[Vision2020] 1981 Slayings Still Being Investigated

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (February 17, 2009) Spokesman Review.

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1981 slaying still being investigated
Police hope new methods will help
 
LEWISTON – Kristin David disappeared in June 1981 while riding her bicycle 
from Moscow to Clarkston, and about a week later the dismembered body of 
the 22-year-old University of Idaho student was found in the Snake River.

Now, authorities say they hope advances in technology will help solve what 
happened to David, a senior majoring in broadcast journalism and political 
science.

“We continue to look at this,” FBI Special Agent Ron Miller said. “It’s 
not just something that’s sitting around. We continue to investigate it.”

He said evidence was reprocessed last year by the FBI lab, but he declined 
to say if any new clues were discovered, because the case is still active.

No arrests have been made in an investigation that included law 
enforcement officials from at least two cities, four counties and two 
states. The FBI took over the case because of all the jurisdictions 
involved.

Law enforcement officials who investigated David’s death say it still 
haunts them.

“The thing I remember is how frightening it was,” said Michael Goetz, who 
at the time had just started his second term as sheriff of Latah County 
and had two small daughters. 

Goetz resigned that fall and took a law enforcement job in Tacoma. Now 58 
and still living in Tacoma, he said he still thinks of David when he hears 
of a drifter being arrested in a similar case.

Some authorities think David’s disappearance could be tied to others.

Christina White, 12, disappeared from the Asotin County Fair on April 28, 
1979, and her whereabouts are unknown.

In September 1982, three people went missing from the vicinity of the 
Lewiston Civic Theatre, where David had worked at one time.

The bodies of stepsisters Kristina Nelson, 21, and Jacqueline (Brandi) 
Miller, 18, were found in March 1984 at the bottom of an embankment near 
Kendrick.

The body of the third person, Steven Pearsall, 35, has never been found, 
and police say he is likely dead.

Authorities also note that three of the four female victims had similar 
names: Kristin, Christina and Kristina.

“Three of the four, all about the same height, same name, you kind of 
start looking at that like, yeah, maybe,” said Willie Russell, 65, a 
Lewiston police detective at the time.

Authorities had suspects, but have never charged anyone. Russell thinks 
all five disappearances are connected.

“What you think and what you can prove are two different things,” he said.

Don Schoeffler, a former Lewiston police detective who worked the cases, 
disagrees.

“Not the same killer,” said Schoeffler, 62, who now lives in Yuma, Ariz.

Schoeffler flew to Texas and then Florida to talk with people who 
confessed to killing sprees, but came away satisfied they had no 
connection to David’s death.

“We lived and breathed those cases,” Schoeffler said. “And to this day, it 
still bothers us.”

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
 
"For a lapsed Lutheran born-again Buddhist pan-Humanist Universalist 
Unitarian Wiccan Agnostic like myself there's really no reason ever to go 
to work."

- Roy Zimmerman


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