"My murderer has never been found": the police broadcast live on the last day of a girl murdered in 1973



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On the morning of July 6, 1973, Linda Anne O & # 39; Keefe's Is woken up for the summer school and put on the white dress that her mother made for her, the one with the light blue flowers and the dark blue trim. She pushed her hair back into a ponytail, pulled on her matching dark blue tennis shoes with her white socks and headed for the door for the last time.

Normally she went to school – Lincoln Intermediate School in Corona del Mar, California – but that day her piano teacher gave her a lift. The 11-year-old girl and eager pianist was sitting in four classes that morning. But she never returned home, causing a frenzied search by police helicopters and crews in the Newport Beach area.

The next morning, the body of O 'Keefe would be discovered in a ditch. She had been strangled.

His killer has never been caught. But Friday, the Newport Beach, California police department unveiled a new trail in the case – albeit small – using DNA technology unavailable at the time, but has since relaunched innumerable cases of cold across the country. Before revealing it, to revive the case, the police department used Twitter to recount the last hours of O & # 39; Keefe and the latest insights from witnesses using the details of the investigation. The tweets started around 7 am Friday, about the time O Keefe woke up to go to school and ended just after 11 pm, the last one. once someone heard her screaming. They continued again as the search resumed in the morning

The tweets were all in O Keefe's voice, as if she were tweeting live on the last day of her life.

"Hi, I'm Linda O 'Keefe (or Linda ANN O' Keefe, if I have problems with my mother)," wrote the Newport Beach Police in the premiere. Forty-five years ago today, I disappeared from Newport Beach. I was murdered and my body was found in the Back Bay. My killer has never been found. Today, I will tell you my story. "

In the afternoon she disappeared, after the last bell rang in the fourth period, O 'Keefe used the phone in the school office to call his mother for a return home.

okay. She is busy with a project of Sewing and telling me that I can go home, it's getting on my nerves, and I'm crying. "

O Keefe sped for a while on the sidewalk outside the house. school before getting up and walking painfully on Marguerite Drive towards the house.And then it was she saw the turquoise pickup truck – the same one that was stopping next to her. in front of Richard's market earlier in the day.

A woman named Jannine and her mother would see the meeting unfold at the same time as Marguerite – "something 9, they won "I forget for a long time.

The van parked along the sidewalk, near the intersection, and the front passenger door was open, O Keefe standing next door. She entered.


The sketch of the artist of the person of interest in 1973, based on the description of the witness of the man in the van. (Newport Beach Police)

Suspicious, Jannine's mother slowed down and stopped.

"If this van passes," she told her daughter, according to the police tweets, "write down the plate number."

But the van did not pass. That was the last time anybody saw O Keefe alive.

At 6:42 pm, six hours after the last time her mother had heard her, O 'Keefe's parents reported her disappearance to the Newport Beach Police Department. Keefe was not just running away with friends to take revenge for not having a car. Helicopters, police jeeps, and search teams have scoured the area for signs of O & # 39; Keefe. But only one person, a woman who knew nothing of a missing girl, was close enough to hear, and by that time it was too late.

Just before midnight, "a lady in the cliffs above Back Bay hears a woman's voice on the outside, shouting" Stop, you hurt me, "tweeted the police on behalf of O & # 39; Keefe. "She listens, but does not hear anything, she does not know that I have disappeared, that I will be dead in the morning, that I will be found a few hundred meters away from her home."

A man who was looking in the back bay for a good place to study nature was the first to find it there, just after 10 in the morning. He sought, in particular, frogs. But when he looked through the cattails, he saw rather something "small and pale": a hand.

"I had read about the missing girl in the newspaper," he told to the Daily Pilot that day. "After seeing the hand in the bushes, a lot of things came to mind, and then I knew it had to be the girl."

According to newspaper reports from the time Keefe was fully clothed and the police found no evidence that she had been sexually assaulted.In three days, according to an article published in the Los Angeles Times in 1973, the police arrested an 18-year-old man for his murder, refusing to tell reporters what evidence they had to link him to the crime.A day later, they released him from prison, saying that they were not were not enough.

Since then the case has remained cold – but Saturday came the new piece of evidence: a police phenotype believed killing O. Keefe. It was created by a Parabon Nanolabs , a DNA technology company based in Virginia.

Using DNA evidence, a phenotype predicts physical appearance one person at a time and generates a digital avatar of a suspect. In this case, the suspect's phenotype shows a light-skinned, blue-eyed man with a hint of green, sandy blond hair. The Newport Beach Police hope this will lead to a breakout of the case. The man is photographed as he could have been 25 years old and 60 years old.

A spokesman for the Newport Beach Police Department told the Los Angeles Times that the police had decided to announce the development along with the last day of O 'Keefe.

"It's an old case from 45 years ago and it could be difficult for people to create emotional attachment to that," said spokeswoman Jennifer Manzella , the newspaper. . "But we think Linda is due to that."

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