CRIMINAL COLD CASES-FUGITIVES FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE-27-FARYION WARDRIP

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05 COLD SWEAT
The advent of DNA technology has created a revolution in the solving of cold cases. Today, with DNA profiling, the police and legal authorities have a very powerful tool in their possession – a system of identification that is almost always entirely correct. As a result, in the twenty-first century, all over the country, specialist police units are being formed to deal with the backlog of unsolved cases on their files – cases that can now be reviewed in the light of this new technology. Their task is immense, but theoretically at least, it may be possible for them to solve many old, cold cases purely through computer analysis. CODIS is a national database which aims to list the DNA profile of every convicted felon in America. When a murder, rape, or other violent crime is committed, samples of blood, semen, hair, and so on can be taken from a victim's body, and the results analysed to create a DNA profile. This profile is then fed into the computer, in the hopes that a match will be made against the database. To date, this system has been very effective; all the cases in this section, and indeed, a large number of the cold cases described in this book as a whole, have been solved in this way.

FARYION WARDRIP:
THE SILVER-TONGUED PREACHER
TERRY SIMS WAS FOUND DEAD IN HER APARTMENT IN WICHITA FALLS, TEXAS, IN THE DECEMBER OF 1984. THE NEXT SPRING, THE NAKED BODY OF TONI GIBBS WAS FOUND LYING IN A SCRUB-BRUSH FIELD BY AN ELECTRICIAN CHECKING A MALFUNCTIONING TRANSFORMER, AND IN THE LATE SUMMER OF THAT SAME YEAR, THE NAKED CORPSE OF ELLEN BLAU WAS DISCOVERED IN A DITCH BY A COUNTY EMPLOYEE MOWING THE VERGES OF A COUNTRY ROAD.
Sims' murder was investigated by the Wichita Falls City Police. Gibbs' body was discovered a stone's throw over the county line, and was investigated by the Archer County Sheriff's Department. Blau was found outside the city limits, and the murder was investigated by the local sheriff.

Three dead bodies and three different law enforcement agencies. None of them shared notes or other information, nor did they pool resources and work collectively. The murders were not seen as being related and each agency had their own suspect. The city police thought Sims' killer was a co-worker; in Archer County they believed that Gibbs was murdered by her admirer Danny Laughlin. The Wichita Falls sheriff focused his attentions on Blau's former boyfriend. Of the three suspects, only Laughlin was ever charged, and a jury acquitted him eleven to one. The three cases went cold. It was years later before anyone realized that they might have been connected.

Bricklayer turns sleuth
John Little had always wanted to be a policeman, but he failed the medical due to poor eyesight. Instead he went into construction, and gained a reputation as an adept and reliable bricklayer – although his heart was never in it. After several attempts he succeeded in realizing his dream in 1993, and became part of the District Attorney's investigative team.

It was December 1998, almost fourteen years to the day after Terry Sims was murdered, when DA Barry Macha admitted to Little that he had come to see the three unsolved murders as a stain on his career. He asked Little to look into it. Perhaps something had been missed.

Faryion Wardrip, a nondescript looking man: a fact that helped protect him as people found him to be likable and trustworthy

For John Little, it was not just a regular investigation. He could remember the night he found out Toni Gibbs had gone missing. He remembered telling his wife, who had been friends with Gibbs at college. When the police asked for volunteers to help the search parties he had stepped forward, and brought his brother with him. They had spent the whole day on foot, a silent group of solemn strangers, their eyes peeled to the ground, braced for the worst. But they had found nothing. Eventually, several weeks later an electrician had stumbled upon Gibbs' corpse in the course of a routine repair.

Although Little never told Bracha this, the murders had never been far from his mind. Over the years he had found himself taking solitary drives to sites that were connected with them, hoping something might jog his memory, or get him thinking. Now that he was on the case, it was plain old diligence that got him on the right track. Little went through the three files and made lists of every name that came up or could come up in each one, and then compared lists to see if any of them reappeared. One name came up three times, and after a brief records check, the former bricklayer knew he was onto something.

The preacher with a past
Faryion Wardrip was living in Olney, Texas, when John Little made the connection. He had gained a reputation as a conscientious worker and taught Sunday school at his local chapel. A well-known figure in the parish, he hoped to begin training as a Baptist preacher. But Wardrip was a preacher with a past. If you looked closely, you could see an electronic monitoring bracelet around his ankle. Clearly, Wardrip was on parole for a serious crime. If parishioners asked, he usually told them he had been serving a manslaughter sentence for killing his girlfriend in a drink-driving accident. Sometimes he would say he got into a bar-room brawl and ended up killing a man. As his family would later put it, 'Faryion is one of those people who would climb a tree to tell a lie when it was just as easy to stand on the ground and tell the truth.' Even in his youth in Marion, Indiana, where he was a high school dropout, Wardrip had lied about himself extensively. Later, he would boast about the glory of his military days, although the truth was that he had been discharged from the army for drug use.

But as it turned out, Wardrip really did have something to hide. He had been convicted in 1986 of murdering a female friend, Tina Kimbrew, and sentenced to thirty-five years.

Kimbrew's parents had campaigned to secure a life sentence, but the Texas Department of Criminal Justice had launched a new Victim Offender Dialogue programme, and the family was asked if they wanted to participate. The idea was to give a victim's family an opportunity to question the criminal who had killed their loved one, about their reasons; about the crime; about anything. Wardrip, who claimed to have found God while he was behind bars, was keen to get talking.

After a five-hour session, Robert Kimbrew was so convinced that Wardrip was full of remorse, that his opinions changed. 'When you get out of here,' he said to the supposedly penitent Wardrip, 'if you find yourself headed for trouble again, and you run out of other people to turn to for help, you can call me.' Thanks in no small part to the results of this new dialogue programme, Wardrip was paroled in 1993. Tina's father had expressed admirable Christian sentiments, but he was wrong about Wardrip. Wardrip had not told him the full story, by any means.

Tagged but unrepentent: by apparently turning to God, Wardrop literally talked his way out of jail – allowing him to rape and murder again

A stolen coffee cup
Semen samples had been collected from the bodies of Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs when their bodies had been autopsied; Ellen Blau's body had been in such a severe state of decomposition when it was found that it offered practically no physical evidence. In a police laboratory archive the samples were kept carefully, until such time as forensic technology would develop to a level where it might become useful. In 1996, DNA profiling became part of the law enforcement programme in Texas. It showed that Gibbs and Sims had been raped (and almost certainly killed) by the same man. It seemed obvious that a DNA sample from the suspect was the lynchpin upon which a successful prosecution would depend, but for legal reasons, the district attorney argued that simply asking for a sample would be a waste of time. Then again, if the sample had been obtained without the suspect's consent, this might give the defence lawyer a shot at throwing the case out of court. So the detectives had to come up with another plan.

Little trailed Wardrip for weeks, in plain clothes, in a borrowed car. Being careful not to draw attention to himself, he learnt the details of Wardrip's daily routine, even the habits of his second wife. He found out what day the Wardrips did their laundry on, and spent the whole day in the launderette they frequented, washing the same clothes over and over again. That was when he got his chance. The suspect arrived in his car and parked outside, and Little saw that he was finishing a cup of takeaway coffee. Wardrip was about to throw it away. Thinking quickly, the investigator filled his mouth with a wad of chewing tobacco and approached the suspect:
'Do you mind if I have your cup?'
'My cup?'
'Yeah, for a spit cup.' 'Help yourself.'
Their little verbal exchange was a piece of legal chicanery that meant under an 'abandoned interest' law, any samples taken from the cup would be entirely admissible in court. Back in the lab, working on a trace of Wardrip's saliva, everyone awaited the results with some eagerness. Everyone apart from John Little; he was already convinced.

A fifth victim
Armed with a positive DNA match from the saliva, Little collected Wardrip and brought him to the DA's office. It was the day before Wardrip was due to read at church. Wardrip was hopeful at first that the meeting might be about the removal of his surveillance anklet, and he was right, in a sense. He would not need one where he was going.

The police confronted him with the incontrovertible evidence that Little had collected. Within minutes, Wardrip had confessed. While he was not forthcoming on the details, and made a string of excuses for himself, he admitted to the murder of Terry Lee Sims, a twenty-one-year-old student; Toni Gibbs, a twenty-three-year-old general nurse at the hospital where he had once worked; and Ellen Blau, another student, a year older than Sims. Then came a shock: Wardrip added that he would like to confess to the murder of housewife Debra Taylor in Fort Worth in March 1985, a twenty-six-year-old mother of two. The police had never considered him a suspect for this murder.

As the interview concluded, Wardrip was asked for the record, as is routine, if he had been promised anything in return for making his statement. 'Eternal life with God,' was his answer. 'I was promised I wouldn't burn in hell.' In November 1999 Faryion Wardrip was sentenced to death by lethal injection. He was forty years of age. Whoever or whatever promised him that he would not burn in hell is a matter of speculation, but the promise that he was about to meet his maker cannot have been of much comfort to him, for within months, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he was trying to bring an appeal against the court's decision.