On Wednesday, July 9th, 1969, the Veach family—parents Bill and Etta, and children Billy and Patricia—were spending a quiet, normal evening at their home in Des Moines, Iowa. The kids went to bed at their usual times, but Bill and Etta stayed up until around two a.m., and nothing at all seemed amiss.
The next morning, July 10th, Bill Veach noticed that the screen on the front door had been sliced right near the latch. Concerned, he went to check on the children.
Billy was fine, but eight-year-old Patricia Veach was lying dead on her bed, covered in blood and clad only in her pajama top.
Investigators quickly determined that the child had been sexually assaulted, and that her killer had likely smothered her to death, either with his hand or with a pillow. Strangely, no one in the house had heard anything on the night of the murder, and the family dog—who had been in the basement—had not barked to signal an intruder. Police were able to obtain hair and blood samples from the scene, but tests on the evidence proved inconclusive.
During the ensuing investigation, nearly five hundred people were interviewed, but no one seemed to have any information about who had assaulted and murdered the child. For years, a pall of suspicion hovered over father Bill Veach, who many townsfolk suspected may have been involved with Patricia’s slaying. In fact, when the family bought a new house in Des Moines a few months after Patricia’s death, residents of their new neighborhood circulated petitions in an attempt to keep them from moving in.
At last, though, in 2011, the Iowa state crime lab tested the blood evidence that had been preserved from the crime scene, and established that none of Patricia’s family members had been responsible for killing her.
Notably, there had been a similar crime committed on Christmas Eve of 1968, just seven months prior to Patricia Veach’s murder. In this earlier case, ten-year-old Pamela Powers had been abducted from a Des Moines YMCA. Two days later, clergyman Robert Anthony Williams turned himself in and led police to the child’s body. Williams had also been arrested in Kansas City in 1965 for raping a seven-year-old girl, and had subsequently escaped from a mental institution and made his way to Des Moines, Iowa.
Williams was finally convicted of the murder of Pamela Powers in 1977, and it remains a distinct possibility that he may have murdered Patricia Veach as well. He died in prison in 2017.
Crime Immemorial 