Cup may have closed book on 4 North Texas killings
Jason...@virgin.net
Cup may have closed book on 4 North Texas killings
By EVAN MOORE
Copyright 1999 Houston Chronicle
WICHITA FALLS -- It was a brisk day in February as Faryion Edward
Wardrip stood outside the Olney Screen and Door Co., holding the secrets
to his past in a paper cup.
Wardrip was nearing the end of his break. He drained the last of his
drink and turned his lanky frame back toward the door. He was about to
toss the cup in a trash receptacle when a stranger approached, a wad of
tobacco bulging in his lower jaw.
"Say, could I have that?" the man asked. "I sure could use a spit cup."
And Wardrip handed over his paper cup, his past -- and his future -- to
John Little.
It was the end of a quest for Little. The Archer County District
Attorney's investigator had been shadowing Wardrip for most of a week,
waiting for the chance the cup had afforded.
It also was the beginning of a classic investigation involving the
science of DNA. Within weeks police would close the books on four
previously unsolved North Texas killings and Wardrip, a middle-aged
Church of Christ Sunday school teacher, would be charged as a serial
murderer.
Little rushed the cup to the GeneScreen laboratory in Dallas. There,
minute cells from Wardrip's mouth were scraped from its surface and
matched to evidence from the 14-year-old murder of Toni Gibbs near
Wichita Falls.
That was no surprise to Little. For the better part of two years he had
been following a trail that led directly to Wardrip. It was a trail that
began and ended with DNA.
"Without DNA there would have been no case," said Little.
Originally, the Gibbs case seemed clear. A nurse at Wichita General
Hospital, Gibbs was reported missing on Jan. 19, 1985. Her abandoned car
was found three days later in Wichita Falls, and her body was discovered
Feb. 15 in a field just south of town.
She was one of three young women killed in a similar manner in Wichita
Falls within a year. Others included Terry Sims, 20, killed in December
1984, and Ellen Blau, 21, killed in September 1985. All had been
sexually assaulted, and theories of a serial killer were circulating.
The Gibbs case, however, appeared solved. Danny Wayne Laughlin had
hovered around investigators at the Gibbs crime scene, offering theories
about the killing. Later, during questioning, Laughlin appeared to know
facts about the case that were not public knowledge.
He was eventually charged with the killing, despite a lack of any
physical evidence and his assertions that his knowledge of the case came
from reading the case file when left alone in an interrogation room
during questioning.
There was an attempt in 1986 to match Laughlin's DNA with evidence from
the crime scene, but that proved impossible with procedures that existed
at the time. He was subsequently tried and, although his case ended in a
mistrial, many were convinced that he was the killer.
Laughlin died in a car accident in 1993, and the cloud of suspicion
followed him to his grave.
Little, however, had doubts. After joining the district attorney's
office in 1996, he began examining the old slayings. The killings
appeared to him to be the work of one man and had ended with Blau.
Little wondered why, if Laughlin had been a serial killer, had he
seemingly stopped?
DNA comparison methods had improved greatly by 1996, and Laughlin's DNA
was tested again. It did not match evidence from the Gibbs case.
If Laughlin could not have killed Toni Gibbs, Little reasoned, then he
couldn't have killed the others.
The investigator then began comparing facts about the killings. One man,
Wardrip, appeared to have some connection to each case.
In fact, he was a known killer. He had smothered his 21-year-old
neighbor, Tina Kimbrew, on May 6, 1986. She had not been sexually
assaulted, and investigators had not compared her death to the other
three.
Three days after the slaying, Wardrip showed up in Galveston and told
police he was suicidal and admitted killing Kimbrew during an argument.
He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to 35 years.
He was paroled in December 1997 and moved to Olney, where he found a job
with Olney Screen and Door, married and joined the Hamilton Street
Church of Christ.
He was known as an affable, dependable worker who, at 6-feet-6, had
garnered the nickname "Gonzo."
Wardrip was active in the church as well. There, he told the
congregation he had been in jail for causing his girlfriend's death
while driving while intoxicated, but that he had since become a changed
man. He attended regularly, sang hymns and taught Sunday school.
All the while, Little was poring over case files. He learned that
Wardrip had lived less than a quarter-mile from where Sims was killed
and less than a half-mile from where Gibbs' car was found. Wardrip also
had worked as an orderly in a hospital with Gibbs shortly before her
death.
Little then determined that Blau had been a frequent guest at a couple's
apartment across the hall from Wardrip's and that Wardrip had worked at
a pizza restaurant near Blau's place of employment.
Moreover, Little learned that when Wardrip confessed the Sims killing to
Galveston police, he had mentioned that he knew Ellen Blau, who also had
been slain.
Still, Little was without any tangible physical evidence to link Wardrip
to the crimes. His only hope was DNA and, since DNA samples were
available from all the cases, Little decided to obtain a sample of
Wardrip's.
That proved easier in theory than in practice, however. Wardrip had
pleaded guilty to the Sims killing and, because DNA played no part in
that case, no sample had been taken from the defendant. Little was
forced to obtain his own sample.
During the first week in February, the investigator spent five days
following Wardrip. They were days in which he fought boredom in a
coin-operated laundry across Texas 114 from Olney Screen and Door. He
watched as Wardrip came and went from the business, never leaving
anything that might contain his DNA.
Finally, on Feb. 5, he spotted Wardrip with the paper cup.
Results showed that the chances of anyone other than Wardrip having
killed Toni Gibbs were 1 in 16,310,932.
Little arrested Wardrip on Feb. 13 and, within days, Wardrip had
confessed to the killings of Sims, Gibbs, Blau and to the 1985 killing
of Debra Taylor in Fort Worth. He has since been charged in all those
killings.
"This case is the best example of the use of DNA that I've seen," said
District Attorney Tim Cole. "Without it, we'd have no case at all, and
with it, it's tied up.
"I only wish they'd had the present procedures perfected back in 1986."
Wardrip marked his 40th birthday, March 6, the day he was indicted on a
charge of capital murder in Gibbs' death, in the Archer County Jail.
His case is set for trial in October in Denton, moved there on a change
of venue motion by public defender John Curry.
Curry, appearing somewhat resigned at a pretrial hearing for Wardrip in
August, said he plans to question the manner in which Wardrip's DNA
sample was obtained.
"Frankly, because I have to try something," he said.
Repo...@home.net
Houston
Chronicle newspaper:
September 11, 1999
Cup may have closed book on 4 North Texas killings
By EVAN MOORE
The Houston Chronicle