1652
In 1652 the Susquehannock tribes signed a peace treaty with the people of Maryland that gave them the Howard County area.
about 0:08:12The story
Elkridge, Maryland, is a suburban town of about 16,750 people in Howard County, roughly twenty minutes from Baltimore. Its history runs back to Elkridge Landing on the Patapsco River, the seaport for the inland tobacco plantations, and the Elkridge Furnace ironworks founded in 1755. The episode tells a run of murders there between 1979 and 1989, mostly of wealthy elderly people, none of them robbed.
In 1979 Carvel Faulkner, 58, a large man who ran a garbage business and was a licensed gun dealer, and his wife Sarah, 56, were found dead in their bedroom at about 2.30 in the afternoon by a foreman who came to the house looking for them. Carvel had been shot once in the head, the bullet splitting the walnut headboard. Sarah was bound hand and foot, her throat cut with a kitchen knife and stab wounds in her back. There was no forced entry and no sign of a struggle; $1,000 sat in plain view on the dresser and jars of quarters were untouched. Their two French poodles were unharmed. Their daughters, Mary Louise Tablada, 21, and Carolyn Martinez, 31, came to the house, the family offered a $10,000 reward, and police interviewed more than a hundred people without result.
On February 22nd, 1980, a housekeeper found that 70-year-old Rebecca 'Dolly' Davis had not been seen for a week. Her car was half in the garage and a shoe lay in the yard. Police searched the house and then the grounds and found her in a shallow grave under wood at the edge of the property. She had been stabbed nine times in the neck, had many defence wounds and was believed to have been sexually assaulted. Davis was unmarried, from an old family, a former artist who did charity work and employed odd-job workers. A few days after her body was found a stabbed mannequin torso splashed with red paint was found hanging from a tree by her house, and more mannequin parts turned up on back roads. When newspapers reported this on May 13th, 1980, the cases became known as the mannequin murders. Police said they could not verify a connection.
On March 29th, 1981, a boy cutting through a yard found the body of 68-year-old Evelyn Dietrich, a widow crippled by arthritis. Her phone lines had been cut. She had gone onto her back porch in her nightgown and been beaten to death, probably with a 100 pound rock found nearby, and dragged 25 yards. Nothing was taken and the killers had not entered the house. On December 28th, 1984, 80-year-old Iva Murdle Watson, who lived a few houses from the Faulkners, was found in pine trees near her home, bludgeoned and sexually assaulted.
On the night of July 3rd to 4th, 1989, 23-year-old Kathleen Gouldin, assistant manager of the Fat Tuesdays nightclub in Baltimore, ate crabs with her parents and went home to her ground-floor apartment on Old Washington Boulevard. At about 1 a.m. she went to her rear window and was shot in the chest with a shotgun. On August 9th, 1989, he fought officers who served a warrant for blood and saliva samples.
Gouldin's mother was kept out of the courtroom at the defence's request.
In 1998 a tip led detectives back to the evidence, and Detective Keith Fisher found a slide with DNA from the Davis scene that had been too small to test in 1980. He is held in the Maryland Department of Corrections.