CRIMINAL COLD CASES-FUGITIVES FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE-29-ELAINE GRAHAM

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ELAINE GRAHAM:
A LONG ROAD TO JUSTICE
THE CASE OF EDMOND JAY MARR IS ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY IN THE HISTORY OF THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT (LAPD). TWENTY YEARS AFTER COMMITTING A MURDER, FOR WHICH HE WAS NOT PUNISHED AT THE TIME, MARR WAS FINALLY TRACKED DOWN. THE DEPARTMENT's NEW COLD CASE UNIT REOPENED THE FILE ON HIS VICTIM, ELAINE GRAHAM, AND THROUGH ADVANCES IN DNA TECHNOLOGY, WHICH INVOLVED TAKING SAMPLES FROM HER DAUGHTER – A TWO-YEAR-OLD AT THE TIME OF THE MURDER – THIS TIME THEY WERE ABLE TO GAIN A PROFILE OF THE KILLER.
Thus it was that the brutal murder of a young mother was finally avenged, after decades of being just another statistic in the city's roll of violent crimes. Elaine's family and friends thought the authorities had forgotten about her – but they were wrong: they just had to wait a very long time for justice to come their way.

When Elaine Graham met her death, she had everything to live for. She was a hard-working, twenty-nine-year-old nurse with a husband and a young daughter. She had ambitions to become a writer, and was taking writing classes at university. Every night, she wrote a journal in which she addressed her entries to her baby daughter. The night before she was murdered, she wrote an entry about a dream that she had had, in which she and her daughter were a pair of detectives engaged on a case where they caught a bad man and solved a big case. The dream was to prove prophetic, but only after years had gone by. And little did Elaine Graham think at the time that it was she herself who would be the victim in the case.

A double-edged dagger
On that fatal morning, 17 March 1983, Graham dropped her daughter off with her carer, and set off to attend her writing class on the campus of the California State University Northridge, which was near her home. That was the last time anyone saw her. She never returned to collect her child that day, and no one knew where she had gone. The police were called in, and next day, in the early hours of the morning, her 1971 Volkswagen was found at a parking lot in the Santa Ana Fashion Square Mall (now known as the Main Place Mall). Detectives from the Robbery and Homicide division of the police department were assigned to the case, and began by focusing their attention on a young man who had been near the Cal State campus on the day that Elaine had disappeared. His name was Edmond Jay Marr.

Marr was twenty-five years old at the time of the investigation. He had just been dishonourably discharged from the army, and was having a difficult time at home, arguing with his parents, especially his father. On the night of the seventeenth, he had visited his sister, who lived only a few blocks away from the mall where Elaine's car was later found. Marr was found in possession of a double-edged dagger. The dagger was taken in for examination, using the conventional techniques of serology that were available at the time. A tiny patch of blood on the well-cleaned dagger was found that was consistent with the blood type of Elaine Graham, but it was impossible to narrow the match down any further. As the investigation proceeded, it was found that Marr had been arrested for violent robbery, and his dishonourable discharge from the army came to light. However, none of this in itself was concrete enough evidence to charge him with the murder.

Fitting easily into a pocket, it is all too easy for a murderous urge to be expressed by a knife attack, as Elaine Graham found out to her cost

Human bones discovered
Eight months later, human bones were discovered by some hikers in Brown's Canyon, a remote area of the hills above Chatsworth. The bones were examined, and it became clear that the victim had met a violent death. There was a dent in one of the rib bones which suggested that the victim had been stabbed. A woman's blouse was also found in the bushes near the bones, and when it was examined, it was noticed that there were no holes in the fabric. The combination of the dent in the bone and the unpunctured fabric of the blouse suggested that the killer had stripped his victim before stabbing her to death.

The skeleton tells a story: although DNA evidence rarely survives in bone, the bones themselves often retain a good record of how their owner met their death

For Elaine's family, these meagre but horrifying details were all they knew about her last moments. It was a relief for them to know that she had not simply run away and abandoned her dearly loved husband and daughter, but it was deeply traumatic to learn that she had been murdered in such a brutal, terrifying way.

Detectives on the Graham case brought Marr back in for questioning when it was discovered that, as a young man, he had often hiked in the area of Brown's Canyon. The following year, the detectives brought the case to the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, and the decision was made to keep the evidence in the case, including Marr's knife, until advances in forensic technology could give a clearer result. For the time being, despite the new findings, and much to the disappointment of the police officers concerned, there did not seem to be enough evidence to bring the case to the courts.

Sadly, for the next two decades, there were no new leads on the case, and the file on Elaine Graham lay on a shelf in the LAPD's offices. It was not until November 2001 that the case was reviewed, by which time the leading detectives in the investigation, Paul Tippin and Leroy Orozco, had retired from their jobs. In the new millennium, a new unit had now been formed in the Robbery Homicide Division: the Cold Case Homicide Unit. The aim of the unit was to try to solve old, cold cases on the police's files, using the now much improved techniques for DNA profiling. Two new detectives were assigned to the Elaine Graham case: Rick Jackson and Tim Marcia.

Missing piece in the puzzle
Going back through the files, Jackson and Marcia discovered that Marr's dagger had been carefully stored as evidence. Jackson and Marcia ordered the dagger to be reanalysed by the police forensic department, who re-found the minute amount of blood that had remained underneath its handle. The next step was to obtain a DNA sample from the victim to match it with, so they went to Graham's daughter, Elise. From Elise's DNA, which was the same as her mother's (DNA works in such a way that although there are minute differences between peoples' DNA, these differences are smaller between blood relatives), they matched the blood on the handle. This was something that could not have been done back in 1983, and it was to prove the crucial missing piece in the puzzle of Elaine Graham's death.

As a result of Jackson and Marcia's investigations, which involved witness interviews, phone tap recordings and forensic analysis, Edmond Jay Marr was arrested and charged with the kidnap and murder of Elaine Graham. He was held on a one million dollar bond. His trial received a great deal of publicity, and the courtroom was packed. Friends and relatives of the deceased were there, including one of the detectives who had worked on the case originally in 1983. Graham's daughter Elise, now aged twenty-four, stood up in court and told Marr exactly what losing her mother at such a young age had meant to her. 'You ask this court for mercy,' she said. 'Where was the mercy for my mother? You've given me a life sentence of a broken heart,' she went on. 'You took from me the most important person in the world.' It became clear that, over the twenty years following Graham's death, while the case had gathered dust in terms of the police investigation, there were many for whom it had never grown cold.

Edmond Jay Marr, now forty-seven, pleaded guilty, and admitted the use of a knife in his crime. As a result, his lawyers were able to cut a deal with the prosecution, which resulted in a verdict of second, rather than first-degree murder. He was sentenced by the judge to a prison term of sixteen years.

It had taken twenty years, but in the end, Elaine Graham's prophetic dream had finally come true. She and her daughter Elise had caught a criminal, and solved a case of murder.

A band-aid on a bullet hole?
The case was a triumph for the newly opened unit in the LAPD, which had been criticized in some quarters as 'putting a band-aid on a bullet hole': journalists had pointed out that there were only six detectives and one supervisor assigned to the unit, yet there were over eight thousand unsolved homicide cases on the files for them to deal with, some of which dated as far back as the 1960s. If one calculated that each detective could solve a cold case a month – which was unlikely, given the complications of most criminal investigations – it would take over a century for the team to get up to date. Many felt that public funds would be better spent on detective teams that would solve current crimes, rather than delving into old cases that were unlikely to be resolved.

However, the solving of the Graham case did much to improve the image of the new cold case unit, and it was pointed out that, even if only a few cases were ever solved, this was of crucial importance, not only to the relatives of the victims, but to the morale of the city as a whole. The fact that the unit had been set up, and that there was some impetus towards finding the perpetrators of homicidal crimes, was of great symbolic – if not always literal – significance to the citizens of Los Angeles, in that it showed that the many victims had not been altogether forgotten, and that justice could still be served for at least some of them.