BRYAN, Texas (AP) - The gruesome 1981 death of Virginia Freeman haunts the investigators involved with the still-unsolved case.
The bloody corpse of the real estate agent and married mother of two was found in the back yard of a home she was selling in December 1981. Investigators said Freeman had been sexually assaulted, stabbed in the neck 11 times, had her neck broken by strangulation and was hit in the head with a 4½-pound (2-kilogram) concrete chunk.
“The main thing I remember was the stark look of terror in her eyes” when the body was found “wide open,” Travis Bryan III, then the Brazos County district attorney, told The (Bryan-College Station) Eagle (https://bit.ly/2pSEYW6).
Brazos County Sheriff Chris Kirk said there is plenty of DNA evidence in hand from the death of the married mother of two and that the case has more genetic material in evidence than any other of the county’s unsolved killings. But none of the evidence has been matched in the genetic database, suggesting the killer has never been convicted of a crime, Kirk said. The killer may even be dead by now, investigators acknowledge.
“It gnaws on you,” Kirk said.
The sheriff had recently had his hopes lifted when DNA was found on Freeman’s fingernail trimmings. He released two facial composite sketches of the possible killer earlier this week using the latest in DNA analysis.
It revealed a picture of a man at 25 and 70 years old, showing his age at two different times in his life. However, it wasn’t known how old he was at the time of Freeman’s death.
Retired Texas Ranger Bob Connell lived a block and a half from the death scene and was part of the effort to find the killer before he retired in 1992.
“We ran out of every lead we had,” he said. Furthermore, he said he never talked to a person of interest who he thought was the likely killer after being questioned.
That doesn’t put a dent in the investigators’ resolve to solve the case.
“It’s worth every bid of time and effort to try and solve this case,” said Bryan, who is now a state district judge. “This is the worst unsolved crime in the history of Brazos County.”
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Information from: The Eagle, https://www.theeagle.com
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