Followup: skull found in creek
Anne Warfield
Law officials hope to identify body
Several Peoria women reported missing in recent years are still
unaccounted for
August 27, 2001
By SARAH OKESON
of the Journal Star
PEORIA - Stephanie Gibson was a little slow and so naive that her
friends always wanted to know if she made it home OK.
When she disappeared in 1995, her friends and family spent weeks
tromping the countryside looking for any trace of her or her remains.
They went to Kingston Mines where the man she was with, Arlie Ray
Davis, had said they were going.
They searched the rural roads where Joseph Miller dumped the bodies of
the prostitutes he killed in 1993. And they looked along Illinois
Route 8, the road near where a Peoria prostitute was found strangled
to death last March.
A skull and other human bones were discovered by a fisherman in
Kickapoo Creek on Aug. 17 about half a mile downstream of Route 8, a
discovery that holds both fear and dread for every friend and relative
of those who are missing.
"I hope it's her," said Gibson's friend, Tove Altieri. "Stephanie
never had a service. No one ever gave her one. That really bothered
me."
The creek where the bones were found was quiet Sunday. It's near a
sandbar across fallow fields that are difficult to tromp across on
foot. Wildlife Prairie State Park is a stone's throw away. Little is
visible through the muddy water stirred up by the recent rain.
"You can't see it too well, but in a day or two it will clear out,"
said Jerry Wyatt, who owns the adjacent fields.
Bodies left out in the open, especially under the hot summer sun, can
be stripped to the bones by insects, the elements and wandering
animals in a matter of days. The bones the fisherman found bear no
flesh, so an anthropologist has been called in to study them.
Forensic anthropologists can tell many things from the study of bones:
the sex of the person, the race, the age, even the number of
pregnancies a woman has had. Authorities hope the anthropologist will
be able to put a name to the bones that were found and tell how the
person died.
Gibson, who police believe was murdered by Davis, is only one of
several women missing from the Peoria area. Valerie Sloan, 20, of
Peoria and Stacey Morrison, 25, of Pekin, have been missing since fall
1993. Police say those women likely were victims of convicted serial
killer Miller.
In 1996, Davis was convicted of raping and murdering a Kewanee woman.
He is on death row in Illinois. Four Peoria-area prostitutes have
testified that Davis tried to kill them in 1993 and 1994. During paid
sex, he allegedly choked them, sometimes with electrical cords.
Davis is a suspect in the disappearance of three other Peoria-area
women: Loretta Tinkham, 31; Sheryl Murwin, 35; and Cheryl Murray, 44.
Miller liked to talk about his exploits although he didn't always tell
the truth, but Davis is tight-lipped.
"He was very cool," Arkansas County Sheriff Wayne Simpson once said.
"He has no personality at all. The only time I talked to him, he
struck me as being real cold-hearted and not giving a damn about
anything."
When Davis was brought to a court hearing in 1995, Gibson's son,
Leslie Kildair, was there.
"Arlie Ray, I want you to know my mom is still missing - Stephanie
Gibson," Kildair said.
Davis didn't respond or even look in Kildair's direction.
http://pjstar.com/news/topnews/g33892a.html
--
Anne Warfield
indigoace at goodsol period com
http://www.goodsol.com/cats/