National Forensic Science Week – Finding Justice for Joyce Casper | Event | City of Boise
— Read on www.cityofboise.org/events/police/2023/september/national-forensic-science-week/

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Thanks to a reader for information about a break in the 1982 cold case sexual assault and murder of 16-year-old Kimberly Louiselle.

https://www.whmi.com/news/article/kimberly-louiselle-cold-case-murder

I agree with the reader that suspect Charles David Shaw (d. 1983 at age 26) should be looked at in the OCCK case, as well as the unsolved murder of Jane Allen and any other unsolved Oakland County homicide of young women that took place prior to November 27, 1983.

Earlier this year, the Livingston County MI Cold Case team announced that Shaw had sexually assaulted and murdered 19-year-old Christina Castiglione of Redford.

https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/livingston-county-sheriffs-office-solves-1983-murder-decades-later/

After 40 years, the LC Cold Case team sent a DNA sample to private lab Othram, Inc. Scientists there were able to produce leads using forensic-grade genome sequencing which led police to Shaw.

When a cold case is vigorously investigated, probable links to other cases can be established, as happened in these two homicides. In addition, the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office explained Shaw’s family members were essential in identifying him as the suspect in the Castiglione case. I assume the public will learn more about how the Louiselle case was solved (including whether an outside lab was used) when the MSP issues a press release in a day or two.

In these cases and those of Roxanne Wood (1987 case, MSP used lab Identifinders, Int.) and Cathy Swartz (1988 case, MSP and Three Rivers PD teamed up with Othram Inc.), presumably the DNA samples were obtained from semen samples that the police agencies adequately stored for many decades. In the OCCK case it appears that the killer(s)/rapist(s)/sexual assaulter(s) took great pains to avoid leaving semen. There was a partial Y-str DNA sample developed from the basically useless autopsy conducted by Robert Sillery, MD, on Kristine Mihelich. This is unidentified male DNA that is apparently not suitable for forensic genealogy.

I again consulted Dr. Michael Arntfield’s book How to Solve a Cold Case and Everything Else You Wanted to Know About Catching Killers (Collins, 2022) because of his observations about cold case teams and the pitfalls of overreliance on DNA testing to the exclusion of traditional investigative techniques. (See p. 36).

Cold case teams in the Louiselle, Castiglione, Wood, Swartz and Sharon Hammack (1996, Kent County, arrest in 2022 after DNA from semen and a rope used to bind the victim matched DNA from a similar crime in Maryland) cases, rose above the indolence, incompetence and insensitivity which infects many cold case investigations where there is no DNA to slam-dunk a resolution, (Id. at 34). Without a lab report to rely on, the MSP seemingly has no incentive to move on the OCCK cases. Yet they won’t spend any money on the new innovations in DNA testing to obtain a lab report. Circular reasoning at its finest.

The OCCK case involves four homicides. The cost is the MSP’s problem. They have had a ton of grant money (for which they never accounted) and taxpayer dollars over almost 50 years to play with. Instead, they push these four murders around the plate, the MSP maintaining exclusive access to the files and the evidence and any “forward motion” of the investigation. It is a warehouse for these four kids, whose lives mattered just as much as the women whose cases have been solved as described above.

Test or restest all of the evidence in the OCCK cases using Othram or a similar lab. Answer to the public and the family in the event no unknown DNA can be developed. In the Wood cold case, DNA “the size of a human cell” was discovered and utilized. Who’s to say, despite incredibly poor evidence storage in the OCCK case that a suspect did not leave behind DNA a third-party lab could identify? If you don’t get your ass off the bench, you have no business in the game. I say it again: L. Brooks Patterson and Richard Thompson could not have been happier to have these four Oakland County child murders in the vault at the MSP, where “no comment” is an art form.