With a suspect charged in connection with five of Cape Girardeau's unsolved murders, that leaves only one homicide in the city languishing without police any closer to an arrest than they were in 1979.

On Sept. 16, 1979, the bruised, nude body of Deborah L. Martin, 24, was found on the first floor of her business, the Mother Earth Plant store, at 605 Broadway.

She had fallen from the second-floor balcony, and police ruled her death a homicide after an autopsy revealed that she suffered injuries that could not have occurred as a result of the fall.

The police department at the time suspected that Martin knew her killer.

A handful of suspects existed in the case, but police could not flush out enough evidence to arrest any one person.

Detective Jim Smith, who took over investigating the unsolved homicides last summer, said that with the other five murders on their way to being resolved, he can now focus on the Martin case.

Smith's work on the 1977 murders of Brenda and Mary Parsh and Sheila Cole, and the 1982 killings of Margie Call and Mildred Wallace, led to Timothy W. Krajcir being charged Monday with the crimes.

Cape Girardeau County Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle mentioned the Martin killing at a news conference Monday to announce the charges against Krajcir.

"Whoever committed the Martin murder, I've got news for you: Jimmy Smith is working on that, too," Swingle said.

In Cape Girardeau County, the sheriff's department focuses their investigations on several unsolved crimes: Bonnie L. Huffman, a 20-year-old schoolteacher whose body was found dumped in a ditch near Delta on July 5, 1954; Lee E. Moore, discovered shot to death in a field near his home Aug. 12, 1991; Debra Manning, found stabbed to death on Cape Girardeau County Road 249 just northeast of Delta on July 5, 1983; and Linda Crites, who disappeared Nov. 23, 1983, from Jackson and who police suspect may have been murdered.

"We always have hope we can solve them as each year goes by, always hope something will break," said chief deputy David James.

Breaking vow of silence

Sometimes people with knowledge about the case who have held their tongue for years will change their minds and break their vow of silence, he said.

New leads come in occasionally, but many times they turn out to be old leads that have already been investigated repeatedly, James said.

There were dozens of people of interest in the Huffman murder, but none strong enough to resolve the case, he said.

DNA evidence exists in the Manning and Moore cases and has been submitted to CODIS, the DNA database containing the genetic profiles of thousands of convicted criminals, for testing, but no clear leads have yet been determined from the results, he said.

For a short time, Krajcir was a suspect in the disappearance of Cheryl Ann Scherer, who vanished from Scott City on April 17, 1979, but he denied ever having been in Scott City, said Scott County Sheriff Rick Walter.

Walter said there was no reason to suspect Krajcir was lying because he had been forthright with everything else.

In January 2006, Walter chose to reopen the investigation into the 1993 murder of Angela Mischelle Lawless, despite Joshua Keser having been convicted of the crime.

"According to the state of Missouri, it's solved -- case closed," Walter said.

However, he said he believes there's more to the story.

Though he is not trying to free anyone from prison, too many unanswered questions linger about the killing, he said.

Nothing connects Lawless to Keser, he said.

After the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in November that the case had been reopened, Walter received a call from a man who supplied him with two names, saying "this is who it will be when the truth comes out."

Just this week, a couple came into Walter's office in Benton and named someone they felt may have information about the case, he said.

bidicosmo@semissourian.com

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