Angie Housman disappeared in 1993. Her body was found 10 days later in the woods, in the County of St. Charles. 25 years after the abduction, rape and the killing of the girl, the police finally seem to be ready to name the killer.
New evidence
Last year, forensic scientists found a strange, not previously studied DNA in evidence from the crime scene. Having a DNA database, they found a match with samples obtained from 61-year-old veteran of the air force. This meant that probably a retired soldier who is serving time in Federal prison for pedophilia and child pornography on an international scale — and is the killer of Angie Housman. Sources say: he is ready to press new charges, although the details of the resumed investigations are in no hurry to divulge.
Angie’s stepfather told the Post-Dispatch that to him a few months ago, the police came and showed pictures of the alleged killer. He is convinced that he did not know the man in the photo, although the face looks very familiar to him. Ron bone glad if the rapist found, although do not understand why the police didn’t do this sooner. The mother did not live to see justice for her baby: she died 3 years ago of cancer. Until the end of her life, she could not accept the loss of his daughter.
Search Angie Housman
Cute, cheerful girl with long brown hair, a student of the 4th class of the local school, stole nearly at the house. Just half a block on Wright Avenue in St. Ann, after a couple of minutes after she disappeared from a school bus at 16:00 on 18 November 1993. She was wearing blue jeans and a long pink coat with a hood.
The last time his stepfather saw a girl at 8 in the morning, before work. When he returned at 17:00, foster daughter were still out and that alerted Ron. He raised Angie since she was 1 year old: the girl called him father, and Ron thought of her as his child. The man voluntarily took the test on the lie detector, so the police have eliminated him as a suspect. «It doesn’t matter,’ said bone — if they want to do [the test] may do.»
In search of girls were involved hundreds of police and volunteers. Then he joined the FBI. Looking for any clues, scoured the forest and parks hoping to find maybe a school bag or something. The police started on the trail of the dogs and sent helicopters with infrared sensors to find the child.
The family hoped to the last that will find Angie living. On national television on «America’s Most Wanted» showed a photo of the child in an attempt to find witnesses or find some clue in the investigation.
Over the door of the family bone has a sign saying «come Back, Angie, we miss you». The family began to call from a psychic, trying to explain what happened. They comforted his mother and stepfather, convinced that the girl is alive, warmly dressed, and fed.
Ultimately, the worst suspicions were justified when a deer hunter found the body of 9-year-old Angie nine days later tied to a tree in the woods of the County of St. Charles.
The girl had been sexually assaulted, and before the death of starving. She was handcuffed, my eyes and mouth did the killer put duct tape on the hand Angie was getting dark wound. Authorities believe that the girl died of hypothermia just a few hours before she was found.
A series of accidents and mass panic
It was hard to believe how quickly disappeared Angie and almost unbelievable — that there were not any witnesses to the incident. The neighbor who usually watched the kids get off the bus, from his home, that day went to the window. Another neighbor went to his sick father.
After the disappearance of Angie parents of local school children were very scared. The adults tried not to let the children alone, police followed school buses and checked all the suspicious clues.
Angie Hausman
First, the loss of the girl was tied up with another case. In Maryland Heights. November 8, unknown persons tried to kidnap like Angie 11-year-old girl as soon as she came out of the school bus at 15:30. The man tried to drag the child into the bushes, but the girl, fortunately, fought off her attacker and escaped. The sketch of the kidnapper has sent all sections and set up the checkpoints — including, close to home, Angie.
And 4 days after found the body of poor Angie, lost another girl.
Cassidy went to a friend at 15:30, but it never came to her house. The child had a radio with which he sent the alarm. Radio found 10 minutes later in the grass near the house of that same friend. In the afternoon, when they buried Angie, began the search for Cassie.
The police feared that a serial kidnapper of children: the case was suspiciously similar. All girls — white, about the same age, with brown hair and brown eyes, abducted at the same time, in the late afternoon. Cassidy is facing extinction seen in blue jeans and a pink sweater, Angie in blue jeans and a pink coat. The police did not want to cause a panic, but everything pointed to the similarity of the cases.
Cassie’s body was found after 8 days, left her in an alley in St. Louis. In death in a few weeks, accused the neighbor. But it turned out he didn’t kill Angie — the matter Hausman remained unsolved for 25 years.
Why Angie’s killer was never found in the 90s
From time to time the police felt she was close. In the attempted abduction of a schoolgirl in Maryland heights Texas suspected of auditor, but he was not a murderer Angie. The man from Florida who admitted to molesting children, found newspaper clippings about the girl’s death: but this trail was a dead end.
For many years the police searched for the offender, involved in the death of 9-year-old girl. Sketches with the supposed appearance of the thief was circulated to all police stations. The FBI has drawn up a psychological profile of the killer: a white male between 20 to 45 years old, single, unemployed or a loved one, or experienced the stress of not getting along with women, quite intelligent, but his talents are not in demand, is available to one or more machines.
All these 25 years, the police had been closer to the suspect than I thought. Earl Cox already had previous convictions and arrests for child abuse, for 4 years before the abduction Angie took him for molestation of 7-year-old girl. The name Coke appeared in the list of sex offenders FBI in 4 years after the murder of Housman, when the Bureau built the list of 1408 of names of people arrested in the area. Photo of Coke in his youth fits the sketch and the description, the suspect’s sister lived near the school, and Angie — but for 25 years he was never interrogated on the case of Angie Housman.
All the key places — Angie house, school, bus stop, house Coke, Coke relatives, the place of his previous arrests, was located approximately 1½ miles from each other. But these sites covered three different municipalities, each with its own police Department.
If Angie was kidnapped today, the case would open for a few days, maximum weeks. At that time, there was no social networking, registry of perpetrators of sexual crime, the national DNA database and the local databases on criminal history that contains information about the arrests in dozens of police departments.
Although, writes the Post-Dispatch, the name of Coke is still not sex offender registry Missouri. It is not listed in the database of Colorado, where he was convicted in 2003 for participating in the international online distribution of child pornography. Coke, for some reason, is not part of a national database.
The accidental discovery that changes everything
Last fall, investigators planned to send more than 300 of the evidence file Angie to a private lab, but decided again to look at the evidence. On March 1, the sample underwear girls found DNA that matched DNA in a national database of criminals.
Then in sight of the investigators and got Earl Cox. Grabbing the string, they began to dig into his past, questioning those who knew the man.
Who is Earl Cox
The alleged killer of Angie grew up in St. Louis. Enlisted in the air force in 1975 but in 1982 it was fired in disgrace: a military Tribunal found Coke guilty to sexually assaulting four young girls at the airbase Rhein-main in Germany. In 1985 he was released conditionally, and the man again settled in the St. Louis area.
Cox was arrested four years before the murder of Angie, on suspicion of child molestation. Parole for the crime in Germany was canceled, and he returned to Federal prison, where he sat from January to December 1992. Eleven months after his release Angie was found dead, and Earl Cox moved to Colorado. In 2003, Earl agreed to meet with a 14-year-old girl, asking to become his sex slave. In fact, the young friend online correspondence was a Federal undercover agent.
After his arrest, the police seized about 45,000 images of child pornography from a computer of Cox and learned that he was the administrator in a criminal organization engaged in the distribution of child pornography via the Internet.
In 2011, Earl Cox admitted sexually dangerous in accordance with the Law of Adam Walsh. This enables the authorities to keep the accused in custody after the expiration of his term if the Board, within which there are forensic psychologists, comes to the conclusion that there is a likelihood that the person will commit the offence again. Cox tried to challenge the conclusion of psychologists, referred to health and age, but to no avail.
