Since at least 1982, he has touted phony credentials and a bogus work history. Richard Walter is many things and little that he claims. In the years to come, he would often sit in his cell and wonder: Who was that thin man smoking on the screen? “And I take great personal satisfaction in hearing handcuffs click.” McGuffin was convicted and sentenced to a decade in prison. “It’s sweet revenge,” Walter said with a grin. There on TV was Walter, a man he had never met, all but accusing him of murder. As he awaited trial, he watched the 20/20 episode about his case from the Coos County jail. Soon, Walter traveled to Coquille and examined crime scenes with the police chief, trailed by a camera crew from ABC’s 20/20.īuilding on the momentum of Walter’s visit, the authorities arrested McGuffin and charged him with killing Leah. Later, at a private dinner, Walter dangled before them a tantalizing profile that suggested the killer was indeed McGuffin, the boyfriend they had suspected all along. In Philadelphia, members of the Coquille team presented Leah Freeman’s murder to the Vidocq Society. A publisher was finalizing a book about the Vidocq Society, The Murder Room, which detailed Walter’s casework on four continents and claimed that at Scotland Yard he was known as “the living Sherlock Holmes.” He favored Kools and Chardonnay, and he was never photographed in anything but a dark suit, a tiny smile often curling at the corner of his mouth. Walter was tall and gaunt with a hard-to-place, vaguely English accent. The group’s co-founder, Richard Walter, was billed as one of America’s preeminent criminal profilers, an investigative wizard who could examine a few clues and conjure a portrait of a murderer. In January 2010, a new team of detectives and a prosecutor flew to Philadelphia to pursue a last-ditch option: to present the case to a league of elite investigators called the Vidocq Society, which met once a month to listen to the facts of cold cases and sometimes venture instant insights. The hunch was there, but the physical evidence wasn’t. Police said he switched cars the night she vanished and flunked a polygraph. As months turned into years, Coquille police dwelled on one suspect whose story never quite made sense to them: Nick McGuffin, Leah’s 18-year-old boyfriend. The police had initially treated Leah as a runaway before mounting a search, and when the FBI and state police finally arrived, investigators were too far behind. “And now we can pray for whoever did this to be caught.”īut the killer was not caught. “We prayed for her to return,” the motel manager told a reporter. The Lord takes.” A search party had found Leah’s body at the bottom of an embankment, severely decomposed. A month later, the message was replaced with Job 1:22: “The Lord gives. On its sign, the Myrtle Lane Motel posted a description of Leah. K-9 units swept the school grounds, and police set up roadblocks and interviewed motorists. Police and a donor put together a $10,000 reward for information leading to her safe return. The local paper published Leah’s school photo: big smile, mouthful of braces. At a gas station, a county worker found one of Leah’s sneakers. She was seen walking past McKay’s Market, the credit union, and the high school, but she never made it home. On the night of June 28, 2000, a 15-year-old named Leah Freeman left a friend’s house and set off on her own. Coquille, on the Oregon coast, is a two-stoplight town where mist rolls off the Pacific and many of the 4,000 residents work in lumber and fishing.
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