Post by Graveyardbride on Nov 11, 2018 17:56:57 GMT -5
Solved: 2001 Murder of Christine Franke in Orlando
ORLANDO, Fla. – On October 21, 2001, Christine Franke (above right) was found dead in her apartment on Plaza Terrace Drive near Audubon Park. The 25-year-old woman was studying education at the University of Central Florida and working as a bartender and waitress at Cigarz, a bar at Universal CityWalk. She was last seen leaving the establishment around 4 a.m. after working a double shift.
Seventeen years later, on Friday, November 2, Orlando police detectives arrested Benjamin L. Holmes (left), 38, for the Franke’s murder. Holmes was identified after Parabon Nanolabs, a Virginia company working with the Orlando Police Department, ran a DNA sample from the scene of the crime through an open-source genealogy database and identified three individuals believed to be distant cousins of the killer, Det. Michael Fields. From there, Fields constructed the family tree, identified Holmes as the most likely suspect and obtained a warrant for his DNA, which matched the profile from 2001. California detectives used the same method earlier this year to identify Joseph James DeAngelo as a suspect in the Golden State Killer cases.
Franke’s mother, Tina Franke, thanked the detectives who investigated her daughter’s murder for almost two decades. “I honestly thought that he was dead after 17 years and that we would never find out,” she said. “This is such a blessing for our family.”
Holmes denied killing Franke and Fields indicated he had not identified a personal connection between Franke and Holmes or determined a motive for the killing. He noted Franke likely came home from work that night with at least $300 in cash, which the first officers on the scene were unable to find. “It’s safe to assume that he [Holmes] took the cash,” the detective insisted. He was remanded to the Orange County Jail without bail.
Since 2001, Holmes has been arrested 14 times in Orange County, including six arrests for driving with a suspended license, four or probation violation and once for domestic violence. None of these crimes required law enforcement officers to obtain a DNA sample.
On the morning of October 21, a girlfriend of Franke’s, who was out of town, was unable to reach Franke and asked a neighbor to check on her. The neighbor noticed Franke’s front door was ajar and returned to her own apartment in tears. She and her boyfriend found the body and notified police.
Franke had been shot in the head and police discovered semen on her body, though the medical examiner found no evidence of rape. Crime scene investigators collected DNA, but were unable to find a match in the databases. Without any productive leads, three months later, the police declared the crime a case cold.
“She didn’t have any enemies – at least none known. She was extremely well-liked. Didn’t owe anybody anything,” Orlando police Detective Roy Filippucci said in 2002.
In 2016, Orlando police used a service called DNA phenotyping to create a rough sketch of a possible suspect: a black man with brown eyes, black hair and no freckles. The sketch didn't generate any tips.
The idea to use familial DNA came to Fields back in 2014 when he was working on his own family tree, he said. But it wasn’t until May 2018 when an employee from Parabon Nanolabs emailed him saying she found three distant cousins of the suspected killer on GEDmatch, a Lake Worth-based database where people upload their DNA profiles and find family members. Fields traced the profile to a woman who lived from 1910 to 1987 and had 10 children – Holmes’ grandmother. Then he began excluding her descendants one by one: because they were too young to have committed the crime, were female or their genetic profiles didn’t match. “This was not a family tree, it was a family forest,” Fields explained. “They had a very, very, very large family.” Eventually he narrowed down his search to Holmes and his brother and a judge granted warrants to obtain DNA samples from both.
An undercover detective went to the construction site where Holmes’ brother worked and offered him a bottle of lemon-lime Gatorade. Holmes’ brother took the Gatorade, drank some and threw the bottle into a dumpster, where officers collected it. Officers got Holmes’ DNA from a Bud Ice beer can and seven small cigars the suspect had thrown away outside his friend’s home, where he was staying after he and his wife divorced in January. The DNA was a match, Fields said, though he later took swabs from Holmes’ mouth to confirm it.
Tina Franke said the day Holmes was identified was bittersweet. She was relieved the killer had been arrested, but it brought back memories of her daughter’s death. After the murder, Mrs. Franke found a doodle her daughter had drawn on a piece of cardboard, with a message written in block letters, reading: “mom dad I love you!” The mother had the message tattooed on her right forearm, under a drawing of Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree.” That’s what Christine Franke wanted to dress as for Halloween 2001 and it matched her giving personality, Mrs. Franke added.
“It’s a terrible thing, not knowing,” the distraught mother continued. “Until recently we didn’t have a face. We didn’t know anything, I mean, the person could live right around the corner from you and you don’t know. So just having it settled in our minds and knowing that he’s behind bars and can’t hurt anybody – I would want that for anybody who’s in a similar situation.”
Source: Gal Tziperman Lotan, The Orlando Sentinel, November 5, 2018.