THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, May 3, 1995 TAG: 9505030430
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JUNE ARNEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESAPEAKE LENGTH: Long : 180 lines
Authorities are calling off further investigation in the 1966 slaying of Sandra Pace Todd, whose sister has waged an exhaustive crusade to avenge the death.
Todd's sister, Pat Maier, said she does not plan to stop her campaign to see charges brought against a Portsmouth man, the only suspect since shortly after the homicide. He has never been charged and denies involvement, and a grand jury failed to indict him in April 1969, a little more than two years after the crime.
``I'm still writing letters'' to the suspect, Maier said last week from her Pennsylvania home. ``I'll write letters until the day I die. And I'll come down there. And when he dies, I'll definitely be at his funeral.''
Maier and her father - before he died in 1990 - have made dozens of trips from Pennsylvania to Hampton Roads in the hope of seeing the crime solved. Todd's body was found in a ravine off Interstate 264 at Bowers Hill on Dec. 17, 1966. She had been beaten and strangled.
``We've done everything reasonably practical,'' Chesapeake Commonwealth's Attorney David Williams said last week in explaining why the active investigation is being ended. ``There isn't anywhere else to go. Justice is not always equated with a result.''
Williams stopped short of closing the case completely, however.
``I don't like to give up,'' he said.
Maier said she is used to the case being put on the shelf for years at a time.
``I'm not surprised at all,'' she said. ``I don't like it, but it's nothing new. This is the way it's been all these years.''
She plans to visit Hampton Roads again next month to talk to authorities.
``I can't let it go,'' she said.
Maier once begged the Portsmouth man's minister to talk to him about the killing, made prayer requests at his church and questioned one of his former girlfriends.
On what would have been Todd's 45th birthday, Maier had friends erect a memorial off Interstate 264 in Chesapeake that read: ``My birthday is April 18. FOREVER 17. FOREVER DEAD. My killer walks free.''
So it was not out of character when Maier tracked down the suspect at a Portsmouth Hardee's restaurant in October. In an interview, she said she wanted a glimpse of the 75-year-old man she has branded as guilty without benefit of judge or jury.
He first noticed her at the drive-through window and waved. Then he rolled down his passenger-side window and handed her a business card. She told him her name was Jen. They agreed to go inside for coffee.
Maier was struck by the irony.
The suspect had told police in 1966 that he had coffee with Maier's sister, then 17, hours before she was strangled.
The first meeting between Maier and the suspect led to two others. During the third rendezvous at the Hardee's, Maier snapped pictures of the suspect joking with a friend of hers. Finally, it was time.
Maier, 49, pulled out photographs of her slain sister and her father, who died of cancer. She did it casually, as if looking for something in her purse.
``I was talking to him, but I kept seeing Sandy,'' she said. ``His face got red, he jumped up and took off, didn't even use his cane.''
He told her he didn't want to talk with her again.
``He finally realized who I was,'' she said. ``He knows I'm not giving up.''
The suspect declined several requests for an interview, but he makes it clear that he is tired of being dogged by Maier. He now refuses to accept mail from her, which comes back marked ``Return to sender.'' But she's found a way around that. She mails his letters to friends in Hampton Roads, who remail them locally, avoiding the telltale Pennsylvania postmark.
During one interview request, he said, ``I've heard about this thing till I'm sick to death of it.''
When a reporter visited the suspect's home recently, he said: ``I'm not making any statement about it. . . . It's something I had nothing to do with.''
The Portsmouth man is not the only person who regularly hears from Maier.
She has hounded police, prosecutors, the attorney general's office and City Council members - anyone who will listen.
In the past two months, Maier said she has written at least 20 letters to Chesapeake prosecutor Williams. He admits he doesn't always have time to read them - they're starting to get repetitive, he said.
Chesapeake Detective Cecil E. Whitehurst, 44, is the latest of many investigators assigned to the city's oldest and coldest murder mystery. Since inheriting the case two years ago, he has logged hundreds of hours and added to what is now a foot-thick file.
Even though the case is nearly three decades old, police interviewed the suspect twice this year: for half an hour Jan. 11 and 15 minutes on Feb. 25.
One of the questions Whitehurst asked the suspect was why police investigating at the time of the killing found newspaper clippings of the crime in his possession even though he denied knowing about the murder.
His answer, according to police records: ``Clippings? Oh, I don't know. But, you know, hell. I've just, I've got a whole stack of papers back there. You know, newspaper clippings. . . . I had nothing to do with it, any way, shape, form. No more than you did, or no more than you did (referring to Whitehurst and Williams).''
Williams, who ``almost never'' interviews suspects, said he and Whitehurst were out on another homicide case when they decided to visit the suspect in January.
``He denied any involvement in the crime,'' Williams said. ``He was very adamant in his denial. He denied knowing anything about anything to do with Ms. Todd or that he'd been investigated.''
Williams said that ``some of the things he said were inconsistent,'' but added that such inconsistencies could be explained because of the age of the case and the fact that the suspect is in his mid-70s.
He denies that Maier's persistence has played a role in the case.
``I don't think anything got done any differently,'' he said.
Part of Maier's campaign has been to persuade authorities to do DNA tests on material from the crime scene. She hoped that technology developed since her sister was killed could finger the killer.
Unknown to Maier, that was one of Whitehurst's first projects when he took over the case in March 1993. He immediately called the state DNA lab and delivered the sample in April 1993. But, at that time, the lab was unable to test such trace amounts. In June 1994, he took the material to a private lab.
The expert who performed the testing at the private lab found nothing to help solve the crime.
It was one more dead end for Whitehurst.
Maier herself unwittingly may have contributed to another.
Whitehurst had established a relationship with two witnesses who knew the suspect. During summer 1993, Maier contacted those witnesses and urged them to help in solving her sister's case.
By the following spring, the witnesses had stopped talking to police.
Williams said he understands family members' desires to get involved, and the pain they suffer when homicides cannot be solved.
But he cannot help but be somewhat critical of Maier's interference.
``Who knows how things might have turned out had she not involved herself,'' he said.
Todd was a newlywed living in Norfolk, having married William Todd on Oct. 17, 1966 - a month after they met. Her husband last saw her alive early on the morning of Dec. 17. He was a suspect only briefly. He had an alibi; he had been at work.
According to news accounts at the time, evidence against the suspect gathered by police was presented to a grand jury, which did not find probable cause to indict him. That evidence included:
When first questioned by police, he had a scab on one hand and what looked like a bruise on one thumb. He told police they were caused by an allergy. Police said Todd apparently had been struck in the face with a fist. She had a cut lip and the left side of her face was bruised.
Waitresses said the suspect was wearing a checked topcoat when he came into an Ocean View restaurant. The suspect said he never owned one. Police later found a checked coat in his apartment.
When Todd's parents talked to the suspect's girlfriend, she showed them a short beaver-skin jacket that she said someone had given her. A three-quarter length beaver-skin coat was missing from Todd's apartment, authorities said.
Despite the end of the active investigation, Whitehurst says Todd's case remains in his thoughts, along with two other unsolved killings assigned to him.
``You don't forget these cases,'' Whitehurst said. ``There isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about my unsolved cases. An investigator goes on. You never give up on a murder case. There's always that hope. Miracles happen.'' MEMO: CASE CHRONOLOGY
Dec. 17, 1966: Sandra Pace Todd is beaten and strangled during the
pre-dawn hours. About 7 a.m., a workman finds her body in a ravine off
I-264 at Bowers Hill in Chesapeake.
May 1967: The suspect and Todd's husband take polygraph tests. Both
pass. No one is charged.
Jan. 10, 1969: Republican Congressman Lawrence G. Williams of
Pennsylvania writes a letter asking then-Virginia Gov. Mills E. Godwin
Jr. to get the state attorney general involved in the case.
March 27, 1969: The congressman receives a death threat by
telephone.
April 1969: A Chesapeake grand jury hears evidence for three days and
fails to indict anyone.
March 26, 1970: Congressman Williams writes a letter to then-Gov. A.
Linwood Holton Jr. saying the case had not been handled well.
April 18, 1978: Norfolk and Chesapeake prosecutors and police reopen
the case based on discrepancies in a polygraph test.
Aug. 7, 1979: Then-Norfolk Commonwealth's Attorney Joseph Campbell
seeks a hair sample. It is never obtained.
February 1990: Sandra Todd's father, Durant Lee Pace, dies. Pat Maier
makes a vow to her dying father to avenge her sister's murder.
Jan. 11, 1995: Chesapeake Commonwealth's Attorney David Williams and
Detective Cecil E. Whitehurst interview the suspect for about an hour.
No charges are brought.
KEYWORDS: MURDER UNSOLVED CASE by CNB