ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, July 25, 1996 TAG: 9607250069
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-2 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA
SOURCE: Associated Press
OFFICIALS NOW ARE looking at another student, who said he may have been the last person to see Aimee Willard alive.
The hunt for Aimee Willard's killer took on a new twist Wednesday after investigators revealed their plan to search the car of a college student from Delaware County.
The student was with Willard, a student at George Mason University in Fairfax, at Smokey Joe's bar in Wayne, Pa., the night she was killed and may have been one of the last people to see her alive, according to police sources quoted in Wednesday's edition of the Philadelphia Daily News.|
State police confirmed that they had obtained a search warrant to search the car. They also insisted that another man, Andrew M. Kobak of Bryn Mawr, had not been a suspect.
Evidence technicians from the state police and the Criminal Investigation Division of the Delaware County, Pa., District Attorney's Office were combing the car for clues at the state police crime lab Wednesday afternoon.
Willard, 22, was last seen by friends about 1:40 a.m. on June 20, as she left the bar in Wayne. Her unoccupied car was found idling at 2 a.m. and her naked body was found 14 hours later in a trash-strewn lot in North Philadelphia.
The student, who attends Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., arrived at a friend's house in Allentown nearly three hours after Willard disappeared.
Sources told the paper that the student was ``despondent, disheveled and dirty.''
After hearing reports of Willard's disappearance, the man told friends he may have been ``the last person to see her alive,'' sources said.
The friends contacted the FBI, who in turn notified state police.|
Police had aggressively investigated Kobak, the 23-year-old son of a stockbroker.
Two weeks ago, a Delaware County grand jury questioned Kobak's friends and relatives as the panel investigated Willard's slaying.
Blood samples were drawn from Kobak for DNA tests that might link him to the Willard crime scene. Police still are awaiting results from those tests.
State police sources told the paper that police got ``nothing of significance'' from searching Kobak's house and two family cars.
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