Murder Mystery #2
After graduating from High Point Regional High School in rural Sussex County, New Jersey, 19-year-old Heather Stigliano moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to chase her dream of becoming an actress.
"I had just gone through a divorce, and she promised to stay with me for a year till I got my legs, and when that year was up she made plans and she moved," said Susan L. Wright, Heather's mother.
After securing a job as a waitress at a local eatery, Heather rented a small apartment near the beach. Her first few weeks at Myrtle Beach were fun-filled and full of excitement; however, she soon discovered that breaking into showbiz was not as easy as she had thought.
"She wanted me to come down. She was feeling homesick, and things were not going as well as she wanted it to go down there," Susan said.
Unfortunately, that phone call would prove to be the last time Susan had any contact with her daughter. The following week, on Nov. 4, 1991, friends found her body lying on the floor inside her apartment. She had been stabbed multiple times and strangled to death with an electrical cord.
During her autopsy, forensic pathologist Jamie Downs noted "40 separate individual injuries including significant blunt force injuries."
The prosecuting attorney would later describe it as one of the "most brutal" crimes he had ever seen.
Investigators found no evidence of forced entry; however, the motive for the murder appeared to be robbery, as several of Heather's possessions—a wallet, 35-millimeter camera, and television set—were missing. Her car was also nowhere to be found.
Several clues were found inside the apartment. Investigators found unidentifiable pieces of broken plastic next to Heather's body and fingerprints that did not a match the victim. They also found shoe prints from a size 11 athletic shoe. In addition to the evidence, investigators also made note of the fact that the killer had placed a pillow underneath Heather's head, suggesting the he or she may have known the victim.
Doctor Downs estimated that Heather had been dead for approximately one week prior to the discovery of her body.
"There were several stab wounds that were inflicted to her body after she died," Downs said. "There were some injuries that probably happened during the final few moments. I had not seen anybody murdered in the way she was murdered. It was obvious that there were three different methods of murder there."
Heather's autopsy revealed no evidence of a sexual assault; however, Downs was able to match a shoe impression found on her shoe to the impressions found at the murder scene. The location of the impressions on her body suggested that the killer had used his foot to hold her down when he was attacking her.
Police issued a national alert for Heather's car and began their investigation by interviewing her family members, friends and co-workers.
"She was very friendly. She loved to be with her friends; she wanted to be part of anything that had energy, and I think that what Myrtle Beach gave her was the energy she wanted," said Victor Stigliano, Heather's father.
Police soon learned that Heather had recently broken up with her boyfriend, a military pilot stationed at Pope Air Force Base. The lead seemed promising at first, but investigators soon learned that he was deployed in Saudi Arabia during the week that Heather was murdered.
Next, investigators focused their attention on an Air Force pilot with whom Heather had a problem in the days leading up to her murder. According to her mother, the man had sexually assaulted her at a party.
"She had drunk a little bit more than she should have," Susan said. "She did tell me she thought that she had been raped by one of the husbands of one of the guests while she was passed out."
Susan said that Heather had been considering notifying police about the incident.
Police considered the man a prime suspect in the cases, surmising that he had murdered Heather to protect his military career and to prevent his wife from finding out about his infidelity.
Nonetheless, as with their previous suspect, the man could not be connected to the scene, and he willingly provided investigators with his fingerprints, which ruled him out as a possible suspect.
After ruling out their first two suspects, police focused on a friend of Heather's who had recently stayed at her apartment while in town on business. However, like the two before him, he was also soon ruled out when he provided investigators with proof that he was out of town at the time of her murder.
The case was quickly going cold—police were out of suspects and unable to match the prints to any known criminals in the area. Then, things suddenly changed when an antique dealer from Pawleys Island called police after seeing reports of the murder on his television.
According to the antique dealer, a man had recently come into his shop and tried to sell him a camera matching the make and model of the one missing from Heather's apartment. He said the man acted suspiciously and became aggravated when he would not buy the camera. The incident troubled the shopkeeper to the extent that he wrote down the license plate of the vehicle the man drove away in. That number, as it turned out, was a match to the plate on Heather's stolen car.
Police had their first break in the case and also a description of their suspect, "a Caucasian man, mid 30s, with dark hair."
Using those details and others provided by the antique dealer, investigators were able to put together a composite sketch of the suspect, which they distributed to news outlets throughout the country.
Within days, employees of a construction company in Myrtle Beach contacted police and told them they recognized the man in the artist's rendition as 38-year-old James Bernard Whipple, a former coworker who had suddenly stopped coming to work over a week ago.
When police ran Whipple through their criminal database, they discovered that he had a record spanning four states for burglary, grand larceny, unauthorized use of a vehicle, petty theft, DUI and resisting arrest.
Whipple's last known address was in Melbourne, Florida.
On Nov. 14, 1991, a Melbourne police officer observed a suspicious vehicle driving down a local roadway. When he ran a routine check of the vehicles license plate, he discovered that the car was stolen and initiated a traffic stop. The driver pulled over to the side of the road and identified himself as James Bernard Whipple. The officer arrested Whipple at the scene, and he was later transported to the Brevard County jail in Sharpes.
When investigators searched Heather's stolen car, they found a bent serrated knife, a broken clothes iron, a pair of men's athletic shoes and bloody clothing. By the time they were finished examining the car, they were not lacking in evidence tying Whipple to the murder.
As investigators attempted to sort out the details, the knife was sent to forensic pathologist Dr. Jamie Downs for comparison to the stab wounds on Heather's body.
"I looked at the separation of the tines of the serrated knife—the little points that stuck out—and noted that those were at repeated intervals, very consistent repeated intervals," Downs said. "A group of abrasions on her neck, no bigger than a half an inch, were matched to the knife [found] in possession of the suspect. To me that is really impressive. That is what forensics is—answering questions that haven't even been thought of yet."
In addition to the knife analysis, Downs also matched a broken clothes iron found in the vehicle to the unidentified pieces of plastic found near Heather's body, suggesting that it too had been used during the commission of her murder.
"At that point it became a puzzle. After everything was photographically documented, I started gluing the plastic pieces back together," said detective Steve Derrick. "The pieces from the crime scene and the iron in the car created a link to Whipple being at the crime scene."
Investigators also matched the shoes found in Whipple's possession to the imprints found at the crime scene and the ones that Downs had discovered on Heather's shirt.
"There were a number of small cuts—little nicked out areas in the raised areas of the outsole—which corresponded from that shoe to the bloody impression in the bathroom," Derrick said. "The right shoe that had been taken from Whipple was the shoe to the exclusion of all others. The outsole design of Whipple's shoes also matched the bloody impression on the shirt."
Your Assignment:
You will turn in two pieces of paper.
On the first piece of paper you will have the following information:
Modus Operandi
Who, What, When, Where, Why, Patterns/Conclusions of the Crime (identify if your conclusion is deductive or inductive)
On the second piece of paper you will have the following information:
Corpus Delicti
Evidence that indicates that a crime has occurred (both secondary and primary)
Then for each piece of evidence, determine if it is identification or individualization.
Grading:
(1) This is a curved assignment. This means if you can out sleuth your classmates you might get extra credit.
(2) Organization is key to receiving a good grade, if I cannot read or under the layout of the assignment—the result will be a zero.
(3) Remember that there are no late papers for the Murder Mystery, if you are absent or ill, remember to email it to
This is due on November 5th, 2009.