The Cincinnati Enquirer from Cincinnati, Ohio • Page 29

METRO The Cincinnati Knquikkk B6 Sunday. February 23. 1997 Unsolved: Families grope for clues to slayings Other unsolved homicides Here is a sampling of other unsolved homicide cases in the Tri state: Delores Garner Lowe, 36, Walnut Hills, was found dead Sept. 4, 1996, outside Hoff Lacking physical evidence, authorities can't file charges in the case, said Newport Police Lt. Pat Moore, who, more than seven years after the slaying, still chases down information.

Police think Ms. Thompson had been dead several days when her body was found. Mr. Caesar said tests of the dirt on the riverbank indicated that her body was dumped on the riverbank the night before she was found. Loveland Police Chief Dennis Rees said he has asked the Hamilton County Coroner's office to review physical evidence and take advantage of any technological advances, blood was at the crime scene, Lt.

Moore said, and material found under Ms. Armstrong's fingernails was determined to be her own. "This is not a one-hour Quincy (episode)," he said. "It's probably the most frustrating case of my career." For nearly 20 years, William Thompson has not lost faith that his daughter Cheryl's killer would be found. Today, he is even more optimistic after urging Loveland police to take physical evidence out of storage and submit it to the coroner's office for modern tests that might help them solve the case.

"You don't go a day without thinking about it," Mr. Thompson said during a recent visit from his home in Austin, Texas. "I want to pursue this until it's solved. With this push we're going to get it done." Volunteers 18 years and older are needed for a research study for a new investigational treatment for psoriasis (excluding the scalp). Free physical examination ana laboratory test given for qualified participants.

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That is what we are waiting and hoping for," Mr. Manoocheri said. When Julie Watkins believes that she can't stand to miss her sister another minute, she takes Judy Lynn Smith's green and blue wool jacket out of the closet, sits down on the couch, hugs it, takes in the residual smell of Sierra cologne, and cries. "I'll never be able to hug her again, never be able to do sister things together. I always thought that we would grow old together," Mrs.

Watkins said. Ms. Smith was 30 when her stabbed bodywas found by a group of picnicking second-graders at Norwood's Mill-crest Park on June 1, 1994. It was the same day she was due in a Clermont County Judy Lynn courtroom to pur- Smith sue domestic violence and menacing charges against an estranged boyfriend. The grisly discovery came four days after Ms.

Smith, a tanning parlor employee, turned up missing. She left Mrs. Watkins' Batavia Township home between 7 and 7:30 a.m. May 28 to meet the boyfriend at the park. Ms.

Smith and her 13-year-old daughter, Amanda, had been staying at the Watkins residence following Ms. Smith's breakup with her boyfriend. She had lived with him in Norwood for about five years. On the day of her sister's disappearance, Mrs. Watkins suspected the worst when Ms.

Smith failed to show up at a Norwood school at 10:30 a.m. to pick up her daughter from Saturday classes. Mrs. Watkins and her parents searched for Ms. Smith in the Norwood area, to no avail.

Police found her 1993 white Chevrolet Lumina parked at Millcrest Park a day before the body was found. The boyfriend is in prison in eastern Kentucky, serving a 10-year sentence for assaulting a man with a shotgun during the 1980s. He was out of prison on appeal when Ms. Smith was killed. Detectives recently began rein-terviewing witnesses in Ms.

Smith's death. Norwood police Lt. Steve Crowe thinks the case will soon come to a conclusion. Meanwhile, Mrs. Watkins and her family "pray a lot, hope a lot and cry a lot" to get through the ordeal.

"I try to keep myself with a positive attitude that you can't take something that don't belong to you and not pay for it," Mrs. Watkins said. Even with a confession, the fatal stabbing of Sherry Armstrong is no closer to an end, police said. Ms. Thompson, a 19-year-old University of Cincinnati student, disappeared March 24, 1978, after leaving her family's Wooster Pike apartment to meet a boyfriend at Gatsby's night club on Madison Cheryl Road in Oakley Thompson around midnight.

She never arrived at the club, although her car was later found on nearby Bach Avenue. Two weeks later, on April 8, a game warden checking for unlicensed fishermen found Ms. Thompson's partially clothed body on the bank of the Little Miami River off East Kemper Road. She died from strangulation and a blood clot on the brain. Semen was found on the body, leading police to speculate she may have been raped.

At the time Ms. Thompson disappeared, a boyfriend, whom police refused to name, told detectives that Ms. Thompson never arrived at the bar and that he saw a man driving her car at 5 a.m. March 24. He told police he chased the man in his car, but lost sight of him around the Hyde Park Plaza.

Ms. Thompson's car was searched for evidence, but no fingerprints were found that didn't belong there, said Clarence Caesar, now a retired Cincinnati police officer who was assigned to a special law enforcement task force that investigated Ms. Thompson's slaying and 15 similar deaths. "There was nothing we couldn't account for," he said. The task force was set up to check for a link between homicides of young women from the mid- to late 1970s.

Eight of the slayings are unsolved. The task force disbanded after nearly a year. such as DNA, that may provide a lead. Nothing is guaranteed, he said, because some of the evidence has deteriorated over the years. "You can't start with nothing and do something with it.

But we don't want to close our eyes," Chief Rees said. "We're not going to allow information that might be out there to go unviewed. We're willing to accept any additional information." Covington, Ky. mi.sii'M FDIC INSURED SIS) i Id x- I H- frf, I- mmrnm i 3J her death in io, ivis. Armstrong, a former beauty queen from Clear Lake, was starting over after a divorce from drag-racing crew chief Dale Armstrong.

Drawn to the Cincinnati area by Sherry Armstrong the German influence and a friend she met on the racing circuit, Ms. Armstrong was planning to pursue a degree in psychology at Northern Kentucky University and had just taken a job in public relations at Children's Hospital Medical Center, friends said. Three months before the slaying, she had stepped forward in her relationship with boyfriend Lance Ellin-ghausen, moving in with him in a house he owned on Putnam Street in Newport. On Nov. II, 1989, Ms.

Armstrong was preparing for bed after having dinner at a restaurant with Mr. Ellinghausen's mother, when she was attacked sometime after ll p.m. Five hours later, Mr. Ellinghau-sen, returning from his job at the Waterfront Restaurant in Covington, found Ms. Armstrong's body just inside the side door of his residence.

She had been stabbed more than 20 times with a kitchen knife, the coroner said. Detectives questioned those closest to Ms. Armstrong but all were cleared. Information that a man may have been stalking Ms. Armstrong also fizzled, Lt.

Moore said. Ms. Armstrong's sisters offered a $2,000 reward and consulted a West Coast psychic. Still nothing. In August 1994, police thought they had a break when Clifton Cousins, a member of the Black Gangster Disciples gang who was serving a life sentence in Lucasville for killing two women in Cleveland, wrote to The Enquirer, confessing to Ms.

Armstrong's slaying. In letters to the newspaper, he said he and another convicted murderer, Richard Hood, of Cleveland, went to Mr. Ellinghausen's house to kill a man who tried to cheat a Cleveland drug dealer. Mr. Cousins said he blacked out and next remembered holding a bloody knife in his hand.

Newport police questioned Mr. Cousins in prison. "The fellow can confess, but if there is no evidence to support it, we cannot proceed with it," Lt. Moore said. Genetic tests such as DNA becoming more popular among police to narrow down suspects by comparing samples of blood, semen, hair and saliva cannot help identify the killer because of the absence of physical evidence at the scene, Lt.

Moore said. The killer wore gloves, leaving no fingerprints. A weapon was never recovered. Only Ms. Armstrong's Mt.

Healthy 8061 Hamilton Ave. 10am-6pm Batavia Rt. 32 9am-9pm man School in East Walnut Hills. Police don't know who killed her, and they aren't saying how she died. Ms.

Lowe. known as Delores Garner "Dee Dee," Lowe was seen the night before her death in the Walnut Hills and Evanston neighborhoods. Call Cincinnati police, 352-3542. Linda K. Curtis, 36, was fatally shot in the head last August in her home at Lake Waynoka in Sardinia.

Her body was found by her husband, Dick. A 91 1 call to police reported the shooting as a suicide. Detectives are investigating the death as a homicide. Call the Brown County sheriff's office, 378-4155. Terrell White, 20, of Price Hill disappeared Oct.

31, 1994, and his body, wrapped in a tarpaulin, was found Nov. 16,1994, in the Ohio River near the Mill Creek. Police said he was possibly beaten. Mr. White disappeared after riding downtown with an ex-girlfriend to pick up airline tickets for a planned move to Milwaukee.

Call Cincinnati police, 352-3542. Peggy Casey, 37, a mother of four from Covington, was last seen alive April 1 1994, at the Bottoms Up bar in that city. The next day, a man fishing in Miami County, Ohio, found what later proved to be her lower torso. Her purse was found near a gas station in Northside on April 4. Her legs, head and arms were found between April 1 5 and April 19, wrapped in plastic bags, in Clark and Champaign counties in Ohio.

Her upper torso was not found. Call Covington police Detective Bud Vallandingham, 292-2210. Dolores "Dee" Moyer, 52, a retired secretary, was found stabbed to death in bed at her Elsmere Avenue apartment on Dec. 17, 1992. Her three grown children posted a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to an arrest but later withdrew it to hire two retired FBI agents to try to solve the case.

Call Norwood police at 396-8221 Gerald Wilson, 41 of Law-renceburg, a supervisor for Ryland Homes, was fatally shot once in the head Jan. 20, 1992, in a construction trailer at the Barrett Manor South subdivision on Green Valley Court, Union Township, near Pisaah. A Gerald Wilson second man, Tim Saurber, 39, of Meadow-view Court, Fairfield, was shot twice, but survived. Call Union Township Police (Butler County), 777-2231, or Crimestoppers, 352-3040. Richard Woods, 41 a furniture salesman from Dublin, Ohio, disappeared Oct.

8, 1992, after leaving Just Living Rooms at the Colony Square Shopping Center in Lebanon. Two days later, his green 1990 Lexus was found at a rest stop on Interstate 71 near Lebanon. His empty wallet was found on Nixon-Camp Road a few days later. Mr. Woods' body was discovered Nov.

9, 1992, near Middle-boro Road in Washington Township, about eight miles from Lebanon. He had been shot twice in the head. Call the Warren County sheriff's office, 933-1280. Permon Gilbert, 46, an appliance repairman from Ham- ersville, was found dead May 23, 1982, on Swope Road, about seven miles south of Bethel. He had been shot.

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