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(More customer reviews)After dissipating my youth and innocence by reading almost all of the Ann Rule true crime books in print, I was beginning to think most serial killers hung out or originated in the Pacific Northwest. "Blood Justice" by Tom Henderson soon set me straight. Michigan harbors its share of brutal, secretive killers, too.
I had seen an episode on 'Cold Case Files' concerning two 'stranger' rape-killings that occurred many years apart in Flint and Romulus Michigan, and before the glory days of DNA. The killer had also left a bloody partial fingerprint at one of the crime scenes. "Blood Justice" delves much more deeply than the T.V. show into the lives and deaths of the victims: a music professor and an airline stewardess.
Unlike Ann Rule, this author does not automatically make saints out of the victims or heroes out of the law enforcement officials. In fact, a few of the attorneys seem downright incompetent, or more intent on political gain rather than achieving justice. A few Detroit judges take it on the chin, including 'Half-a-Day' Hathaway. I had the honor of serving on one of Judge Hathaway's juries, and yes, he did spend portions of the testimony with his eyes closed, but he was a courteous old gentleman and I always made a point of voting for him until he retired.
I wish I had served on one of Judge Drake's juries. She presided over the Jeffrey Gorton case and the author has nothing but admiration for her. The judge, prosecutor, and most of the jurors were women, which really seemed to freak out the defendant--especially one of the jurors who closely resembled his victims. Coincidentally, one of the prosecuting attorneys was a former flight attendant.
It was the DNA evidence, the partial fingerprint, and dogged police work that finally brought the killer to justice. Only after the DNA had been matched from the two separate crime scenes many years later did the police realize that the rape/murders were committed by the same man. The AFIS (fingerprint matching system) had just come on-line in 1986 when Gorton killed his first known victim, but it was not able to make a match against a partial print. When the partial was sent back to the FBI in 2001, the fingerprint matching system (now called IAFIS) was much improved. A match was made against a man who'd been convicted of assaulting a woman in Orlando, Florida in the early 1980s.
It was Jeffrey Gorton.
Like many psychopaths, Gorton was able to keep his family completely in the dark about his violent tendencies, although his wife must have wondered about the boxes and suitcases of women's underwear that he kept as trophies.
Both the author and the defense attorney are convinced that Gorton committed other murders. In fact, the defense attorney said that when his client was freaking out about the number of women involved in his trial, he hinted at other murders: "...before Gorton was through ranting, he'd told him [the attorney] he'd killed women in Ohio and Florida and that he'd made up code names for the underwear he'd stolen from his murder victims."
If so, I hope this book is someday revised to let us know how Gorton fares in a state with the death penalty.
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In 1991, flight attendant Nancy Ludwig checked in to an airport hotel near Detroit. The next morning she was found gagged, raped, and tortured-her throat slit with such rage that she was nearly decapitated. Her husband Arthur never gave up hope that the future would bring enough evidence to close the case. But it was the past that held the clue.In 1985, fifty-five-year old Margarette Eby, a music professor, met the same grisly death at her cottage in Flint, Michigan. The case went cold-until six years later when the victim's son Mark came upon the story of Nancy Ludwig's slaying. With nothing to go on but intuition, he called authorities, certain that the same fiend committed both crimes.A cunning sting operation yielded irrefutable DNA evidence, and authorities were led to the home of respected navy veteran Jeffrey Gorton living quietly with his wife and two children. But his cold-blooded secrets were only beginning to come to light leaving fears that there were more victims yet to be found in a killing spree that had finally come to an end.
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