Fallen Hero: The victim was a decorated Green Beret. Whoever took him down must have been tough as hell. Well, maybe not.
Ashes to Ashes: A body is found floating in the water off the Florida coast. Who is she and how did she die? The mystery will take three decades to unravel.
The Ring: A woman is dead. The police suspect her husband but can’t prove it. Then a piece of jewelry shows up in a place it shouldn’t be.
Last Suspect Standing: He was the last person anyone would have suspected. But when everyone else has been ruled out, there can be only one.
Buried in the Backyard: A WWI veteran vanishes on his way to get a haircut. Years later, a tipoff leads police to a shallow grave in a suburban garden.
She’s the One: Two women are gunned down in an apparent holdup at an ice cream parlor. The identity of the killer will leave everyone stunned.
Mortal Remains: An unfaithful wife; an angry husband. When she goes missing, there’s only one suspect. How do you prove it without a body?
Cold Cases: Solved! Volume 10
An Imperfect Murder
It was September 5, 1984, Ginger Hayden’s first day at the University of Texas at Arlington. Ginger, an auburn-haired beauty of just 18 years, had graduated from Arlington Heights High School, just three months earlier. Today, a new chapter of her life was beginning. She had dreams of becoming a physiotherapist and could hardly wait to get started with her studies.
Which made it odd that she was so tardy in rising, on this of all days. Lying in her bed in the adjacent room, Ginger’s mom, Sharon, could hear her daughter’s alarm beeping consistently without being turned off. Sharon had worked a late shift at her job the previous night, arriving home at around 2:00 a.m. The apartment had been dark and quiet when she’d entered, and she’d gone straight to bed. Now, the alarm had roused her from sleeping. Looking bleary-eyed at her bedside clock, she saw that it was 6:00 a.m. After yelling several times for Ginger to turn the alarm off, she got out of bed and walked wearily to her daughter’s room. What she found there was a waking nightmare.
Ginger was in a kneeling position, face down on the floor next to her bed. She was partially nude, her pale skin covered with ugly, red-streaked wounds. To her horror, Sharon realized that it was blood and that it was everywhere – on the bed sheets, the walls, the closet doors, seeped into the carpet. Sharon fell to her knees beside her daughter’s body, placed a hand on her back, and felt the cold, lifeless skin under her touch. She staggered to her feet, reeled into the passage, using the wall for support. Moments later, the phone was in her hand, and she was dialing. “My baby’s dead,” she told the operator in a monotone. Then she repeated that sentence, her voice rising hysterically. Then she screamed it down the line, screamed it so loudly that she woke her neighbors. Already, the operator was connecting the call to the police. On the day that should have been her first at college, Ginger Hayden left her apartment in a body bag.
The response from the Fort Worth Police was emphatic. CSIs swarmed all over the residence. Meanwhile, detectives and uniformed officers started canvassing the apartment complex to see if any of the neighbors had seen or heard anything. Sharon, numb with shock and grief, was also questioned. From her, officers learned that Ginger had been dating a young man named Jeff Green. Jeff was roused from sleep to the distressing news that his girlfriend had been murdered. He was then brought to the police station to answer questions.
Meanwhile, crime scene officers were methodically processing the Hayden apartment, collecting trace evidence – blood, hair, and fibers – meticulously photographing the scene, dusting for fingerprints. Perhaps the most important piece of evidence was the murder weapon, a wooden-handled knife found lying on the bedroom floor by the victim’s feet. The knife belonged to a set in the kitchen. It had been wielded with such savage force that the blade was bent, the handle broken. CSIs then moved into the bathroom where they found evidence that the killer had washed up before he left. They also found two bloody socks which he’d used as makeshift gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints on the murder weapon. The socks belonged to the victim. An important find was a single pubic hair. In those pre-DNA days, it was of limited use. Nonetheless, they bagged it.
Back at the police station, an apparently distraught Jeff Green was accounting for his whereabouts the previous day. According to Jeff, he and Ginger had spent the morning with a friend, Ryland “Shane” Absalon. He’d later dropped Ginger at her job, where she had to work an afternoon shift. He and Shane had hung out together until that evening, when he left Shane and went to pick up Ginger from work. He and Ginger then returned to her apartment, where they had sex. They also talked for a time about their future. Ginger had recently discovered that she was pregnant, and they were trying to decide what to do. He left her at around 11:30 p.m. That was the last time he saw his girlfriend.
Jeff Green had answered all the questions put to him in a forthright manner. Officers had no reason to believe that he was lying to them. Although he remained on the suspect list, he was allowed to go. Now, attention shifted to another person of interest, Ryland “Shane” Absalon.
Initial inquiries indicated that Shane lived with his father in the apartment directly above Sharon and Ginger Hayden. Questioning Shane’s father, detectives learned that he’d been awakened that morning by Sharon’s screams. He’d walked to the living room where he found his son already up. Shane’s t-shirt had a large reddish stain on it, which Shane claimed was from a strawberry soda he’d spilled. The officers asked to see the shirt. Shane said that he could not remember where he’d put it. They then asked if they could search the apartment. That search turned up a pair of Shane’s shoes, which had a small bloodstain on them. These were bagged as evidence.
Shane Absalon had now been flagged as a prime suspect in the case. However, the police had no real evidence to bring against him. No one had seen him enter Ginger’s apartment and he was adamant that he had not seen her since the previous morning. His dad could not account for Shane’s whereabouts. He said that he’d gone out drinking after work and had arrived home drunk and gone straight to bed. The forensics were not much use either. The technology of the day was simply not up to the task of matching any of it to Shane Absalon. Shane was then asked to take a polygraph but refused. Just like that, the case was dead in the water.
More than two decades went by. This was an era marked by incredible advances in forensic techniques, particularly in the area of DNA matching. In the mid-2000s, the Fort Worth Police Department announced the formation of a Cold Case Unit, specifically tasked with reviewing old, unsolved cases, using the technologies now at their disposal. But the technology was prohibitively expensive back then. Most law enforcement agencies could not afford it without federal funding. In 2009, Fort Worth PD received such a grant. One of the first cases flagged for review was the murder of Ginger Hayden.
The initial results were disappointing. The only DNA match that the lab was able to find was to Jeff Green. Since Jeff and Ginger had engaged in consensual sex on the night she died, this had been expected. But then, lab technicians tested a towel from the Hayden residence and found the DNA of an unknown male. This same DNA was later extracted from two biological samples. It matched the pubic hair found at the crime scene. It also was a match to the blood droplet found on Shane Ryland’s shoes. Whose DNA was it? The cold case investigators thought they knew. They’d need a swab from Shane Absalon to prove their thesis.
Absalon had since left the Fort Worth area and was living in Arizona. Approached by Fort Worth investigators, he flatly refused to give a DNA sample. Fortunately, they had anticipated this and came armed with a warrant. Absalon was compelled to submit. The buccal swab was brought back to Fort Worth for analysis. Several months later, the results were in. It was a match.
Ryland “Shane” Absalon was arrested at his home in Sierra Vista, Arizona, on August 29, 2010, nearly 26 years after the murder of Ginger Hayden. He was charged with capital murder and bound over for trial. It was here that the case took an unexpected turn. With the details of the murder splashed all over the media, the police received a call from a man named Shawn Garrett. Garrett had some interesting information to share. It seems Absalon had confessed the murder to him...two decades earlier!
At the time, Garrett and Absalon had both been enrolled in a substance abuse treatment program at Straight, Inc. The rules of the program required new enrollees to room with participants who were further along in their recovery. Thus, Absalon ended up living with Shawn Garrett and his parents. The two men shared a room, Garrett said, and often had long conversations at night. During one of these talks, Absalon made a startling disclosure. He said that he’d murdered a young woman some years earlier, after she’d rejected him. He’d wanted a romantic involvement with the woman. She’d said that she did not feel that way about him and just wanted to be friends. The rejection had left him embarrassed. He’d decided to have his revenge.
According to Absalon, he’d snuck into the woman’s apartment and hid in her closet. He’d waited for her to fall asleep and then crept up on her with a kitchen knife in his hand. He’d started stabbing her, keeping up the attack until she stopped struggling and lay still. Then he’d cleaned up the scene and left. “They’ll never catch me,” he boasted. “I did a real good job covering my tracks.”
As it turned out, Shawn Garrett wasn’t the only one who had heard this confession. Absalon had told the story several times in group therapy sessions. Those who’d heard it weren’t sure if they believed him. They were barred from repeating the story, in any case. The rules of the program were that anything said in group sessions was to remain confidential.
Ryland Absalon went on trial for murder in September 2012. The case against him was powerful, with a DNA match and several witnesses who had heard him confess to the murder. The defense would attack both strands of evidence. First, they tried to have testimony relating to Absalon’s admissions excluded. The argument was that these were protected by their client’s right to confidentiality. Unfortunately for Absalon, this wasn’t entirely true. The confidentiality clause only applied to those who had voluntarily enrolled in the program. Absalon had been ordered to attend by a judge. Besides, Absalon had made his confession to Shawn Garrett outside a therapy session. That, certainly, was not protected.
As for the forensic evidence, the defense took the obvious stance of stating that Absalon was a friend of the victim and had been inside her apartment on numerous occasions. It would have been unusual had his DNA not been found, his lawyer insisted. He then offered an alternative suspect. During the early 1980s, Fort Worth had been plagued by a series of murders of attractive young women. The police force had been so concerned that they’d formed a task force to investigate the murders. Several of the crimes remained unsolved. The defense was suggesting that a serial killer had killed Ginger Hayden.
Unfortunately for the defense, this unnamed serial killer (if he even existed) had not confessed to Ginger’s murder. The defendant had and now he was going to have to face the consequences of his actions. Found guilty of aggravated murder, Ryland “Shane” Absalon was sentenced to life in prison. The law in effect at the time of the murder means that he will be eligible for parole in 20 years. Absalon should consider himself lucky that the D.A. did not decide to seek the death penalty. But for that, he’d be sitting on death row right now. No one can say he wouldn’t deserve it.
Continue reading? Click here to get your copy now
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.