http://icaremissingpersonscoldcases...fied-FemaleLady-in-the-Dunes1974Massachusetts
www.provincetownbanner.co...9/7/2000/2
Tobias hopeful about solving fabled murder
Liz Winston
BANNER STAFF
If everything goes the way that Provincetown police Sgt. Warren Tobias hopes, a murder that occurred 26 years ago in the dunes off Race Point may soon be solved.
Results from DNA samples taken from the victim's body, which has never been identified and is buried in St. Peter's Cemetery, are due back from a Louisiana laboratory this week. If those samples prove that the body is a woman named Rory Gene Kesinger, as Tobias suspects, he says he knows who killed her - and hopes to soon be able to make an arrest.
For years, Tobias, along with many other Provincetown and state police officers, has been chasing leads in one of the most notorious unsolved murders ever to occur on Cape Cod. On Channel 7 News last week, Tobias announced that the pending lab results may mean the payoff of the years of work. Results of the DNA tests had been expected months ago, after the body was exhumed by state police in late March.
Though Tobias isn't saying who the suspect is in the case, he is ruling out one convicted murderer who was widely speculated to be the killer of the Woman in the Dunes.
'I do not believe [the killer] is Hadden Clark,' Tobias told the Banner after his Channel 7 appearance.
Clark, 47, is currently serving two consecutive 30-year sentences in the state of Maryland for the murders of 24-year-old Laura Houghteling and six-year-old Michelle Dorr. Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Clark has confided in a cellmate, whom he believes to be Jesus Christ, that he committed many other murders, including that of the Woman in the Dunes.
To see if Clark could corroborate those claims, he and his cellmate were brought to the Cape this winter. They were taken to the property in Wellfleet where Clark spent time as a child at his grandfather's home and where he claims to have buried victims, and to the dunes near Race Point to identify the site where he claims to have left the body of a female victim in 1974, when he was living in Provincetown and working as a cook at the Moors restaurant - the year that the Woman in the Dunes was murdered.
Some police believe that Clark's story about the Woman in the Dunes is hot air, and may have been pieced together from information he got on the Internet or elsewhere. But just this week, an article in The New Yorker hypothesizes otherwise. In his piece, 'A Hole in the Ground,' longtime Wellfleet summer resident Alec Wilkinson outlines conversations he had with Clark in which the convicted criminal divulged information about the dunes murder which it would seem only the killer would know.
On July 26, 1974, a 13-year-old girl walking her dog in the dunes about a mile east of Race Point came upon a body. The woman was lying face down, naked, on a towel with her clothes folded near her head. Her hands had been cut off and her wrists shoved into the sand as if she were doing push-ups; her head was almost completely severed.
Wilkinson's speculations about the possibility that Clark killed her are based partly on the fact that Clark knew the detail about the woman's wrists having been shoved into the sand, and that he likely had little access to other sources of information about the crime, as some police involved with the case have speculated. In a phone interview with the Banner, however, Wilkinson said there were some parts of Clark's account of the murder that seemed weak, including the claim that he knocked the woman unconscious with a surf-casting pole.
'It is possible that Clark's [account of the murder is] imaginary,' Wilkinson's article states.
Around the time that a woman's body was found in the Race Point dunes, a young woman named Rory Gene Kesinger was running with a dangerous crowd. Kesinger and her friends had been involved in gun running and drug smuggling, Tobias has said, and were chased by federal authorities from Alaska across the U.S., and eventually to Pembroke, where Kesinger and others were arrested one night in a drug raid. After attempting to shoot a police officer during the bust, Kesinger was incarcerated in the Plymouth County jail, from which she escaped not long after - and not long before a body turned up near Race Point. She was never heard from again.
The description of the body found in the dunes matches that of Kesinger, and a forensic reconstruction of the murder victim's head done in the 1970s bears a striking resemblance to photos of the missing woman.
Kesinger's name was first connected to the unsolved murder case in 1990, when former Police Chief James J. Meads, who swore he would solve the crime, was about to retire. When Tobias later took over the case, promising connections between the victim and Kesinger seemed to fizzle out for awhile. Police had fingerprints from a criminal named or using the name Rory Gene Kesinger, but had no way to try to match them to the handless victim. No dental records could be found for Kesinger, and at the time, no family members could be tracked down by the detectives.
When Tobias was interviewed by then-Banner reporter George Liles about the Woman in the Dunes in August 1995, Tobias said he believed he knew the identity of the victim and had reason to believe that someone living in Provincetown at the time had a strong connection to the murder. A car registered to the person, who Tobias had recently interviewed, had been parked outside the house in Pembroke the night that Kesinger was arrested.
More recently, relatives of Kesinger agreed to DNA testing that could link them to the unidentified body buried off Winslow Street. On a foggy March morning this year, state and Provincetown police removed the gravestone that reads only 'Unidentified Female Body Found Race Point Dunes, July 26, 1974,' and transferred the corpse to a waiting hearse. After DNA samples were taken, the body was reburied at St. Peter's several days later.
State Police gave a brief statement at the edge of the cemetery, though they would not comment on whether the efforts had anything to do with the investigation of Hadden Clark. 'The bottom line,' said Det. Paul White, 'is that this is an unsolved murder, and we're continuing the investigation.'
Today, Tobias will not comment on whether the person he suspects is living in Provincetown, or whether they are already in jail for another crime. But he strongly suspects that the pending DNA results will prove that the Woman in the Dunes is Rory Gene Kesinger.
And he is also convinced that information will give him what he needs to charge someone with her death.