One Small FBI Secret Uncovered

by Diane Fanning

A few months ago, I posted a blog entitled What is the FBI Hiding? It was more about the murder of Julie and Lollie in the Shenandoah National Park and the Route 29 killings but it tied back to Into the Water, a book I'd written about serial killer Richard Marc Evonitz.

The investigation into the deaths of three girls in Spotsylvania, Virginia, in 1996 and 1997 had a lot of ups and downs before Evonitz was identified as the perpetrator in 2002. A few months after Sofia's murder, another man was arrested and charged with her homicide in 1996. But that charge was based on faulty forensics by a woman in the lab who was determined to set aside scientific honesty to make a ruling to support law enforcement's suspicions. She lost her job.

But I knew all along there something else that the FBI was hiding. And I recently found out about one of the problems in the investigation that also involved bad forensic analysis. The forensic pathologist who performed Sofia's autopsy had been negligent. He did not clean up carefully after the previous autopsy. As a result, a hair was taken into evidence in her case as the hair of a suspect, that, in fact, was a hair belonging to the man who'd been autopsied on the table immediately before her.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn of more information that the FBI is hiding is hiding about the investigations of the killing of young girls in Spotsylania, the route 29 homicides and the double murder in Shenandoah National Park. I only hope one day, all the truth is revealed.

A week ago, St. Martin's Press re-released Into the Water as a True Crime Classic, a select line of their previous successful books in that genre. It was the third of my books to be re-issued in that line.

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