airline-type luggage to his car. right outside his window, underneath the parking lot light, was what appeared to be a monte carlo with somebody carrying toward an open trunk what looked to be northwest gear suitcases and whatnot. amazingly, there were 2,800 monte carlo automobiles registered in the detroit area. every one of those 2,800 owners we ran lien to determine whether there were warrants or whether they had criminal records and tried to eliminate them that way. investigators learned that a hotel employee s boyfriend owned a monte carlo. when questioned, the employee behaved suspiciously. she was caught in a lie. she claimed that a call had come in to nancy s room. she claimed to have known nancy from previous trips. actually, it was nancy s first trip into metro, surprisingly enough, so she couldn t possibly
who that person was. that was our job, to find him. but it wouldn t be easy. margarette eby s murder took place many years earlier, and nancy ludwig was murdered in detroit, over 75 miles away from flint. but investigators suspected that the killer drove a monte carlo automobile and had access to twine used by landscapers. the hotel employee s boyfriend who owned the monte carlo had an alibi for the night of nancy ludwig s murder, and he was no longer considered a suspect. most of the times, killers are pretty stupid, and we catch them for some pretty stupid reason. he was very clever, very clever and very thorough. as the years passed, all 22,000 leads in the case were tracked down in one way or another.
evidence of sexual assault. but at the time, dna testing was still in its infancy. in 1986, we weren t even online. our state was not doing dna testing. although it was beginning to be done in other places, there were only a few select laboratories that did it, and it was a very, very expensive process. but by the time nancy ludwig was murdered, dna testing was routine. and to the surprise of investigators, dna testing proved what margarette eby s son knew instinctively, that the same man killed both women. i thought we had our case solved. and he said, well, the good news is we ve matched your case. the bad news, we still don t can t give you a suspect. the dna profile of their killer did not match any of the known criminal offenders in the national database. the dna match didn t tell us
a trophy. count i, you did while in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of criminal sexual conduct in the first degree jeffrey gorton was tried and convicted for the first-degree murder of both nancy ludwig and margarette eby. he will spend the rest of his life in prison. i m afraid of him. i m glad he s locked up for the rest of his life. he is the absolutely most frightening person that i ve ever encountered because he was random, because he was so secretive, because he was so ordinary. author tom henderson wrote about this case in blood justice and thinks there are other victims. my feeling is that someday, somebody s going to be running a dna sample that kicks up jeffrey gorton s name. it may be more than one or two. it might be quite a few. it still took a fingerprint or something very basic and
have known her from a previous trip. there were no calls into her room. there appeared to be very little security at the hotel. the way they assigned rooms to flight people, it was often done with keys just sitting there at the desk with names on little pieces of paper. so you could come in and stand there and read names and rooms that had been assigned, so you knew who hadn t come in yet. i mean, it was an absolute terrible system. outside doors were left open at night. it was more convenient for the guests, but it certainly wasn t good security. investigators generated a list of potential suspects that included everyone who had access to the hotel. we ultimately had a list of over 22,000 names. on that list were 1,700 tips, people who flew into metro airport the fight that nancy ludwig did. people who flew out after nancy