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Post by shrubmanreturns on Sept 14, 2017 10:48:02 GMT -5
The NYC based musician that Brian McCracken is accusing of murdering Arlis Perry is New York composer David Lang. Google David Lang and you will see he fits all McCracken's clues. Was in Stanford Marching Band at time of murder. Played the Thousand Oaks gig where McCracken confronted him. Google it and you'll see. nyp.st/28ZAIwa
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Post by jason on Sept 15, 2017 13:40:07 GMT -5
The NYC based musician that Brian McCracken is accusing of murdering Arlis Perry is New York composer David Lang. Google David Lang and you will see he fits all McCracken's clues. Was in Stanford Marching Band at time of murder. Played the Thousand Oaks gig where McCracken confronted him. Google it and you'll see. nyp.st/28ZAIwa
Great sleuthing, shrubman!
I didn't believe McCracken's allegations. I still say he was on a "bad trip," but it's interesting that he picked an actual composer and flutist who was actually at Stanford at the time. One thing that convinced me that the entire scenario was a product of McCracken's imagination was that he said he heard strange music while walking past the church. If there had been someone inside conducting a Black Mass, he or she would have locked the doors. Additionally, Arlis Perry was a devout Christian and would have had to have been heavily drugged to lie naked on an altar and so far as I know, the medical examiner found no evidence of drugs in her body. Also, Lang doesn't fit the description of the man who came to the law office where Perry worked and was later seen, apparently, in the church the night she was killed. Of course, Lang's reaction to the allegations is strange. If someone accused me of being involved in a murder, I'd be mad as hell and would say a lot more than "I’ve never been involved in anything criminal in my entire life. I've been very lucky that way," as he was quoted as saying in the article.
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Post by Sam on Oct 12, 2017 3:17:42 GMT -5
I was hoping that there might be an update this year, but it's been more than 40 years now and I guess most people have forgotten what happened.
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Post by steve on Oct 13, 2017 13:10:24 GMT -5
Murders aren't really my thing, but being in this group, I find some of the murders that are posted interesting if there's a real mystery about them. In the article that Lee posted about the "Wig-Wearing Flautist," someone identified as a spokesman said, “If DNA evidence comes along, [we’ll reevaluate the case].” Does this mean that there isn't any DNA evidence in this case? I would think that the DNA is either there, or it isn't there.
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Post by Graveyardbride on Jun 29, 2018 1:09:52 GMT -5
Has Arlis Perry’s Killer Been Identified?
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Officials say a suspect in a cold case from four decades ago at Stanford University appears to have killed himself as deputies were approaching to serve a search warrant the morning of Wednesday, June 27.
Officers from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office were attempting to make contact with a suspect they believe is connected to the October 12, 1974, murder of Arlis Perry, the 19-year-old wife of Bruce Perry, a Stanford student. Mrs. Perry, who was from Bismark, N.D., was found dead at the rear of the church by a security guard. According to the Stanford Daily, she died from an icepick stab to the back of the head.
Sheriff Laurie Smith told ABC7 News the suspect appears to have shot himself inside his apartment on Camden Avenue near Kooser Road before deputies were able to make contact. “He was someone that had been a suspect in the case for quite a long time,” she continued. “We just didn’t have the evidence, but there was not any really strong link and I believe that now we have the strong link.” She said the suspect realized investigators “had focused on him as a suspect” in the case.
According to a search by ABC7 News, a man named Steve Blake Crawford* is listed as living at the address where the suspect appeared to have killed himself.
At this point, it isn’t clear whether words were exchanged before the shot was fired, but Smith confirmed it was not an officer-involved shooting. Smith said the man in question has been a suspect for some time and that DNA evidence was recently re-tested. “We have a cold case homicide unit and they have been working this case actively since 1974,” she explained. “There’s been a lot of increases in technology for DNA and we were able to get more information that led us to believe that this was the suspect. That’s why we have been able to do the search warrant today.”
The sheriff’s office indicated it plans to have an update for reporters after 5 p.m.
Source: KGO-TV, June 28, 2018.
*Stephen B. Crawford was the security guard on duty the night/morning Arlis Perry was murdered.
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Post by Sam on Jun 29, 2018 2:46:43 GMT -5
His DNA alone wouldn't mean that he was the killer, because he worked there, but killing himself means that he was involved in some way. It's very unusual for a man to commit a single stranger-murder like that and not others.
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Post by jason on Jun 29, 2018 6:34:45 GMT -5
That sheriff doesn't have the sense of a doorknob. She should have had deputies wait until Crawford left his apartment to arrest him. That way, he couldn't have gotten to a gun to kill himself. This is what happens when someone is hired and promoted solely because of their gender, color, ethnicity or sexual preference. Smith probably wouldn't have ever been hired by the sheriff's department if she hadn't been a woman.
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Post by jane on Jun 29, 2018 12:33:18 GMT -5
That sheriff doesn't have the sense of a doorknob. She should have had deputies wait until Crawford left his apartment to arrest him. That way, he couldn't have gotten to a gun to kill himself. This is what happens when someone is hired and promoted solely because of their gender, color, ethnicity or sexual preference. Smith probably wouldn't have ever been hired by the sheriff's department if she hadn't been a woman. I remember thinking when I first heard that there had been an arrest: Why did they burst into his apartment instead of waiting for him to come out like the police did when they arrested the DeAngelo man? Maybe because the sheriff is a woman, she was trying to show everyone how tough she is by giving the order to knock down the door, or whatever they did. Now the man's dead and we'll never know if others were involved or if someone hired him to kill her.
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Post by steve on Jun 29, 2018 18:36:18 GMT -5
I remember thinking when I first heard that there had been an arrest: Why did they burst into his apartment instead of waiting for him to come out like the police did when they arrested the DeAngelo man? Maybe because the sheriff is a woman, she was trying to show everyone how tough she is by giving the order to knock down the door, or whatever they did. Now the man's dead and we'll never know if others were involved or if someone hired him to kill her. Wasn't there a man seen at the church that night who was never identified?
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Post by Graveyardbride on Jun 30, 2018 2:35:00 GMT -5
Wasn't there a man seen at the church that night who was never identified? Yes. Some people leaving the church the night of the murder saw a man they described as a young brownish-haired male of medium build who was approximately 5'10" tall. No one could recall having seen him before and investigators never discovered his identity. That afternoon, a man who appeared to be in his 20s showed up at the law firm where Arlis Perry worked and after speaking with him, her co-workers noticed she was quite upset. One of the attorneys said the visitor had curly, sandy blond hair, was approximately 5'10" and of medium build. The man’s hair would have looked darker at night in a softly-lit church and it is believed the unidentified male at the church and the one at her office were the same person.
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Post by Graveyardbride on Jun 30, 2018 2:40:00 GMT -5
Suicide Note from Two Years Ago Found in Crawford’s ApartmentSAN JOSÉ, Calif. – Stephen Blake Crawford (above), the primary suspect in the grisly 1974 killing of Arlis Perry at the Stanford Memorial Church who shot and killed himself Thursday as detectives approached his home, wrote a suicide note two years ago after he was interrogated over about infamous slaying, authorities said. The note is the latest piece of evidence suggesting that Crawford knew the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, working with the district attorney’s office cold-case unit, was finally closing in on him after more than four decades.
“We went there to serve a search warrant with the intent to arrest him,” Sheriff Laurie Smith said Friday. “I think he might have believed his time was up.” But Smith was also quick to note that the presumed suicide note “did not reference anything about the murder.”
Other items discovered in the ensuing hours by Santa Clara County Sheriff’s deputies serving a search warrant at his studio apartment in South San José included a torn-off cover of The Ultimate Evil, a book about the Satanic cult killer Son of Sam that mentions the Perry killing, and what appeared to be a Stanford diploma indicating he was a graduate of the school – he wasn’t.
The drafting of the purported suicide note coincides with the last significant contact he had with cold-case detectives working on the long-unsolved murder. Authorities indicated this was when he went to the sheriff’s headquarters to talk to investigators who had been keeping tabs on him periodically since Perry’s death.
According to Smith, DNA found on Perry’s clothing re-tested in 2016, along with other investigative work, led them to more firmly implicate Crawford. Sources confirmed the DNA most recently tested came from semen found on the Levi’s blue jeans the young woman had worn to the church and which were removed and placed on her body.
In subsequent years, sheriff’s investigators and the cold-case unit “re-contacted everybody that had been in the church that night 43 years ago” to eliminate their DNA and fingerprint profiles from suspicion, Smith explained. “Everything was a culmination of all the investigation they had done since the time we discovered the DNA,” she continued. “We look at this as closure and we believe we had solid evidence to arrest and even convict Stephen Crawford for the murder of Arlis Perry.”
The night of Arlis Perry’s death, she and her new husband, a pre-med student at Stanford, were walking to a campus mailbox around 11:30 p.m. and quarreled over checking the tire pressure on their car. Upset, Mrs. Perry told her husband she was going to pray at the church. When she hadn’t returned by 3:30 a.m., Bruce Perry called police, who checked the church and found the doors locked. Crawford, the security guard, told police he had locked the church around midnight. The following morning, Perry reported that he found her partially hidden corpse by a pew at 5:40 a.m.
An ice pick was driven into the back of Perry’s skull and she had been violated with church candles. Semen was found on a kneeler and a partial palm print was lifted from one of the candles, but neither was enough at the time to catch the killer. Crawford left Stanford two years later and went on to live a nondescript life as a security guard elsewhere and later as an insurance adjuster.
When detectives went to his Camden Avenue apartment Thursday to serve their search warrant, he reportedly tried to delay their entry by requesting he be allowed to get dressed. But officers already had a key to the unit and after waiting a few minutes – Smith said deputies “thought he was stalling” – they opened the door and caught sight of Crawford sitting on his bed, holding a handgun. The deputies immediately backed out of the apartment and soon after heard a gunshot. Moments later, after first checking whether any of their number had been shot, they re-entered and discovered Crawford had shot himself in the head.
Crawford’s brother, a retired Mountain View police officer, who appeared at the Camden Avenue complex soon after the shooting, has declined to comment on the shocking revelations.
Crawford’s only other known run-in with the law was in 1992 when he was arrested for crimes that occurred nearly two decades previous when he was still working at Stanford. Authorities said he methodically stole numerous American Indian artifacts, including art objects and sculptures, as well as around 200 rare books, from the Stanford University Department of Anthropology and campus libraries. According to court records, Crawford pled no contest to a felony charge of receiving stolen property – raised to a felony because the value of the items climbed into the hundreds of thousands of dollars – and received a six-month suspended sentence that he fulfilled through a work furlough program followed by two years probation. It remains unclear whether the university fully recovered all its missing property: Neighbors described glancing inside Crawford’s apartment and seeing western artwork as well as “nice bronze statues of horses with Indians on them.”
This conviction, however, does not appear to have been the source of a DNA reference sample used in the most recent test. Smith said Crawford’s DNA was obtained passively from discarded items that investigators collected.
In light of Crawford’s implication in the killing of Arlis Perry, speculation has simmered over whether he might be responsible for any of a string of unsolved murders that plagued the campus during the 18 months preceding her murder. These include the murder of Leslie Marie Perlov, a 21-year-old Palo Alto law clerk and Stanford graduate found in the nearby foothills on Feb. 16, 1973. She had been strangled, pantyhose stuffed in her mouth and her skirt was pulled up around her waist, as was Perry’s. On Sept. 11, 1973, 19-year-old junior David Levine was found stabbed 15 times near Meyer Library. On March 24, 1974, the body of 21-year-old Janet Ann Taylor, daughter of a former Stanford athletic director and football legend Chuck Taylor, was found strangled in a ditch on Sand Hill Road. Thus far, however, authorities have not drawn any connections between Crawford and those three deaths, but have not formally ruled him out. “We’re always looking at that,” Smith added. “I know there’s a lot more work to do on this case even though the suspect that I believe is the killer is dead.”
Crawford’s car, a silver Saturn sedan, has also been impounded and is being examined by forensic specialists.Source: Robert Salonga, The Mercury, June 29, 2018.
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Post by kitty on Jun 30, 2018 19:45:07 GMT -5
So nothing is really settled. There must have been hundreds of women who stayed a few minutes in the church after closing time and he didn't kill them. So why did he kill Arlis Perry? I think that he was paid to kill her or either to help with her murder by the strange man who was there that night.
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Post by madeline on Jun 30, 2018 20:32:58 GMT -5
Unless it turns out that he killed some of these other women, then I'd say it's 99% certain that he was paid to kill, or help with the killing of Arlis Perry.
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Post by catherine on Jul 1, 2018 1:17:19 GMT -5
Unless it turns out that he killed some of these other women, then I'd say it's 99% certain that he was paid to kill, or help with the killing of Arlis Perry. I agree.
I'm really pissed at that bitch of a sheriff. An arrest is made in a case that has puzzled people for 44 years and she screws it up by having her deputies knock on the frigging door instead of assigning them to watch his apartment and waiting until he came outside to serve the warrant. This happened in California, where there are ultra strict gun control laws -- except for illegal aliens -- so I'm sure she knew he owned a gun.
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Post by Graveyardbride on Aug 5, 2018 23:46:13 GMT -5
Some Investigators Aren’t Convinced Crawford Killed Arlis Perry
For almost 40 years, the individual responsible for the grisly killing of Arlis Perry inside the Stanford Memorial Church eluded generations of investigators who pored over the evidence, interviewed suspects and attempted to pinpoint the killer.
When Stephen Blake Crawford shot and killed himself footsteps from Santa Clara County Sheriff’s detectives who intended to arrest him for the 1974 killing, it capped painstaking investigative work to close one of the most notorious unsolved cases in the region’s history. Sgt. Richard Alanis was the lead detective that day, but he was the latest in a long line of investigators who built the case that he would bring past the finish line.
Interviews with two of the former lead detectives in the case revealed how they methodically chased down leads and eliminated suspects. Even in retirement, they kept tabs on the case. One former detective always considered Crawford the chief suspect.
But another retired sheriff’s detective who spent years on the case still needs convincing. “I always had an eye on him. He was always in the back of my mind,” said Randy Bynum, who took over the case in the late 1990s and early 2000s before he retired. “He was the only one that didn’t cooperate with me during my six years on the case. Everyone I contacted related to the case was more than willing to provide DNA. He didn’t want any part of it.”
Sheriff Laurie Smith said DNA found on Perry’s clothing, re-tested in 2016, led to the formal implication of Crawford. Sources confirmed the DNA most recently tested came from semen found on the blue jeans Arlis Perry was wearing that night.
For retired Sgt. Ken Kahn, who spent close to a decade chipping away at the case and was among the first detectives at the original crime scene, the news that Crawford had been definitively tied to Perry’s death was so surprising he doesn’t fully believe it. “Laurie Smith probably won’t appreciate it, but I’m still not 100 percent sure that Crawford did it,” Kahn admitted, adding that he’s kept tabs on the case even during his retirement. “Maybe I’m still in shock and am still trying to process this. Right now they don’t have enough evidence to convince me he’s the guy. I’m sure these guys are still working hard to fill out these ends, because there’s definitely loose ends on the case.”
Crawford was working as a campus security guard the night Arlis Perry was killed and told investigators he locked the church around midnight, which was about a half-hour after the young woman is believed to have gone to the church following an argument with Bruce Perry, her husband, a pre-med student. Perry called police around 3:30 on the morning of Oct. 13, 1974, after his wife didn’t come home and officers found the church doors locked. Crawford was the person who officially found the body; an ice pick had been driven into the back of her skull and her body had been violated with church candles.
Kahn was dispatched to the 1974 crime scene and would eventually work the cold case in the late 1970s and through much of the 80s. One of his tasks included accompanying the physical evidence across the country so that it could be examined by the FBI. “They put it in an army duffel bag and for some reason the finger was pointed at me: ‘You’re taking this to the FBI lab.’ And so they put me on a red-eye to D.C.,” he recalled.
In 1981, Kahn received a letter from David Berkowitz, the infamous “Son of Sam” killer, proclaiming knowledge about the slaying. So Kahn and his partner, Tom Beck, flew to New York and made an unannounced visit to Attica State Prison to interview Berkowitz. The interview lasted about a half-hour before Kahn shut it down. “He claims he was in Queens in a cult meeting and that a guy stood up and said he killed Arlis Perry,” Kahn recollected. “Then he said he couldn’t tell us who because someone would kill his father in Florida. We knew we were spinning our wheels.”
From then on, Kahn followed leads as they periodically came in. “Most of them were a wild goose chase,” he admitted.
Kahn, now 78, was out of phone range at a family reunion when news surfaced of Crawford’s death and presumed guilt and wouldn’t hear about it for several days. He agrees with Bynum that Crawford was a resistant witness, who refused to take a polygraph in the early stages of the investigation, but maintains a dose of skepticism about his guilt.
When questioned about Kahn’s uncertainty concerning Crawford’s guilt, the sheriff’s office referred this news organization to Smith’s previous comments on the investigation. “I know there’s a lot more work to do on this case even though the suspect that I believe is the killer is dead,” she explained, adding that Crawford shot himself because “he might have believed his time was up.”
Bynum concurred, and said he is “confident” Crawford killed Perry, adding that his successors in the detective bureau “did a splendid job.”
In 1992, Crawford was arrested and later convicted for stealing numerous American Indian artifacts including art objects and sculptures, as well as around 200 rare books, from the Stanford University Department of Anthropology and campus libraries. He served a suspended sentence through a work furlough program.
About six years later when Bynum was on the case, he recalled an interview with Crawford at the suspect’s office in the South Bay in the early 2000s and the uneasy feeling he had about Crawford after dealing with him up close. “Anyone I talked to about the case was very cooperative. He was the only one who was not. His attitude was that I was accusing him,” Bynum said. “He was very defensive. I’m here trying to eliminate people and he took it as an attack almost. He’d ask why we were picking on him.”
Bynum had some help along the way, including that of Dave Larson, now 77, who was working in the Stanford print shop when Perry was killed. He and his wife, Pam, methodically monitored the progress of the case, even during lengthy lean stretches and eventually connected with Bynum and offered research that helped the detective get up to speed. “We’ve thought about this so much over the years,” Larson said.
The couple also provided a plausible theory as to how Crawford got hold of an ice pick, which was a question that lingered in Kahn’s mind. Larson suggested the nearby print shop where he worked kept them on hand because they were used to dislodge grease and debris from the mechanical printing equipment. “The machinists in the shop I worked at had a big toolbox and never locked up,” Larson recalled. “I really do believe that’s where he got the ice pick.”
Bynum believes his instincts about Crawford were affirmed by the tragic outcome at the apartment. A purported suicide note was found in the wake of the shooting, though authorities said it appears to have been drafted in 2016, the last time the sheriff’s office formally interrogated him. “I guess he didn’t want to face society,” he concluded. “Even though he wasn’t brought to justice, justice was served.”
Source: Robert Salonga, The Mercury News, July 9, 2018.
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