Victims’ kin want cold-case squad
Posted on Friday, April 18, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/223109/
From her office at the Arkansas Department of Health’s Cross County unit, Joe Anne Hendrix used to keep an eye on the parking lot of the nearby sheriff ’s office, watching for Arkansas State Police Special Agent Dale Arnold’s car.
Arnold is investigating the death of Hendrix’s daughter but, Hendrix says, he never returns her calls.
So she would watch for his car and try to catch him in person.
Arnold is “a good guy, but he’s stretched out to the max,” Hendrix said.
“He’s doing day-by-day activities — busting labs and trying to catch the bad guys,” Hendrix said. “Trying to work on a homicide case from five years ago is probably not his top priority.”
At a crime victims rally at noon at the state Capitol today, Hendrix plans to speak about the need for a statewide cold-case squad that would take a fresh look at old deaths such as her daughter’s.
She and members of the central Arkansas chapter of Parents of Murdered Children are compiling a list of unsolved killings in the state. The group plans to use the list to help make its case to the state Legislature next year, Hendrix said.
“Right now, the way it is in a lot of counties, they don’t have enough police officers or money” to investigate old slayings, Hendrix said.
Hendrix’s 24-year-old daughter, Joy, was found dead on Aug. 23, 2002, in woods behind Hendrix’s house in Wynne. She was nude, and an autopsy showed she had suffered a broken neck and internal injuries, Hendrix said.
Joy Hendrix had last been seen the night before, when she left her house on an all-terrain vehicle, Hendrix said. Arnold said he is still investigating Joy Hendrix’s death, which he said hasn’t been officially ruled a homicide. He said he interviewed someone about the death “just the other day.” “ It’s still active, ” Arnold said. “All leads are being followed.” Arnold said he investigates 60 to 80 cases a year, “from homicides to rapes to arsons to whitecollar crime, embezzlement” and drug cases. He works mainly in Cross, St. Francis and Woodruff counties.
As for Joe Anne Hendrix’s complaint, he said, “Every time Joe Anne Hendrix has spoken to me or called me, I’ve returned her call.”
Hendrix, 53, said she got the idea for a cold-case squad after attending a national Parents of Murdered Children conference in Houston last year.
The Texas Rangers formed a statewide cold-case team, with seven investigators, in March 2002. The investigators work mainly in rural areas where police departments don’t have their own cold-case squads, said Tom Vinger, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. So far, the investigators have solved 23 cases.
“It may not sound like many, but solving one affects so many people,” Vinger said. “Some of these murders affected whole communities.”
None of the Arkansas State Police’s 85 investigators are assigned to work solely on old cases, state police spokesman Bill Sadler said. He said the investigators mainly respond to requests for help from local law enforcement agencies. If the agencies requested a cold-case squad, the state police would consider forming one, he said.
The Little Rock Police Department also doesn’t have a cold-case squad.
“There’s not a whole lot of difference between a cold-case squad and what our detectives do,” said Lt. Terry Hastings, a department spokesman. “Once a detective is assigned to a case, he works on that case continually.”
Hendrix said she keeps updates from investigators and other information about her daughter’s death in a threering binder. At first, she would check on the case about every two weeks. Now, it’s once every few months. The last time she spoke to Arnold was in February, she said, when she passed along an anonymous letter she had received. That month, she moved to a different job, so now it isn’t as easy to look for his car, she said.
At the Parents of Murdered Children support group meetings she attends in Little Rock, Hendrix said other parents of victims have also complained about investigators who don’t return their calls.
“I quit bugging [investigators ] so much, I guess that’s what a lot of the members do,” Hendrix said. “They just know they’re being pushed over to the side.”