Robert Keller - Murder Most Vile Volume 38: 18 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases

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This was the bloodiest crime scene that Detective Rick Lincoln had encountered in his 36 years as a police officer. What made it even worse was that the victim was a child. Karen Slattery was just 14 years old on the night that she encountered a monster inside a suburban home on a quiet cul-de-sac in Delray Beach, Florida. A popular 9 th grade student at Pope John Paul High School, Karen was a regular babysitter for families in her neighborhood. On the night of Saturday, March 24, 1984, she was looking after the Helm siblings, while their parents, William and Carolyn, went out to dinner with friends. The Helms returned at around 12:15 a.m. to the worrying sign of their front door standing ajar. They entered the home to find a scene that sent them fleeing back into the night.

The sight that had caused such an extreme reaction from William and Carolyn, that had shocked even an experienced homicide detective like Rick Lincoln, was a terrible thing to behold. On the floor of the kitchen, stark under the white light, was a large puddle of blood, almost black in its intensity. From there, a thick trail of the stuff tracked across the floor, down the hall, into the master bedroom. Even worse was to be found here. Karen Slattery lay on the bed, her naked body perforated by multiple stab wounds, her blouse pulled over her face, hiding her dead eyes. An autopsy would later determine that the 14-year-old had suffered 18 deep and terrible knife wounds, to her back, her neck, her throat. She had also been raped, with this atrocity inflicted either while she was taking her last breaths or already dead. The only point of solace in this horrendous tragedy was that the two little girls, aged seven and two, were unharmed. Theyd apparently slept through the whole thing.

Piecing the puzzle together, detectives figured that the murder had happened between 10:00 p.m., when Karen phoned her mother, and 12:15 p.m., when the Helms returned from their dinner date. A cut screen in the master bedroom marked the spot where the killer had entered the home. Hed attacked Karen in the kitchen, probably just after she hung up the phone. Hed then dragged her down the hall to the bedroom, where he raped her. Then, having sated his unnatural lusts, hed taken a shower, leaving blood on a mat and on a bath towel in the process. Finally, he left, walking out through the front door. A bicycle track in the dirt suggested that he might have traveled to and from the crime scene by that means. The imprint of a bare foot outside the bedroom window was believed to be from the killer. The police also had a sample of his semen, although this was of limited use in those pre-DNA days. Regrettably, they did not have a single fingerprint. The killer had been careful.

The murder of Karen Slattery was a crime that severely traumatized the community of Delray Beach. The police were under tremendous pressure to solve it and they worked the clues hard. Neighbors were quizzed and Karens friends interviewed; known sex offenders were hauled in and interrogated; anyone found riding a bicycle at night was stopped and quizzed; even William Helm found himself under suspicion at one point. And there were tips, of course, dozens of them that had to be followed up and investigated. Two of these initially seemed promising but the suspects were ultimately released after their blood types did not match the semen lifted from the crime scene.

While all of this was going on, the Slattery family was not sitting idle in their mourning. Eugene Slattery, Karens dad, was particularly active in the hunt for his daughters killer. Along with friends and neighbors, he raised $50,000, to be offered as a reward for information. This was advertised through hundreds of flyers, plastered around town. It all came to nothing. Two months passed with limited progress in the case. The police were stumped. In truth, they had very little to go on, limited forensics, no eyewitnesses, no one whod seen or heard anything untoward.