Think you should sell your story

[Helen Dagner]

I have to dwell on all of this for a while, Helen. I will send you my thoughts on this and you can decide whether or not to post. I honestly don't know how you have hung in there for this long. I have lived with such tremendous loss, but I really never really gave a thought to the police and the investigation. I just assumed they were doing everything they could. The degree of frustration must be almost unbearable. If there can't be any justice in these cases, I hope there is at least poetic justice for you and your efforts somewhere along the line. Thank you for keeping the memory of these four beautiful children alive and for telling not only John's story, but the story of your attempts to get LE to take notice. I have this horrible feeling that John was ditched as a suspect simply because of the polygraph and the passport, both things that could have been challenged. Someone interviewing him years later would not even necessarily see the John who committed these crimes. Two lessons for law enforcement are the importance of flexible thinking and the danger of assumptions, especially in a case as bizarre as this. John may not be the killer, but of everything I have read, this makes the most sense. He must be laughing his ass off (unless his status as a born-again prevents that sort of thing). I also have to give this some more thought, but I still think you should sell your story somehow. If it was told in the right manner, it would be an important look at how crimes (especially pre-DNA testing) sometimes remain unsolved. There is also a really important story about how you have gotten blown off. I do think during the initial years the cops gave it their all--it just, for a wide variety of reasons, wasn't good enough. This latest spectacle has been nothing short of prideless and I resent the use of taxpayer dollars to have some cops looking at kiddie porn all day before making sure they checked and double-checked every single "coincidence" you have uncovered with John's situation.
----- Original Message ----- Cathy