Murder in a small town.
I was with Lois one day driving down one of those shady lanes where the trees reach over the top of the road. Sunlight filters in between a leaf here and there. I think at the time the murder had already happened and we were just discussing it but this scene along with other scenes of leafy country roads always brings to mind the murder of a young girl and the man accused of murdering here.
Yesterday I did a little research online and discovered there was news about a year or so old in this case I had always thought was unsolved.
The victim was a young girl from somewhere in the city. Her parents had brought her up here for a country vacation. I think they were only here a couple of days when she was abducted. It was 1974.
At the time a man named Kenneth Yarter confessed to the killing. There was a lot of speculation about this case. He said he did it. In jail he gave directions to where her body could be found in Cossyuna lake, I think. The police dredged where he said he'd dumped the body but no body turned up there. A day or so would pass and her fly bloated body was found by a young farmer in the area when he went to look for his missing cow. He found her in his pasture.
He was the topic of conversation constantly at the plant. Some woman said he was always confessing to things he hadn't done. It was another case of a woman claiming to be engaged to a figure in the news. I never met her so I don't know if she was. I never met him either for which I am eternally grateful.
Before he could come up for trial he was extradited to Florida for a similar crime.
Speculation continued with some of us worried about being safe on our own land or driving in the country. I was used to walking where ever and when ever I felt like it. I never really felt scared for the simple reason I just never thought of myself as the kind that would be abducted. Lois was another matter. She was younger than me and cute and blond.
We discussed who we thought might have done it if Yarter was innocent. I won't tell you who we thought might have done it. I don't recall the name anyway. He was also a young farmer and he was shy around women. We all thought that by the time he got out the evidence and the trail would be too cold to convict anyone. We thought that they were losing time by not suspecting anyone else. We really thought that the real killer had escaped.
I was really amazed to discover that a few years back after he'd served his time in Florida he was brought back to NY where he was tried and convicted of the Zanta' girls murder. I don't believe I was living in New York for this historic trial.
It was so awful to think that while we were driving around having fun, a young girl was being murdered near us.
Years later while I was living in NY, a man escaped from a prison there. This was stupid and has nothing to do with the Zanta story except it points out how stupid some cops can be. The prisoners uniforms were a dark hunter green. On TV you see prisoners in bright orange but not here.
This guy escaped and he was running around a wooded area eluding the cops for weeks wearing his dark green uniform and blending in with the foliage. It was even reported that he'd stopped at a small store to buy batteries. And what were the cops looking for him wearing, you might wonder? They were wearing neon orange so they wouldn't be mistaken for the escapee. I think the reason it took them so long to catch him was that he could easily spot them coming and they couldn't see him at all.