yeah, there wasn t a whole lot of movement with the jacket. if you re sitting in the rear seat of a car and you never move, that s where the transfer would be. finally, in the national park near where stephanie dittrick s body was found, investigators discovered remnants of a campfire. some of stephanie s personal items were strewn in the grass along with a plastic shopping bag. there was a shopping bag from a local grocery store and once it was submitted to the washington state patrol crime laboratory, what we found was a very clear latent fingerprint left by none other than gary ackley. the fingerprint, along with the metal fragments and fibers, clearly tied gary ackley to both crime scenes. prosecutors knew why ackley killed his mother-in-law arlene. what they couldn t figure out is why he killed his childhood friend, stephanie.
he said if she interveered any longer, he would kill her. she left the house they rented making statements like, i m not going to put up with with this and i don t know why you re putting up with this either, to her daughter. ackley s brand of cigarettes was another interesting coincidence. when he bought cigarettes, he bought the cheapest cigarettes he could get his hands on. those were basic, b-a-s-i-c, brand cigarettes. that was the kind of cigarette butts located in the toilet of arlene jensen s house. and there was a box of basic brand dumped where arlen jensen s body was found some six weeks later. what was most telling to investigators was gary ackley s profession. gary ackley worked as a fabricator. he worked in a metal shop and much of his time he spent on a lathe. this was suspicious since metal fragments were found on both stephanie dittrick s body as well as arlene jensen s.
aluminum. the fragment samples contained steel and brass. the steel had the exact same combinations of iron, manganese and chromium. in the brass, copper and zinc were found in identical amounts. and all the samples had equal amounts of cerium, part of a compound used to ignite an oxyacetylene torch, a common item in machine shops. we examined all of them and could see the pattern that regardless of where they came from, they were basically the same kind of metal fragments, machining fragments. this proved that both arlene jensen and stephanie dittrick were killed by the same man. the science is starting to really catch up to the bad guys now. a serial killer was on the loose in the seattle area. he had to be stopped before he could kill again.
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then he hid the blood-stained sheets with the comforter. the trace evidence shows he put arlene s body into the back seat of his car, creating the fiber cross-transfer. ackley dumped her body a mile away in a field near the railroad tracks unaware he left more metal shavings there. he also left another calling card. an empty pack of his favorite brand of cigarettes, the same brand he left in his mother-in-law s bathroom. but what was the motive for stephanie dittrick s murder? by all accounts gary ackley had a big mouth. prosecutors think in a moment of weakness, ackley told stephanie that he killed arlene. prosecutors found a witness who saw ackley and stephanie camping together on the fourth of july weekend.