Twenty-year-old Tim McKillop, a lineman for Mountain Bell Telephone, was driving to Scottsdale, Arizona on May 23rd, 1962 to visit his girlfriend Joyce Sterrenberg, also twenty years old and employed at Mountain Bell as an operator. The couple had recently announced their engagement, and planned to marry on April 1st of the following year.
Joyce still lived with her parents, and as it happened, May 23rd was her father’s birthday. Tim and Joyce had cake with the Sterrenbergs and shared an amiable chat, and as the evening went on, the couple decided that they were going out to put gas in Joyce’s car and take a bit of a drive. Joyce told her parents that they wouldn’t be gone long.
Tim and Joyce first went to a service station and filled up Joyce’s white 1959 Chevy Impala, after which they cruised around looking at model homes, stopped for milkshakes, and then drove east into the desert off Scottsdale Road. What happened to them after that point is not entirely clear, but they would both be dead before morning.
At approximately eight a.m. on May 24th, deputies came across the bodies of Joyce Sterrenberg and Tim McKillop, lying near the parked Impala. Both had been shot twice in the head, and four .45 caliber shell casings were recovered from the scene. Investigators also noted the presence of a second set of tire tracks behind the Impala, presumably left by the vehicle of the killer or killers. The only other significant physical evidence collected at the scene was a set of fifteen palm and/or fingerprints, some of which were too smudged to be of any use.
Police believed that the crime had not been premeditated, and had likely been undertaken by a gang of hoodlums who were seeking a sick thrill. Further than that, though, they were mystified as to who the guilty parties had been.
The case would take an enormous leap forward twelve years later, but the ostensible solution of the mystery would not be as clear-cut as it initially seemed, and it’s possible that the man eventually fingered for the crime was not the true culprit at all.
On a Friday evening in late August of 1974, a police secretary named Carol Macumber walked into the station where she worked and informed deputies that she suspected her estranged husband Bill had shot out the windows of the family home with his .45 earlier that evening.
Not only that, she claimed, but twelve years before, he had confessed to her that he had been the one who had “killed those two kids from Mountain Bell Telephone,” possibly following an incident of road rage.
Authorities brought Bill Macumber in for questioning about the window-shooting incident, noting that he failed a polygraph test. Afterwards, detectives informed Macumber that he was also under suspicion for the 1962 murder of Joyce Sterrenberg and Tim McKillop, and Macumber then reportedly admitted his involvement.
Strengthening the case against Macumber was the fact that his palm print appeared to match a partial palm print taken from the driver’s side window strip of Joyce Sterrenberg’s Impala. Likewise, three of the four shell casings recovered from the crime scene had ejector marks which matched those of a .45 caliber Ithaca pistol belonging to Bill Macumber.
At his trial in early 1975, Bill Macumber was convicted of the double homicide, and given two life sentences. It seemed an open and shut case, even though Macumber had later recanted his supposed confession. He was retried on appeal in 1977, but his original conviction was upheld.
However, after serving thirty-seven years in prison for the murders, Macumber was released in late 2012 following a plea deal. Over the years he was incarcerated, he steadfastly maintained his innocence, claiming that his ex-wife Carol had used her employment with the police department in order to frame him for the crime. A book called Manifest Injustice was published about the case in 2013, and Macumber was interviewed extensively by the media, as well as a documentary filmmaker, who produced a film in 2010 called Life: The Bill Macumber Story.
Those who were on the side of Macumber’s innocence, though, were struck a shocking blow less than a year after his release, when he was arrested again, this time on four counts of sexual assault against a young female relative. He was convicted on all charges in 2014, and died behind bars in October of 2016.
Whether he was indeed responsible for killing the young couple in the desert in 1962 is still a mystery, but investigators have identified no other compelling suspects in the case.
Crime Immemorial 