"The second installment of the KARE 11 News Extra, ''A Cold Case Gets New Life'' will be screened tonight on Channel 11's 10 p.m. news broadcast. Last night's broadcast focused on how badly the investigation was botched. The police ''stopped the family from organizing large-scale searches on their own'' and treated the disappearance of Mary and Susanne as ''two runaway girls'' not worth getting ''this whole town excited over.'' ... For 26 days (until the girls' bodies were discovered by another teenager) ''it was the family creating the timelines, conducting the searches and interviewing people who might have seen the girls.'' And even then, investigators ''never secured the crime scene,'' not enough was done to locate the murder-weapon, and investigators ''failed to follow-up with witnesses who claimed to [have seen] the girls with various men on their last day''; ''failed to interview at least two suspects identified by another agency''; and ''either never recorded or lost several reports by other agencies working the case.'' The gross dereliction and incompetence is beyond belief. Here is the link to last night's first installment of the feature, including a video clip and PDF files of St. Cloud Times and Star Tribune reports on the investigation: ... http://www.kare11.com/extras/extras_article.aspx?storyid=97631 ... "
|
