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Virginia Witte

May 12, 1978

Nine months after the Parsh murders took place, and just six months after Sheila Cole’s body was discovered at the rest area on Illinois Route 3, near McClure, another murder took place not very far away. On May 12, 1978, David Witte discovered the body of his wife, Virginia, just after 1:00 P.M. in their Westernaire Estates home on Lakeview Drive. He found her naked body on their bed with a kitchen knife protruding from her chest.

The Wittes lived comfortably in a well-to-do neighborhood in West Marion. David was formerly a district manager for General Motors Corporation and had more recently begun operating his own financial investment firm. His financial success afforded his wife, Virginia, the opportunity to be a stay-at-home housewife. Virginia was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1926. She met David and they fell in love and were married in 1942, in Webster Groves, Missouri. She raised two sons, David Witte Jr., who was living in Jefferson City, Missouri, at the time, and Michael Witte, who was married and living in Denver, Colorado. The couple in Denver just had a daughter of their own, Monica Lee Witte, who shared Virginia’s middle name.

The day before she was killed, David and Virginia had just returned home from visiting their son and newborn granddaughter in Colorado. At the age of fifty-one, Virginia was elated to finally become a grandmother. She looked forward to more frequent visits with baby Monica. Unfortunately, she would never get the chance to watch her granddaughter blossom into a young woman.

David decided to run a few errands and meet with a friend for lunch while his wife went to buy groceries. They both left their house in separate cars at around half past eleven o’clock in the morning. When David returned about an hour and a half later, he saw that his wife had already returned before him. Apparently, she had been attacked as soon as she arrived home because bags of groceries were still standing on the kitchen counter.

David called out his wife’s name but received no reply. He walked through the house, looking for Virginia, and found her body lying across their bed with a knife sticking out of her chest. She was dead.

He immediately called the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department (WCSD) and told them that he needed police and an ambulance at his house right away because he believed that his wife had been murdered. Uniformed officers from the Marion Police Department (MPD) arrived at the scene at approximately 1:15 P.M. followed by members of the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department and investigators from the Williamson County Detective Unit.

After they arrived at the scene, Witte led investigators into the bedroom where they found the naked body of fifty-one-year-old Virginia lying across the bed with her hands bound together behind her back. On examination of the body, in addition to the knife that protruded from her chest, they also discovered a large wound across her abdomen, which appeared to be a slash caused by a knife. The knife that was still lodged in Witte’s body matched the set of knives that were found in the kitchen cabinet.

Crime scene investigators sealed off a perimeter around the property and spent almost two hours going through the house and collecting evidence. They decided that there was no indication of a forced entry into the premises. There was also no sign of a struggle in the bedroom, where Virginia’s body was found. Sheriff’s detective William Henshaw said that “the nearest thing to evidence of a struggle was in the kitchen where Mrs. Witte’s purse was found on the floor.”

Henshaw also said that “valuable jewelry owned by Witte had not been taken, and her husband could not find anything missing from the home, but since a motive has not been determined, robbery has not been ruled out.”

When coroner James Wilson was finally called out to the scene, he did a preliminary examination of the body and reported that there were several knife slashes across Witte’s abdominal area, but that there were also indications that she had been strangled prior to being stabbed in the chest. He would not offer any further details until a formal autopsy could be performed. The body was removed and taken to the Herrin Hospital. Wilson had requested that a full autopsy be performed as soon as possible.

Investigators canvassed the neighborhood. They knocked on the door of Witte’s neighbor Bonney Patterson and asked if she had seen anything suspicious take place in the subdivision. She asked them why, had there been a burglary? When they told her that they were investigating a homicide, she could hardly believe that such a thing could take place in the quiet, conservative, well-to-do neighborhood. Patterson told police that she hadn’t noticed anything suspicious, and she described Witte as a well-spoken and attractive woman who was proud of recently becoming a grandmother.

Other people in the neighborhood who were questioned said that they remembered seeing a stranger in the area at the time. Descriptions varied depending on who was questioned, but for the most part, the unidentified stranger was described as a muscular man, in his thirties or forties, with very dark hair. Through their descriptions, police were able to create two composite sketches of the stranger. Michael Wiseman, director of the County Detective Unit, distributed the sketches to local law enforcement agencies throughout the area in hopes that they might assist in identifying the man. At the time, Wiseman said that while the pictures varied in detail to detail, they represented witnesses’ recollections of the same man.

Witnesses who were interviewed also told investigators that the man was driving a late-model car. Some of them described it as a silver or white Chevrolet or Oldsmobile. After more people were questioned—who also provided coinciding details of the stranger’s description—a police composite sketch artist created a third image of the man, which was believed to represent a more accurate likeness of him. This image, as well as information about the circumstances of the murder, was released to the media with a plea for help in identifying the suspect.

A few days after the murder, Jack Jones, Timothy Krajcir’s parole officer, contacted the Williamson County Major Case Squad and told them that the composite sketch released by the media looked very much like Krajcir. Investigators followed up on Jones’s hunch and drove to North Springer Street in Carbondale, where Krajcir was living at the time. They observed Krajcir walk from his car to his trailer and noted that the vehicle was similar to the one described by Witte’s neighbors as the car that was used by the stranger. Investigators then visited the Grob car dealership in Murphysboro, where Krajcir purchased his car. Afterward, they drove to the Jackson County Ambulance Service, where Krajcir was employed. They spoke with his supervisor and discovered that Krajcir did not come to work on the date that Witte was murdered.

Nearly a hundred pieces of possible physical and forensic evidence was collected from the crime scene, including latent fingerprints that were sent to the FBI. Federal officers compared Krajcir’s fingerprints with those that were collected at Witte’s house. Since they did not find a match, investigators never contacted Krajcir for questioning and he was dropped from the list of suspects. This decision later proved to be a fatal error in judgment. Local authorities may have found it difficult to ignore the mounting evidence against Krajcir, despite the fact that his fingerprints were not discovered at the scene of the crime. However, when they were told by the federal government that he was no longer a suspect, they had no choice but to abandon their only lead and begin to look elsewhere.

At Herrin Hospital, resident pathologist Dr. A. S. Thompson performed the actual autopsy. Thompson established the time of death to be around noon or shortly thereafter. An examination of the body revealed that Witte had been sexually assaulted. Eventually it was concluded that although Witte had been sliced several times across the abdomen and was stabbed in the chest, the cause of death was determined to be due to strangulation.

Virginia Lee Witte was Catholic. Her viewing took place on Sunday, just two days after she was murdered. The Rosary was recited at 7:30 P.M. at the funeral home, and on Monday morning, at ten o’clock, her funeral service was held at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, where Witte was a member and regularly attended. She was buried in San Carlos Cemetery at Herrin. Tornadoes and high winds raced across the state at the time. Perhaps it was a premonition of the storm of murderous rampage that was about to be unleashed.

An investigation by the Marion Police Department and the Williamson County Detective Unit ensued, but a connection with the murders that took place just fifty-seven miles away in Cape Girardeau was not made, and the cases remained independent of each other.

Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, no other solid leads developed as time passed, and eventually it became a cold case. Years later, Lieutenant Echols spoke with Les Snider, a retired Marion police detective, about the Witte case. In a subsequent report, Echols wrote that Snider told him that he believed that a convicted serial killer by the name of Anthony Joseph LaRette was responsible for killing Virginia Witte. Evidently, while working on a different case, Snider interviewed LaRette while he was incarcerated. During their conversation, LaRette made statements that convinced Snider he was responsible for the murder, although he never openly confessed and he did not mention Witte specifically. Snider made his assumption based on LaRette’s propensity for committing acts of sexual violence, and the fact that he was suspected of engaging in a killing spree during the same period of time that Witte was murdered. Snider’s gut instincts played a more substantial role than solid evidence did.

When he was about six years old, LaRette sustained an electrical injury that rendered him unconscious and caused his head to fall against the side of a trailer hitch, which knocked out several of his teeth. After that incident, LaRette claimed to experience auditory hallucinations. He began to exhibit tendencies toward violence at a young age by attacking several other children at various times. During one of these attacks, he was struck in the head with a baseball bat when he was only nine years old. As a result, he was diagnosed as suffering from psychomotor epilepsy. Several weeks after he received that blow to his head, he attacked a female family friend, who was a St. Petersburg, Florida, detective. He exposed himself to her and then tried to tear her clothes off as well. As he grew older, his behavior included increasingly aggressive sexual overtones. The number of attacks against women increased with each passing year.

In 1974, LaRette was charged as an adult for raping and strangling a woman named Ms. Hecker. He was admitted to the Larned State Hospital in Kansas for a pretrial evaluation on the charges of rape and aggravated burglary. He was found competent to stand trial. He entered a guilty plea to the charge of rape and was incarcerated at the Kansas State Reformatory. During his stay there, he received psychiatric treatment. According to the Amnesty International Web site: The doctor treating him reported that sexual offences [sic] such as indecent exposure, choking of older women and rape were possibly committed during black-out spells.

LaRette was paroled in 1976 and married Janet Suther within the next year. He claimed that he stopped taking the medication that was prescribed to control his mental illness and replaced it with illegal drug use and alcohol. He said that he unsuccessfully tried to kill his wife on two separate occasions after he found her in bed with another man on their anniversary in 1980, and that his feelings of anger intensified. He remembered driving to St. Charles, Missouri, to stay with a friend, and it was at this point that he hallucinated killing his wife. He was actually accused of killing another woman, Mary Fleming, and then attempted to kill himself by stabbing himself several times in the chest and slashing his neck with a knife. After LaRette was charged with Fleming’s murder, his attorney requested a psychological evaluation of his client based on his suicide attempt. LaRette was found to be mentally competent.

A jury found him guilty of murder, and he was subsequently sentenced to death. After spending thirteen years behind bars, he became Missouri’s longest-serving death row inmate. According to a book, She Had No Enemies, by Mary’s brother, Dennis Fleming, The police placed the number of [LaRette’s] victims—all women—at two dozen, but he later claimed to have raped and killed thirty.

Echols did not report finding any past official records to confirm Snider’s suspicions that LaRette was responsible for Witte’s murder, and he could not interview LaRette in regard to the incident because he was executed by lethal injection in November 1995 under then-governor Mel Carnahan.

In the meantime, investigators in Cape Girardeau continued to pursue every single possible lead and open up interdepartmental communications between law enforcement agencies across the nation.