'73 killing is solved by DNA - Perpetrator died of throat cancer
KaEfEr
By Beverly Ford
The Arizona Republic
Feb. 4, 2000
Twenty-seven years after a young Phoenix woman was raped
and murdered, a DNA test has solved the case.
Authorities said it may be the oldest murder case in the
nation to be solved using DNA.
But Karen Bingham's killer will never be brought to
justice.
Last month, three weeks before James Robert Williams was
indicted in Bingham's slaying, he died of throat cancer.
It was an ironic twist to a case that baffled detectives
and frustrated Bingham's family for more than a quarter-century.
"Can you imagine the irony we felt when we found out that
after all these years, he died three weeks earlier?" asked Bingham's
brother, Brian, 47. "It's mind-boggling."
Karen Bingham was 19 when she was raped and strangled in
the bedroom of her Phoenix apartment while her 7-month-old son,
Benjamin, lay on a bed nearby.
Now 26, he remembers nothing about his mother or her Sept.
27, 1973, murder. But through the years, he's thought about her killer
often.
"Not a day went by that I didn't wonder who did it," said
Benjamin, who was reared by his maternal grandmother. "For a long time,
I thought maybe my father did it. It was always painful wondering if
he did. At least for me there is some closure in knowing he didn't."
The mystery surrounding Bingham's death began to unravel
three years ago, thanks to Ed Reynolds, a Phoenix police detective who
works on old cases. The persistent Reynolds ordered the DNA
tests that linked semen found on Williams' pants with stains
discovered at the murder scene.
In January, Reynolds took the 27-year-old evidence before
a grand jury and won an indictment against Williams, a violent felon who
raped both his 13-year-old sister and a 10-year-old brother within
the five years before the murder.
"We were absolutely flabbergasted, absolutely stunned. It
was a bolt from the heavens," Brian Bingham recalled after learning that
the case had been solved. "We didn't even know anyone was
looking at the case or that evidence existed that could be put
together."
"It was nothing in a million years I would have expected,"
added Benjamin Bingham, who remembers as a child thinking his mother
died in an accident. It wasn't until he was a teenager that he learned
the truth.
The family's elation was short-lived, however.
Within days, Reynolds called to say that Williams had died
of throat cancer at a Phoenix hospital, just three weeks before the
indictment.
"It was like getting all the way to the finish line and
then dropping out of the race," Benjamin Bingham recalled.
"It would be different if he died five years ago but three
weeks . . . I felt cheated. I felt this guy would finally pay for what
he had done, but we can't have that satisfaction."
Bingham's death devastated the family. Her mother,
Leatrice, of Phoenix, still finds it difficult to talk about it. A
brother, James, an acquaintance of Williams who gave him the key to his
sister's apartment on the night of her murder, was wracked by guilt all
his life; he died at age 37.
"It had a horrible impact on the whole family," Brian
Bingham said. "Our family suffered mightily because of this. It was a
nightmare."
Yet Benjamin can't help think that in the end, Williams
may have paid for his mother's murder after all.
"I've had friends and loved ones die of cancer and I can
only hope that his was as painful, debilitating and lonely as death by
cancer can be," he said.
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