OAK HARBOR – Seven-year-old Deborah Palmer left home about 8:30 a.m. on a March morning nearly 10 years ago.
She intended to walk two blocks to school, but never made it.
Five days later, the girl’s body turned up on a beach on northeast Whidbey Island, and the case remains Oak Harbor’s only unsolved homicide, police Detective Sgt. Jerry Baker said Thursday.
The department, anxious for any leads to solve the case, has sent information about it to the FBI in hopes that something will surface connecting convicted murderer and child molester Joseph E. Duncan III to the Oak Harbor death.
“He was in the state. He was in the area. This is what he does,” said Baker, who was one of the detectives who investigated Deborah’s death.
The department sent materials to the FBI after Duncan talked about killing two girls from Seattle in 1996 and a California boy in 1997, according to federal prosecutors.
Duncan in 2005 was convicted of killing three members of a family in northern Idaho. In a related case, he’s charged in federal court with kidnapping and sexually abusing the same family’s two children, Shasta and Dylan Groene, and killing Dylan several weeks later.
Federal prosecutors will seek the death penalty for Duncan.
Prosecutors in Boise this week said that Duncan also confessed to killing the two half-sisters in Seattle, ages 9 and 11, whose remains were discovered in Bothell in 1998.
California authorities also plan to charge Duncan with the 1997 kidnapping and murder of a 10-year-old boy.
There’s no known connection between Duncan and the Oak Harbor case, Baker said, but “you never know. He was just one of those people out there who are very dangerous and traveled around and killed children.”
The crime shocked the Oak Harbor community.
Deborah was last seen by her mother the morning of March 26, 1997, as the girl set off to walk the short distance to Oak Harbor Elementary School.
At lunchtime, her mother learned that the first-grader didn’t make it to school.
Volunteers fanned out conducting a massive door-to-door search for any clues, and tracking dogs were used. Handbills were posted in stores and on utility poles.
After five days of searching, Deborah’s body was discovered on the beach near the scenic and remote Strawberry Point area. She had been suffocated.
Baker said his department is constantly on the alert for reports of killers and child abusers who could be connected to the unsolved homicide, and Duncan will remain on his list of suspects “until we can prove he was somewhere else” at the time of Deborah’s disappearance.
A 25-year police veteran, Baker said he really wants the case resolved.
“I would hate to retire without solving this,” Baker said.
Reporter Jim Haley: 425-339-3447 or haley@heraldnet.com.
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