but before the sentence was carried out, he died in prison of a heart attack at the age of 40. although phillips bragged to his prison cellmate about killing three women, he never mentioned susan schumake, but her family still believed he was responsible. we thought that phillips was the murderer, and he went to jail and he died in jail. so, my family, consequently, thought, well, this is done with, it s over, he s dead. others weren t so sure. for one thing, susan s murder was different from the others. most of his murders were under darkness, and that wasn t the situation with susan schumake. lieutenant paul echols was susan s classmate in college and had kept the picture from her case file on his desk. you could just look at that
word from susan, the police were notified. that night, officers noticed some trampled vegetation near a dirt footpath students use to walk from one side of the campus to the other. as he walked into the weeds a little deeper with a flashlight, and the weeds were quite high, it was very difficult to see, then all at once, he saw susan s body. this was something that really undid us. it was obviously a horrible thing. and i immediately started crying. it was a very terrible moment for me. it appeared that susan had been beaten, strangled, and sexually assaulted. police assumed the crime occurred just after susan left the radio station between 6:00 and 6:30 p.m., which meant she was abducted and attacked in broad daylight. this was in the middle of the day that this happened. and i think that really that
was one of the more scary things to people, is that it was so random. police asked anyone who might have seen anything suspicious to come forward. they also interviewed all of susan s friends, including her past romantic relationships. there had been a few people who had attempted to date her that she had denied. so they, of course, became part of a growing suspect pool. police also had to consider whether the perpetrator was a stranger. because of the location of the murder and its accessibility to a number of dormitories, they were looking at dormitory lists and who lived who lived in the area. she was such a blameless victim. the thing that we re all afraid of is some monster coming out of nowhere and snagging someone we love or snagging ourselves, and that s what happened to susan. then police learned of a remarkable coincidence. on the day susan was murdered, a
a dna sample was obtained from phillips bone marrow. it did not match the dna from the crime scene. i called and spoke with susan s mother, and she was very disappointed. but you know, i tried to assure her that we would continue to go forward and try to identify the suspect. i was angry at the time, because i felt we had closure, it was done with. and there was more bad news. the dna did not match anyone in the statewide database of known criminal offenders. if the killer wasn t phillips or anyone who committed a felony before the dna database was created, then who was it? you know, where do we go from here? and the obvious answer is, let s dig back into the case and let s see who else was a suspect in those days. who else can we get a dna standard from? let s just keep going until we run out of suspects.
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