Detroit police crack 38-year-old murder mystery

August 07, 2008 05:25 AM

By Robin Erb
The Detroit Free Press

DETROIT, Mich. — A 38-year-old murder mystery on the Michigan State University campus has been solved with a DNA match, but there will be no arrest. Police say the killer has been dead for a decade.

The body of Marie Jackson, a 19-year-old Lansing teen who worked at a drive-in restaurant, was found in a wooded area on the southern part of the campus about a week after she was reported missing in 1970. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, police said.

As a rookie officer at that time, now-police Chief Jim Dunlap was assigned to take some of the hundreds of phone tips about the case, and he later moved to the detective bureau where he was assigned Jackson’s case. He remembers interviewing a Lansing man, Carl Finch, who was 23 at the time.

Like other suspects, Finch denied involvement and in a pre-DNA age, investigators couldn’t link Finch or anyone else to her.

The case was re-opened from time to time, but it remained unsolved.

Several years ago, campus police submitted DNA found in semen in the case to a national DNA database, Dunlap said. Other suspects were ruled out one-by-one and they learned then that Finch killed himself out of state years ago. They were able to obtain DNA samples from authorities there and contracted with two private labs to test them against the DNA in Jackson’s case.

On Tuesday, police learned the match was definite. On Wednesday, they spent the day tracking down Jackson’s mother and cousins to tell them the news.

It has been a good period for the campus police.

Earlier this year, police arrested four people they say set the fire in an agricultural research building on New Year’s Eve 1999 on behalf of radical environmentalists. The arrests came just months after two men were found guilty of the 1973 fatal stabbing of MSU student Martin Brown.

“I know Detroit won’t like this,” Dunlap said, “But these were our last two unsolved cases.”]