years in a Massachusetts state prison. There will be no end in sight for the 78-year-old.
Brewer has now been charged with capital murder in the Jan. 9, 1980, slaying of 25-year-old Susan Leigh Wolfe whose body was discovered in an Austin, Texas alley. She had been walking to a friend’s when she was kidnapped.
Wolfe had been shot in the head.
But decades later a prison DNA swab led detectives to Brewer Jr.
COPS CLEAR 1983 CALI HOMICIDE
The killer bashed Ronald Gaskey’s head in at his Newport Beach home, leaving him to die.
Now, 41 years after the murder, cops say his alleged killer has been arrested. He is Michael Larry Manatt, 70, of Huntington Beach, California.
According to cops, Gaskey was slain on Dec. 13, 1983. Detectives dotted their i’s, crossed their t’s and collected forensic evidence, but the case went ice cold.
An ex-girlfriend found Gaskey’s battered body. The then 36-year-old construction worker’s cohorts became worried when he didn’t show at a construction site. Death came from Gaskey being clubbed in the head and face.
Pals told the Daily Breeze at the time that the victim was a “highly security-conscience person” and fortified his home. But when his girlfriend and later cops arrived, the door was unlocked. Investigators ruled out robbery.
DETECTIVES ID HUMAN REMAINS IN ’73 SLAYING
Roxanne Leadbeater has her name back.
Investigators in Colorado finally put a name to Leadbetter who was murdered in 1972 when she disappeared. The remains were discovered in November 1973.
When the case went cold, the Jane Doe’s remains were preserved and later later interred at Linn Grove Cemetery in Greeley. But like a lot of cold cases from the 1970s, tech had not caught up with cops’ needs.
That changed in 2021, when cold case detectives reopened the probe. Genetic genealogy was the magic bullet and test results confirmed that the victim was Roxanne Colleen Leadbeater, a 15-year-old who had been missing from Los Angeles in 1972.
Now, cops have their sights on catching her killer. The teen wasn’t from Colorado and had no known ties to the Rocky Mountain State. Her family remains mystified about how she came to be in the state.
INNOCENT MAN SPENT 20 YEARS IN PRISON
For nearly 40 years, cops in Georgia say a killer walked free. At the same time an innocent man rotted in a state prison.
Now, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) claim they have solved a gruesome 1985 Camden County double murder. Erik Kristensen Sparre, 61, of Waynesville, Ga., has been arrested and charged with two counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault in the murders of Harold and Thelma Swain.
The Swains were shot to death on March 11, 1985, during a Bible study class at Rising Daughter Baptist Church. Press reports that a man arrived claiming he needed to speak with Harold. A scuffle led to gunfire.
Thelma ran to see what had happened and she was also shot and killed. The killer then cut the church’s telephone lines, left the building and drove away in a battered brown car.
Dennis Perry, 38 at the time, was arrested in 2000. He was convicted in 2003 and to escape the needle, he pleaded guilty. The problem was, he didn’t do it.
Investigators reopened the case in 2020 after Perry was cleared. That led them to Sparre.
“It’s not about me. All I want is justice for Harold and Thelma Swain and their family. When I got exonerated, that was a big burden lifted off me. Now, it’s a big relief,” Perry said in a statement.
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