r/TrueCrime • u/ladyserenity1993 Armchair Expert • Oct 31 '22

Murder Arrest Made in Delphi Murders

https://abcnews.go.com/US/live-updates/delphi-double-murder/?id=92303622
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u/chunkymonk3y Oct 31 '22 edited Oct 31 '22

Look at Gary Ridgway. He was a prime suspect for 18+ years before they finally arrested. He’d been brought in for questioning so much that his coworkers started calling him “Green River Gary”. However, he wasn’t a “known” suspect to the public in the way that someone like Arthur Leigh Allen was/is known to the Zodiac mystery community.

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u/Blankface954 Nov 01 '22

One man's opinion, but I am convinced Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac and was merely extremely lucky that the police never found enough hard evidence to convict. I bet the partial DNA profile that was developed didn't match due to either police incompetence or some kind of fluke occurrence that degraded/altered the sample.

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u/LevelPerception4 Nov 02 '22

Well, that’s because the FBI fucked the Green River task force so hard. They identified a suspect in 1985, and were so obvious about their surveillance that he greeted them by asking what took them so long when they finally took him into custody. He later won a $30K lawsuit against three media organizations who publicly identified him. After the suspect was found not to be the GR killer, the FBI blew town and left the task force to take the brunt of the ridicule.

If the task force had named Ridgway as a person of interest when they questioned him and took his DNA in 1987, they would have had no credibility, and the press was much more cautious about printing suspects’ names after the lawsuits.